The Freud Cycle, 2004
Portfolio of 13 digital pigment prints, on rag paper, different sizes from 76 x 55 to 109 x 162 cm (30 x 22 to 43 x 64 in), some prints in two parts. Edition of 30, signed and numbered.
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For his edition series The Freud Cycle, Robert Longo draws on historical photographs of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna apartment, taken under dramatic circumstances. After Freud – persecuted as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Vienna – was forced to emigrate in 1938, his apartment was sealed: steel barriers at the door, windows heavily shrouded, a place of silence and exclusion. Yet a photographer managed to gain access to the rooms. In the midst of darkness, he turned his camera toward Freud’s iconic objects – his couch, his bust, his books – capturing the charged atmosphere of an abandoned intellectual center.
Decades later, Robert Longo discovered these visual documents and was struck by their expressive intensity and historical weight. In his reinterpretation of the photographs for this edition, he translates the scenes into his signature visual language: deep black, hyperrealistic charcoal drawing. The work becomes a multilayered reflection on absence, memory, the darkness of Nazi crimes, and the psychological architecture of a place uniquely tied to the birth of psychoanalysis.
