Blog Posts

In May of 2008, when the hammer fell on Lucien Freud’s 1995 oil painting, “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” at Christie’s in New York, a new benchmark was set for living artists… $33.6Million. What is more, the hammer thrust a long-standing tradition in art into the public consciousness, that of challenging convention. “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” was not the prototypical model which gracefully dances through the pages of our contemporaneous magazines, across our stages or televisions, or inhabits the little box we call “ideal”. No, the supervisor in question, Sue Tilley, was quite generously “Rubeneque”.