The Modern Art Notes Podcast

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights artist Lucian Freud, whose paintings are the subject of a major exhibition that originated at the National Portrait Gallery in London and which is now at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Titled “Lucian Freud: Portraits,” the exhibition is on view at MAMFW through October 28.

My guests are Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, a friend of Freud’s who has written several books on his work, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth chief curator Michael Auping, who helped organize the exhibition and who conducted the last interviews with Freud before his death last year. Smee and I also discuss art and museums in Boston and New England, and his new e-book, titled “Frame by Frame.”

Both Auping and Smee talk with me about how Freud exists outside the usual modernist narrative… but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t occasionally fit right in (albeit over half-a-century late). Take this painting, Standing by the Rags (1988-89), in which Freud flattens space in a manner that recalls an early modernist master. Is Freud’s model lying down? Or is she standing?

To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program here.

Image: Lucian Freud, Standing by the Rags, 1988-89. Collection of Tate, London.