Robert Longo

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On June 4, 1938, having paid the “German Reich Escape Tax” and the “Jew Property Tax,” Sigmund Freud left his apartment at 19 Berggasse forever. A few days before his emigration from Vienna to London, photographer Edmund Engelmann courageously and secretively recorded Freud's legendary residence, documenting it in photographs that were eventually published. An old volume of these photographs was presented to artist Robert Longo in 1993, acting as the catalyst and primary source material for the 30 large-size charcoal works that constitute The Freud Drawings . Via Longo's charcoal, Freud's deserted rooms become an admonition of a destroyed world, tension-filled reminiscences of a place both momentous and monstrous, eclipsed and strange.