Freud’s Study – Photographic Series at Freud Museum London

Click on the images to enlarge | all images: © Klaus Wehner, by Courtesy of the Trustees of The Freud Museum, London

Freud's Study: 1st artist's edition of 50, signed/numbered, hard cover, 30cm x 30cm, 200 pages, 100 photographs, designed by Klaus.
€ 250 / £ 230 + postage. Ask questions or order it here!

Freud's Study is a collaboration with the Freud Museum, London. Conceived as a book project from the beginning, it consists of 100 images of Sigmund Freud’s sizeable collection of antiquities, photographed in his study which is preserved the way he left it when he died in London in 1939.

Known to the world as the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was also an obsessive collector of antiquities and he had brought together a unique collection of almost 3000 mainly Egyptian, Roman and Greek antiquities in his lifetime. He arranged his collection liberally spread around his home and study, some in busy display cabinets, others spread on various shelves, around the now iconic couch and in a circle facing him on his desk.
Freud made playful use of the freedom that only private collectors enjoy, which is to make changing arrangements and create arbitrary juxtapositions. This fluidity of arrangements is also the reason why we can honestly say today, that the collection is displayed the way it was during Freud’s lifetime.

We have eyewitness accounts and photographs of the study from Freud’s lifetime both as it was in the Berggasse in Vienna and after the move to London. He kept some of his “old and dirty Gods” “set in elegant precision in a wide arc”* in front of himself on his desk, which must have created a type of screen between him and his opposite. The Freud Museum, London today preserves the study in his house for visitors. Just as it is when visiting the study today, the presence of the collection surely would have been an impressive element of the experience of being in the room as one of Freud’s visitors or patients at the time.

Freud’s passion for these objects was largely determined by subject matter. He was not interested in creating educational art historical overviews or even classification. as often with private collections, there is a liberal element poetry in the arrangement of the objects and it has been my aim to create a series of images that pay homage to and emphasise this poetry. To add to this even further, inside the book, I have juxtaposed some evocative quotes from Hilda Doolittle’s publication ‘Tribute to Freud’ which is a poetic account of her own experience of being a patient of Freud’s, hence a visitor to his rooms, over several years. As is fitting for a series of poetic images, my book also does not label the photographed objects nor includes any supplementary essays. (For information on the collection, see the reading list below.)

With this aim, the photography itself is of course not ‘neutral’ as it would be for a catalogue but deliberately evocative and interpretative. The images are much determined by the use of visual features that are specific to photographic images, such as low depth of field and optical foreshortening that can make some figures seemingly relate to each other. Photographs of sculpture often seem to bring the objects somewhat ‘alive’. Corresponding to Freud’s privileging of subject matter over artistry, the images’ evocative style emphasizes the subject matter of the depicted figures over the object-character as artefacts.

The viewer of the images knows that the photographed sculptures were in the possession of the man we know as the father of psychoanalysis. Not only does that imply that they were ‘witnesses’ to many of Freud’s now world famous sessions with patients, but viewers will also immediately ponder about the reason for Freud to choose these objects, wondering about his associations and what he may have ‘seen’ in these figures.

Whilst the study itself is deliberately only ever visible in fragments, the image series suggests it as populated by haunting archaic figures, depicted in somewhat dream-like images. The title ‘Freud’s Study’ plays on the double meaning that the object of the photographs is the room that is his study as well as it refers to the fact that archaeology and also photography as metaphor for psychological processes, were part of Freud’s study of the human mind.

Klaus Wehner, text updated: London, April 2021

More information on the collection can be found in these publications and on the Freud Museum websites:
Sigmund Freud’s Collection, Highlights from the Freud Museum London. Lead Author: Bryony Davies, Freud Museum London, 2019 (can be ordered from the Freud Museum shop)
Meine... alten und dreckigen Götter: Aus Siegmund Freuds Sammlung. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Freud-Museum Wien (Stroemfeld /Roter Stern), 1998
Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities. With an Introduction by Peter Gay. Harry N Abrams/Freud Museum London, 1989
Tribute to Freud, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), A new Directions Book, New York, 2012 (1956).
Links to: Freud Museum London | Siegmund Freud Museum, Wien

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