Lucian Freud: 1996-2005

by Lucian Freud

“The greatest living realist painter” is how Robert Hughes described Lucian Freud in 1998. He is probably most famous as a portraitist, a portraitist above all of nudes. Stripped of their clothes, his sitters—mostly friends or family members—are revealed in all their vulnerability. Their gorgeously painted flesh is alive. As Freud himself has said of his nudes, “I used to leave the face to the last. I wanted the expression to be in the body. The head must be just another limb.”

Freud has always worked outside the conventions—academic as well as modernist—of contemporary art. However, his vision reflects the anguish of his time as powerfully as the work of his close friend, the late Francis Bacon, once did. Where Freud triumphs is in his ability to get inside his not to analyze them, as his grandfather did, but to bring them to sentient life in paint.

Although he works very slowly—most portraits take months to finish—Freud has spent the last ten years (since the publication of the 1996 monograph Lucian Freud ) painting day after day, usually from 8 a.m. until midnight. The result has been a corpus of great new works, which reveal him to be the only heir today of Rembrandt, Courbet, and Cézanne.

The most daring of Freud’s recent portraits is a full-length painting of Andrew Parker-Bowles—a new, subtly satirical take on the grand manner that stretches back through van Dyck to Titian. Like Goya, Freud is without reverence. With his portrait of the Queen, you feel the canvas is a window through which Her Majesty is bursting, diadem and all. Freud has also indulged his passion for animals in some wonderfully perceptive studies of horses and his whippet, Pluto. And he has proved to be an acute observer of nature in obsessively meticulous but wonderfully fresh paintings and engravings of the buddleia bush in his garden. This book is a dazzling record of a powerful late period by our last great painter.

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, the son of the architect Ernst Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to England in 1933. His work has been exhibited in major museums around the world with retrospectives at the Tate Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He lives in London.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

180 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2005

About the author

Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.

His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.

Reviews

[Leonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

My knowledge of the art of Freud who died a few years ago, was non-existent before reading and looking at this book. Of course now I'm an expert! Not really, obviously. But the more I looked at his paintings, which I would describe as "harsh" and read about him, the more interested I became. He had wise parents who read the handwriting on the wall and left Germany as Hitler was gaining power, and moved their family to Britain. He seemed to be very devoted to his art. He had a variety of relationships during his life and numerous children from those relationships. He painted some very captivating self-portraits and had some revealing things to say about the act of looking at yourself and accepting or not accepting what you see. One of his paintings of a very large nude woman, who frequently posed for him, sold recently for over 33 million, but it's my impression that the value of his art must be measured with a scale other then just the monetary one.

[Renee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am grateful for the equal representation of male figures. Freud's weighty portraits remind me of the strangeness of the human body.

I love most the 'nudes' of his beloved dogs, and that they seem much more at home in their own bodies than we do.


Excellent image quality and large pages gave me a closer look at brush work. I always think of his brushwork as being smooth but there are lots of little globs in some of the close ups. I have never seen a Freud in person, so I am curious if this is the result of a change in style, or just an up close observation.

Well written text but very brief. I would have liked more information about the personal life of the artist - even if he wished to keep that separate from his work.

[Saulo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book, with most of the work of a contemporary genius of painting. He has an eye for the soul, for that intimate and rare moment of his subjects, when you can see through them.