Readers eager for artistic insights or extended ruminations such as those found in, for instance, Van Gogh’s letters, will be disappointed by this volume. If we are to judge by his correspondence, Freud, at least in his younger years, did not give much time to artistic introspection or theoretical musings. The style in which he writes to his friends and lovers is rambunctious, irreverent, sometimes facetious and almost always funny. He must have been a wonderfully amusing, if somewhat dangerous, companion. An obsessive womaniser, he treated his lovers appallingly – or so it seems; the devotion shown by his two wives and countless others itself verges on obsession. Ever a bit of professional rivalry in artistic circles…. That exhibit may have been an early example of the juxtaposition of contemporary artists with Old Masters, something that’s become a trend in curatorial circles in recent decades. Sharp, Jasper (2013). Lucian Freud (Exhibition Catalogue of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna). Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-5332-6

Mature style [ edit ] Girl with a White Dog, 1951–1952, Tate Gallery. Portrait of Freud's first wife, Kitty Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman This is both a vital contribution to art scholarship and a gorgeous addition to the bookshelves of art lovers around the world. Specifications: Larger-than-life British artist Lucian Freud enjoyed a career lasting over seven decades. He worked almost until the day he died, when he left a portrait of friend and studio assistant David Dawson unfinished.With paintings of the powerful, such as 'HM Queen Elisabeth II' (c.1999-2001, lent by Her Majesty The Queen from the Royal Collection) the artist positioned himself in the tradition of historic Court Painters, such as Rubens (1577-1640) or Velázquez (1599-1660), all the while paying unflinching attention to everyday sitters, including his own mother, poignantly documented at the end of her life. And about himself, Freud is equally trenchant. The things that many find contentious in his work – his view of the nude as a human animal, of its head as just another limb – are exactly as he ordains them. It is startling to learn that he gave up his early, graphic style as a kind of retaliation to his critics. "People used to write 'He's a fine draughtsman, but the paintings are rather flat.' I thought, I'd better put a stop to that." More surprising still is his ideal response from the viewer of a new work: "Oh, I didn't realise that was by you"; an impossible dream, but remarkably uncomplacent. Who do you feel are the true heirs to Lucian Freud among painters or artists working today? Many would cite his influence on their technique. Who do you, as both a painter and a critic, feel achieves some of the qualities that Freud was striving for, the greater ruthlessness or, as you’ve described it, the intensification of reality that characterises his best work?

The original, unnerving, sustained artistic achievement of Lucian Freud... had at its heart a wilful, restless personality, fired by his intelligence and attentiveness and his suspicion of method, never wanting to risk doing the same thing twice.' - Guardian Freud's early paintings, which are mostly very small, are often associated with German Expressionism (an influence he tended to deny) and Surrealism in depicting people, plants and animals in unusual juxtapositions. Some very early works anticipate the varied flesh tones of his mature style, for example Cedric Morris (1940, National Museum of Wales), but after the end of the war he developed a thinly painted very precise linear style with muted colours, best known in his self-portrait Man with a Thistle (1946, Tate) [13] and a series of large-eyed portraits of his first wife, Kitty Garman, such as Girl with a Kitten (1947, Tate). [14] These were painted with tiny sable brushes and evoke Early Netherlandish painting. [13] A comprehensive overview of his life and work in one luxurious volume, this book is a gorgeous addition to the shelves of art lovers everywhere. Created in collaboration with the Lucian Freud Archive and David Dawson, Director of the Archive, and edited by Mark Holborn. Specifications: Through more than 60 paintings, you will see the development of an artist: paintings of powerful public figures are followed by private studies of friends and family; the familiar, domestic setting gives way to the artist’s paint-splattered studio – a place that becomes both stage and a subject in its own right – and the approximated features of his earliest paintings are complemented by the expertly rendered flesh of his final works.

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Perhaps the coarseness came to equate with candour. That seems the case with the final self-portraits in this show. Almost the smallest of these is nonetheless the most monumental. Painter Working, Reflection, made when Freud was 71, casts a cold eye upon his own body, reflected in the studio mirror, naked except for the famous laceless boots flapping like devil’s hooves. The artist brandishes the palette knife with which he has worked up the pelleted surface of this very picture; a conductor with a baton, or perhaps a late Prospero with his wand. This time the portrait meets the man head on: unique and full force. Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic for The Spectator magazine. He sat for a portrait by Freud, an experience recounted in Man with a Blue Scarf (2010). Freud often framed his subjects in domestic settings and in his paint-splattered studio, a place that became both stage and subject of his paintings in its own right. Showing how Freud's practice changed throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, the exhibition culminates in some of Freud's monumental nude portraits, revelling in the representation of the human form. Calvocoressi, Richard (1997). Early Works: Lucian Freud. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. ISBN 0-903598-66-3

Take Naked Portrait II (1979-80) . Why did he choose to paint this nameless woman, apparently asleep on the battered couch, one knee lolling to reveal her open vulva? A poor, bare forked animal with swollen breasts and the faint seam of a recent – or forthcoming – birth upon her stomach, she appears fully exposed to Freud’s all-seeing eyes. Who she is, what she feels, whether she is or has been pregnant: nothing is vouchsafed in the painting or its bald title. Nakedness is the central fact of her to Freud. In 1987 the British Council organised a retrospective for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, which was subsequently shown in the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, in the Hayward Gallery London and in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. a b Spurling, John (13 December 1998). "Portrait of the artist as a happy man". The Independent . Retrieved 19 June 2010. Freud was one of a number of figurative artists who were later characterised by artist R. B. Kitaj as a group named the "School of London". [11] [12] This group was a loose collection of individual artists who knew each other, some intimately, and were working in London at the same time in the figurative style. The group was active contemporaneously with the boom years of abstract painting and in contrast to abstract expressionism. Major figures in the group included Freud, Kitaj, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, and Reginald Gray. Freud was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949 to 1954. Born in Berlin on 8 December 1922 (the city was then part of the Weimar Republic), Freud was the son of a German Jewish mother, Lucie (née Brasch), and an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect who was the fourth child of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. [4] Lucian, the second of their three boys, was the elder brother of the broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud.Feaver, William (1996). Lucian Freud: Paintings and Etchings. Abbot Hall Art Gallery. ISBN 0-9503335-7-3