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Exhibited: Saint-Paul, Fondation Maeght, Bacon-Freud, July-October 1995, p. 193, no. 73, (illustrated in color).
New York, Acquavella Galleries, Inc., Lucian Freud, October-November 1996.
Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Munich, Haus der Kunst, Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, October 1999-April 2000, p.56, no. 24 (illustrated in color).
Venice, Museo Correr, Lucian Freud, July-October 2005, p. 147, no. 62 (illustrated in color).
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Literature: B. Bernard and D. Birdsall, Lucian Freud, London, 1996, pp. 330-331, no. 281 (illustrated in color).
Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, 2001, p. 121, fig. 105 (illustrated).
W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, pp. 346-347, no. 227 (illustrated in color).
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Notes: "The human figure, which for thousands of years was the container and vehicle of art's most exalted as well as its coarsest intentions, languishes in late-modern American painting like a vestigial sign, atrophied. This is not because abstract art attained its Utopian ends of making representation obsolete - we all know it didn't - but because the culture forgot that there was anything to do with bodies and faces except photograph them. It's as though America, maddened and warped by its own erotomania, its obsession with and fear of the flesh, and further blocked by its newly acquired worries about sexual politics, can no longer imagine how to paint a naked human being. And even if it wanted to, the skills needed to do so have been edited out of all but a few art schools and are, in the main, no longer taught. What passes for avant-garde style today is mostly recycled and tired, a thrice-dipped tea bag. There is not only a place but a burning need for art whose images are worldly, skilled, robustly embodied and keenly felt. This is what Freud, by taking nothing for granted and looking over the very brink of his perceptions, supplies." (R. Hughes, "The Fat Lady Sings," Time, December 27, 1993).
A large life-size painting depicting a vast naked woman lying asleep on a worn out sofa, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping is a bold and imposing example of the stark power of Lucian Freud's realism and his extraordinary ability to capture the startling actuality of life in all its awkwardness, discomfort and artless wonder.
One of the finest of Freud's paintings from the 1990s, this picture is a simple and seemingly uncomposed depiction of one of the key features of Freud's art - the forceful and undeniable physical presence of people and things. The woman on the sofa is Sue Tilley, a benefits supervisor from London who was introduced to Freud by the Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery - himself the subject of several monumental and yet also tender portraits that Freud made in the early 1990s. Bowery, who recommended several sitters to Freud, attempted to find models for the artist whose physicality would appeal to him. Freud had greatly welcomed the new possibilities that the bulk of Bowery's own imposing figure had offered him and it was this that had prompted Bowery to think of his friend, "Big Sue." Tilley, who is now the author of Bowery's biography, was, as a result, understandably quite nervous on first meeting Freud, but, like most of his sitters grew more comfortable and confident as she came to know him. After Freud's first picture of her, Evening in the Studio of 1993, which was originally to have also included Bowery and for which she was forced to lie on the bare floor in an extremely uncomfortable pose, Freud bought the dilapidated sofa that appears in this painting for her to lie on.
Over the next few years Tilley became a regular sitter for Freud and his paintings of her went from strength to strength. The fleshy landscape of Tilley's body provided his famously penetrative gaze with a fascinating new arena of visual stimulation and a new challenge for his art. "She's in her way very feminine and, as she says, luckily she's got a sensible gene," Freud has recalled. "Initially, being aware of all kinds of spectacular things to do with her size, like amazing craters and things one's never seen before, my eye was naturally drawn round to the sores and chafes and weight made by heat" (L. Freud, "Conversation with William Feaver," April 1998, in William Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, p. 373). Benefits Supervisor Sleeping is the largest, simplest, and seemingly most natural of all Freud's portraits of "Big Sue." As Stephanie Theobald wrote in the Observer at the time of Freud's major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 2002, the striking informality and apparent naturalness of Tilley's pose in this painting was probably determined by the sitter herself." A friend once told her 'never stand when you can sit and never sit when you can lie down,'" Theobald wrote, "and when she poses for Freud she says she tries to get into positions where she can fall asleep without him noticing." (S. Theobald, "How Big Sue became art's biggest muse," Observer, 23 June 2002.)
