The first time I saw Lucian Freud’s prints I was repulsed, for reasons I could not have explained. Freud’s paintings of female flesh can be difficult to look at, but these were monochrome portrait heads, etched in hard black line. Did I find them cruel? I’m not sure. I certainly thought they were ugly. Decades later, after I had learned a bit about the process of etching, I became preoccupied by these strange, twisted, touching works, made in the last thirty years of Freud’s life. I was drawn to them with a vehemence that matched my initial distaste.
