A new exhibition at Freud Museum London celebrates its 40th anniversary, featuring key objects from the Museum collections and items from the Freud family’s daily lives that have never been publicly displayed before. The exhibition, 40 Objects, 40 Years, will reflect the diverse nature of the Museum’s collection and offer a fitting tribute to the Museum’s origins as Sigmund Freud’s final home and its journey from opening in 1986.
To mark this significant milestone, 40 Objects, 40 Years will be on view at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, the house where Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life, after himself being forced to flee Nazi-occupied Vienna with his family on the eve of the Second World War.
Upon Freud’s death, his daughter Anna – herself a distinguished child psychoanalyst – preserved his study and library as he left it, including his world-famous couch, all of which remain in the Museum’s collections today. The exhibition is a rare chance for visitors to see antiquities that sit on Freud’s desk up close. It also offers the opportunity for family treasures to be viewed: objects from the Freuds’ domestic and personal spaces which illustrate the house as a former family home. Items from long-term storage will be seen for the very first time.
To celebrate and unlock the collection, the Museum has called upon a distinguished community of artists, writers, psychoanalysts, educators, and community members to reflect on one of these fascinating objects. Each contributor will explore their chosen object’s past and reflect on what it means to them personally. Details of specific members of the community will be revealed in due course.
Developed at the Museum and curated by Museum curator Bryony Davies, 40 Objects, 40 Years presents the life and works of Sigmund and Anna Freud in a new light, thoughtfully combining their professional legacies with their personal lives to offer visitors a new perspective on the story of psychoanalysis.
To find out more please visit https://shop.freud.org.uk/collections/40-objects-40-years
