24 years ago, an art collector bought a Lucian Freud painting – a full-length male nude – at auction. Soon after, he received a call from the artist asking to buy it from him. The collector politely refused, as he liked the picture. A few days later, he received another call from a now incandescent Freud, who told him that unless he sold him the painting, he would deny having painted it.
“In that case, you will never sell it” came the words of the painter. The Freud estate subsequently refused to authenticate Standing Male Nude, and until this week, the painting was a fake Freud painted by Freud.
After years of research, the collector has been given a lifeline. Three independent studies, including one by the same AI we previously profiled here, have concluded that Standing Male Nude is almost certainly by the paintbrush of the 20th Century Master.
But this all raises the principal question: does an artist of any discipline have the right to abdicate ‘creation’ of an artwork? Can an artist unhappy with their work for any reason decide to remove it from their oeuvre? Can a musician disappointed by an album they have produced withdraw it from their discography? Can a filmmaker despondent at their film extricate themselves from the credits?
It’s something artists have done over centuries.
In November 2011, the artist Cady Noland disavowed several of her works, including her 1990 silkscreen on aluminium, ‘Cowboys Milking’. Upon viewing the work and seeing that the corners were bent and damaged, she disavowed the work, stating ‘the work’s current condition … materially differs from that at the time of its creation.”
This issue more usually manifests in the world of film, where the creative process is exactly that: a process, rather than a single person’s work. Studios often bully their directors into getting contractual final cuts. The film American History X was disowned by its director Tony Kaye after the studio released a version, 24 minutes longer than his own cut, which according to him was a “total abuse of creativity” and “crammed with shots of everyone crying in each other’s arms”.
The story has entered into Hollywood folklore (in one meeting with New Line at the peak of the trouble he brought a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi and a Tibetan monk to ease negotiations), as the studio refused to let Kaye remove his name from the film. This was even after his expensive and embarrassing protestations including demanding the completed film be credited to ‘Humpty Dumpty’.
Hollywood so often finds itself with this issue that there is a pseudonymous name, Alan Smithee, for a directing credit which the director has disowned. Alan Smithee has made far more films than Godfrey Ho. David Lynch’s Dune and Michael Mann’s Heat, for example, when re-edited for TV were given the Smithee credit by the disgruntled directors.
Unless directors are at the peak of their negotiating and creative powers, they often have to bend to the will of the studio. Artists like Cady Noland, though, are far more protected, at least in European law.
Noland’s ‘Cowboys Milking’ was withdrawn by the auction house after she disowned it, and she later did the same with her 1990 sculpture ‘Log Cabin with Screw Eyes and Café Door’. This particular wooden sculpture was designed to be displayed outdoors, and through it being exposed to the elements, suffered significant deterioration and was conserved. However, conservation was done without consulting Noland and without her consent. She blocked the sale saying the new version was not her art, and the court supported her in all the many cases that the buyer had brought against.
This is because continental European art law has long recognized a variety of “moral rights” (in contrast to the economic rights that most copyright law addresses). These moral rights are personal to the creator of a work and cannot be assigned.
This is particularly notable in French and German law, where certain moral rights are perpetual and are passed down from artist to heirs by inheritance. As a consequence, an artist’s moral rights in these countries continue to be relevant, limiting a collector’s ability to have a work conserved, and in some instances loaned or exhibited, long after the artist’s death.
Artist Richard Prince famously disavowed troves of his early work. Stacks of paintings, drawings, collages and etchings that he produced in the 1970s, before he became a celebrated neo-conceptual artist known for appropriating images from advertising and elsewhere, were “Just ripped them up,” he said in a 1988 Flash Art magazine interview, “put them in garbage bags.” Why? “I didn’t like the work I did 10 or so years ago.”
Prince claims to have destroyed 500 of these early works. Except he couldn’t destroy all of them, especially if they didn’t ‘belong’ to him any more. “If I were a sensitive type, I would be angry and extremely hurt,” said New York City gallery owner Kathryn Markel, who showed Prince in the mid-1970s and owns several of these works, all of which were loaned to the Neuberger Museum exhibit. “It’s not up to an artist to say when his career begins. What makes him think that he should have come out full-blown, as though from the head of Zeus, as a mature artist? Like every other artist, he has an early period, a middle period and a late period.”
What makes him think that he should have come out full-blown, as though from the head of Zeus, as a mature artist?
It is imaginable, nay, undoubtable that every artist has stacks of student work, side projects, unfinished bootlegs or drafts of their works. Yes, it is understandable that an artist would want protection of these, but it should not be in their power to remove themselves from creation. Christopher Nolan’s weakest film is undoubtedly his first, a short made at university of a man who turns into a bug.
He has made no efforts to get the film removed from YouTube, not even a copyright claim, which would be easy enough in this time. And speaking of men turning into bugs, readers of fiction are undoubtedly pleased that Franz Kafka’s friend Max Brod chose to ignore Kafka’s death-bed directive to destroy all his writings, instead giving the world a group of celebrated novels, short stories and, to many, the word “Kafkaesque.“
Grand Central Station, Alfred Stieglitz
Where it gets more complex is that artists deserve control over their narrative. Not their output, but rather, how that output is perceived in their career. Some manage to control it perfectly, such as Georgia O’Keeffe who destroyed parts of her and her husband’s, Alfred Stieglitz, work before her death, ensuring optimum narrative. After Francis Bacon’s death in 1992, one hundred slashed canvases were found in his messy studio in South Kensington.
The cycle of creation and destruction was central to Bacon’s tortured creative process and emotionally-charged works. He would refer to his work as an ‘exorcism’: cathartic, painful, sexual, releases of raw emotion.
Is it then on us – the common watchers, the plebeian audience, the mere mortal curtain twitchers of these brilliant minds to decide when and what and how an artist wants to show their work? Are we heaping a little too much importance on our precious eyes and overlooking the fact that the creation of an artist’s work is often extremely emotionally painful, and to have it out there when unwanted is even more so?
As for Lucian Freud, the reason for his desperation to re-acquire his own painting is believed to be sparked by his embarrassment that the male nude appears to be a self-portrait. With his face turned in profile, his facial features match photographs of him. Although known for his many female lovers, his friend Thierry Navarro, a private investigator, reveals he had several early gay affairs.
German-born English painter Lucian Freud smoking in a Dublin street. (Photo: Daniel Farson/Picture Post)
Navarro discovered that the painting had hung in a flat in Geneva secretly used by fellow artist Francis Bacon and gay friends, with Freud among its visitors.
So, then. Did Freud have the right to control his story and personal life, regardless of a career marked by perverse but beautiful discomfort between artist and sitter? Or is a life of art also a life of forceful revelations, sometimes wanted, sometimes unwanted?
