Touché | Bruce Bernard, by Lucian Freud

Julian Page Gallery. Lucian Freud, Head of Bruce Bernard (1985), Etching 51 x 47cm Edition of 50.

Meet, if you dare, the inscrutable glare of Bruce Bernard, a man who didn’t suffer fools gladly, as depicted in 1985 – aged 57 - by his lifelong friend Lucian Freud, about whom the same could be said.

In his obituary of Bernard, in The Guardian in March 2000, the writer Adrian Searle described him as being ‘possessed of one of the most acute bullshit detectors I have ever encountered’.

He was a picture editor by trade – first for The Sunday Times and later for The Independent (in its early heyday) - but also a fine photographer in his own right, and a writer, most notably of Vincent by Himself, a book which juxtaposed paintings by van Gogh with letters to his brother, Theo, and Century, a survey of the twentieth century in photographs.

Bernard – elder brother of notorious Spectator columnist Jeffrey - was a habitué of the studios of the country’s foremost painters (as well as the Soho bars they frequented) taking candid photographic portraits of the likes of Freud – touché! - Francis Bacon, Euan Uglow, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach. A posthumous exhibition of these images was displayed at Tate Britain in 2002.

Freud’s etching of Bernard – supplied by Julian Page - is to be shown in Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern Art, a stand-alone exhibition at British Art Fair 2023, featuring émigré artists who came to Britain from all over the world during the 20th century. Freud, of course, arrived in London at the age of 11 in 1933, and didn’t officially become a British subject until 1939.

Other artists featured include David Bomberg, Frank Auerbach and Bill Brandt (from Central Europe), Liliane Lijn and R.B. Kitaj (from the United States), Aubrey Williams and Cleveland Brown (from the Caribbean) and James Barnor (from Africa). Works are being supplied by past and present exhibitors to British Art Fair, and will all be for sale with prices ranging from four to six figures. The exhibition is being compiled by art market expert, writer and British Art Fair advisory committee member Colin Gleadell and curated by art historian and author Monica Bohm-Duchen.

Bruce Bernard trained to be an artist at St Martin’s School of Art in the 40s, and, though he dropped out, developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of art, becoming known as an unerring critic (he wrote under pseudonyms such as Dierdre Pugh and Joe Hodges). No doubt he would approve of this wide-ranging and important exhibition, and its underlying, ever-relevant premise: that 20th-century British art is very much a hybrid, multinational beast.