Clearly asleep in this painting with her face squashed against the arm of the sofa and one hand supporting the weight of a large and heavy breast, "Big Sue's" other arm is more actively extended along the top of the sofa in a more awkward and uncomfortable manner contrasting strongly with the soporific slump of the rest of her figure. It is this contrast and the slight surprise of the seemingly alert position of the straight arm that bestows Tilley's, in all other respects, inert pose with its tension and inherent sense of vitality and animation. This living, breathing nature of the figure, whose rolling landscape of fleshy form is almost unfolded across the picture plane, is contrasted simply and directly with the inert stuffed and patterned material presence of the sofa - an object that has its own imposing presence and, since the painting of this picture, has appeared with frequency, in many of Freud's paintings.
Although the position of this arm could naturally, though unusually, have occurred in sleep, a studio photograph of Sue Tilley holding this pose reveals, more than the painting, the full and unusual awkwardness of the straight arm as well as its importance to the composition of the painting as a whole. In other words, and as is his way, Freud, in collaboration with his sitter has gone to great pains to arrive a simple pose that is at once intriguing and dynamic, but also natural to and fitting of the sitter. "I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them," Freud has often insisted, "not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong." In addition he has pointed out that if "I'm putting someone in a picture I like to feel that they've fallen asleep there or they've elbowed their way in: that way, they are there not to make the picture easy on the eye or more pleasant, but they are occupying the space of my picture and I am recording them." (L. Freud in op cit, p. 372).
In his choice of composition as in his rejection of the artifice and emotion of non-naturalistic and even heightened colour, Freud, as Frank Auerbach once elegantly pointed out, deliberately eschews conventional aesthetics. His subject matter is served "raw, not cooked to be more digestible as art, not covered in a gravy of ostentatious tone or colour, not arranged on the plate as a composition." (F. Auerbach "On Lucian Freud," in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Tate Gallery London, 2000, p. 51). "I'd like to think that I had in some way caught a scene rather than composed it, so that you never questioned it," Freud told William Feaver. "One of the things in Stanley Spencer I'm conscious of, especially lately, is that his are 'compositions.' ... I was quite pleased when John Wonnacott, whose work I like, said, 'you are a marvelous painter of flesh but you can't compose.' I thought 'Oh good,' because I felt that the way I put things looked - not in a romantic way, I'd like to think - awkward, in the way that life looks awkward" (Lucian Freud in W. Feaver, op.cit, p. 371).
In Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, the simple matter-of-factness of the painting's composition is an important part of the painting's appeal. In addition to the extraordinarily relaxed and natural pose of "Big Sue" lying on the sofa, the frontality of the scene and the looking down from above - one of Freud's favourite viewing positions - lend the whole atmosphere of the picture an impressive air of arbitrariness. Unlike many of Freud's paintings where the naked figure appears laid out below him like a strange specimen ready for inspection, the simplicity and apparent normality of the pose and composition in this work bring a strange and almost intimate familiarity to this unfamiliar image. There is also something fitting between the scale and bulk of the figure, that of the old sofa and indeed, the vast size of the painting itself, that renders this modern day sleeping Venus as a tender and almost homely image - a modern urban nude who is herself a landscape, at ease in the setting of a modern urban interior.
As is his way, Freud appears to have arrived at this impressive full-length image of "Big Sue" reclining on her Withnailian sofa, by working in a piecemeal fashion, gradually unfolding, bit by bit, the full expanse of her figure and the sofa in a series of canvas extensions invisibly joined together until this simple and complete composition was attained. Radiating throughout with the harsh, whitish-grey London light intrinsic to so many of his paintings, the subject, form, and colour of this exceptional work together combine into one bold and simple expression of the existential power of living and inert material. Presented alone and naked on a drab sofa set down on a bare wooden floor, this simple nude is also both monumental and magnificent. The undeniable physical presence of "Big Sue's" naked form, its overt facticity, like that of the sofa, acts on the viewer like a slap in the face, awakening them to a shared appreciation, with Freud, of the extraordinary depth and apparently infinite richness of cold, simple reality. "What do I ask of painting?" Freud once said, "I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince" (L. Freud quoted in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Tate Gallery London, 2000, p. 37).
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