The Garden of Lucian F.

Born into blithe ignorance, humans and plants began their eons of coexistence in Eden, only to carry on, side by side, in the aftermath of the Fall, eventually finding themselves together in apartments with an array of pots and window boxes. Lucian Freud’s botanical imagery takes as its subject matter this postlapsarian state of plants – their life force, now sapped, hindered, and blocked, is seen only in the expressiveness of their leaves, which once stood tall but now wilt and yellow. A surname that could hardly be overlooked, a life of excess, a steady stream of affairs with both women and men and a fair share of scandal all fed the media notoriety of Sigmund Freud’s artist grandson; but while Lucian Freud’s nudes and his portraits of women (from Elizabeth II to Kate Moss) were the talk of the town, no one paid much attention to his depictions of cyclamen, yucca, licorice, and aspidistra. With a book, an exhibition, and now with this article, Giovanni Aloi has unearthed a part of Lucian Freud’s oeuvre that had remained hidden, buried like a plant’s roots.