A tiny Chinese trinket smuggled out of Vienna under the nose of the Nazis will take pride of place in a new exhibition about pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
The 19th century jade and wood screen was one of two objects from Freud’s huge collection of antiquities he chose to be sent to London ahead of his planned escape into exile before the outbreak of the Second World War.
It will go on show with a wider collection of his Chinese art at the Freud Museum which is based in what became the family home in Hampstead.
Curator Craig Clunas said Freud, who as a prominent Jewish intellectual would have been a target for the Nazis, began making plans to escape with his family and his treasured antiques after Hitler took power in Austria in 1938.
Clunas, who is professor emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, said: “What happened is Freud asks a friend, a Greek lady — the Princess Marie Bonaparte, who is a descendent of Napoleon Bonaparte — and he gets her to smuggle two objects out of the apartment in Vienna in her handbag so that at least if he can get himself and not the stuff out he will have two things left to remind him of his collection. One is an ancient Greek bronze figure of the goddess Athena and the other is this little Chinese jade screen, below. It’s about two inches high, and perfectly smuggleable.
“There are photographs of his Viennese apartment and these things are right in the middle of his desk, under his nose, so while there is a degree of practicality about it, these objects are some of the most familiar to him when he looks up from writing.”
The exhibition, which opens on Saturday, includes dozens of objects from figurines to paper knives collected by Freud and eventually brought to the UK, where he died in 1939.
Professor Clunas said: “Freud is a kind of abstraction but when you see his environment and the things he touched it makes him a bit more human.”
The museum’s director Carol Seigel said: “Before Professor Clunas, no one had looked at Freud’s Chinese objects with real understanding of their context. His work is in the depth and knowledge that he brings to the exhibition and is imbued with these insights.”
