For many years, the Freud Museum Shop has worked closely with The Estate of Oscar Nemon, a studio museum and archive that hand casts resin and bronze-resin replicas of Nemon’s original busts. Read the remarkable story behind the creation of Nemon’s famous sculptures of Freud, and follow our Little Thinker as he journeys to the Freud Museum Shop to pick up his own ‘Nemon bust’ in the video below.
FREUD & NEMON
The prominent sculptor Oscar Nemon (1906-1985) was commissioned by his friend Dr Paul Federn to make a bust of Freud in 1931. Federn had tried for decades to persuade his mentor to sit for a sculpture, but Freud had always declined; partly out of humility but also because of the hurt caused by the contempt he had suffered at the hands of the University of Vienna. So when he finally agreed, Federn responded quickly, and Nemon, at the time residing in Brussels, received an urgent telegram from Vienna simply reading Come at once!
Nemon’s first meeting with Freud was in Freud’s consulting-room at his summer residence outside of Vienna, where he immediately set to work on sketches for the bust. The two would meet several times, always for brief sittings between Freud’s sessions with patients. Nemon then returned to Brussels with his sketches, and after six months he finished three busts: one carved in wood, the second cut in stone, and the third cast in bronze.
Later the same year, Federn, who had brought along the three busts, asked Freud to choose one to keep as a gift from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Freud chose the wooden one with the remark, With its vivacious and friendly expression it promises to become a pleasant roommate. The same bust is still kept on display in Freud’s study here at the Freud Museum in London.
In a letter to Max Eitingon from 1939, the year of his death, Freud described Nemon’s work as, The head which the gaunt, goatee-bearded artist has fashioned from the dirt – like the good lord – is a very good and astonishingly life-like impression of me.
Nemon’s best-known sculpture of Freud, the massive seated figure reminiscent of Rodin’s The Thinker, was originally intended to be unveiled in Vienna in 1936 on the occasion of Freud’s eightieth birthday, but unfortunately political events made this impossible. While working on the sketches for the sculpture, just after having finished his fourth one-hour sitting with Freud, Nemon wrote to his friend Simone: No one has moved me so deeply as he does or convinced me of his greatness with his knowledge and insight. I have been enriched by knowing that such a man exists on this earth. He deserves to have his bust cast in gold.
Nemon would visit Freud one final time in London in 1938, to work on a harsher, more abstract portrait which was to become the head of the famous statue. On seeing the head, Freud’s housekeeper Paula Fichtl said that Nemon had made him look too angry, to which Freud responded, But I am angry. I am angry with humanity.
Three decades later, in the late 1960s, Donald Winnicott, the president of the British Psychoanalytic Society, decided that he wanted to erect a bronze casting of the sculpture (the plaster casting was languishing in Nemon’s London studio). The Freud Statue Committee was formed and a total of £11,000 was raised. In October 1970 the statue was finally unveiled by Freud’s daughter Anna at Swiss Cottage, London. As the statue was originally located in an alcove behind Swiss Cottage Library where it was virtually hidden away from the public, the Freud Museum arranged to have it moved to its present location at the junction of Fitzjohn’s Avenue and Belsize Lane in 1988.
Watch the Little Thinker on his journey from the current site of Nemon’s bronze statue of Freud to the Freud Museum Shop, to pick up his own version!
Pick up your own bust here.
Blog written by Retail Supervisor Martin Bladh
Photo and Video created by Digital Content Producer Callum Blades
