Lucian Freud Retrospective at National Gallery Coincides with Record Auction Fragment

A fragment of Lucian Freud's 'And the Bridegroom' sold for nearly £2 million at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Sale on October 14, 2022, against an estimate of £700,000–£1 million. The work is a first version fragment from 1993 depicting Leigh Bowery and Nicola Bateman, titled after A.E. Housman's 'Epithalamium'. The sale occurred shortly after the opening of 'New Perspectives', the first major Freud retrospective in a decade, at the National Gallery in London, running until January 22, 2023. The exhibition, organized with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid where it will travel, features over sixty works spanning seventy years of Freud's career. Freud, born in Berlin in 1922 and naturalized British, died in London in 2011. The show includes iconic large-scale portraits of public figures and intimates, highlighting his 'intensification of reality' approach. Bowery died of AIDS months after marrying Bateman in May 1994.