Lucian Freud

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Brown, Mark (10 July 2021). "Exhibition brings to light young Freud's love triangle". The Guardian. London. p.25. Stark and revealing... Recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art.' - New York Times 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.

Nollekens and his Times: Comprehending A Life Of That Celebrated Sculptor, And Memoirs Of Several Contemporary Artists ReadLauter, Rolf: Lucian Freud, in: 10x Malerei. Rubenspreis der Stadt Siegen in Werken der Sammlung Lambrecht-Schadeberg, Siegen 2002, ISBN 3-935874-03-0

Feaver’s vastly detailed biography is the ideal companion to Freud’s work. It resembles nothing so much as a large Freud canvas: hypnotic, occasionally reiterative, quirkily dark in places, proceeding by a process of obsessive accretion. Lucian Freud, not a real painter? On this evidence he was real enough.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. Freud was a Jewish Berliner by birth. These facts gradually impinged upon him once he was no longer a toddler and became a boy. I chose Emil and the Detectives although there are other books from childhood that he was also very keen on – the poems of Christian Morgenstern, for example. However, Emil has this vivid atmosphere of growing up in late 1920s Berlin, in which the protagonist and his young accomplices, rough-and-tumble working class boys, set out to catch a mysterious man in a hat who had pinched money from Emil when he fell asleep on a train. 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. 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. Daniel F. Herrmann, Curator of 'The Credit Suisse Exhibition – Lucian Freud: New Perspectives' , says: ’With an unflinching eye and an uncompromising commitment to his work, Freud created figurative masterpieces that continue to inspire contemporary artists today. His practice has often been overshadowed by biography and celebrity. In this exhibition we offer new perspectives on the artist’s work looking closely at Freud’s mastery of painting itself and the contexts in which it developed.’

Lauter, Rolf (2001). "Lucian Freud, naked portraits". collections.britishart.yale.edu . Retrieved 4 February 2020. In 1987, he curated an edition of the Gallery’s famous 'Artist’s Eye' exhibitions. Selecting nearly thirty masterpieces from Chardin to Vuillard, the artist wrote: ‘What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.’ It was exciting to do, going through the works with Lucian, who even took a private plane trip from New York to Chicago to persuade the Art Institute of Chicago to lend Stoke-by-Nayland, one of the great last paintings for the show. So it was a collaboration, and I think Leslie’s Life of Constable therefore pre-reflects the relationship between me and Lucian over practical things, like which pictures to choose and how to present them. In my case, I was the one to do the actual hanging of them all, and when Lucian flew with a few friends over to Paris to look at the exhibition, he told me he congratulated himself on the installation, which of course he had nothing to do with. Calvocoressi, Richard (1997). Early Works: Lucian Freud. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. ISBN 0-903598-66-3Freud'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] 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. It was Freud's practice to begin a painting by first drawing in charcoal on the canvas. He then applied paint to a small area of the canvas, and gradually worked outward from that point. For a new sitter, he often started with the head as a means of "getting to know" the person, then painted the rest of the figure, eventually returning to the head as his comprehension of the model deepened. [26] A section of canvas was intentionally left bare until the painting was finished. [26] The finished painting is an accumulation of richly worked layers of pigment, as well as months of intense observation. [26] Later career [ edit ] Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995, a very large portrait of "Big Sue" Tilley, showing his handling of flesh tones, and a typical high viewpoint His relationships with his models similarly often had a certain reciprocal commitment to accomplishing a particular work.

Lucian Freud was an extraordinary, outstanding painter operating in an age when a lot of things were down to novelty and down to programs of modernism. He wasn’t having any of that. Which doesn’t make him a reactionary, it simply makes him someone who believed in painting. Despite all the picaresque episodes of his life, painting was the basis, the centre, the thing he was most serious about. He became famous really only in the latter years of his life, covered in Fame: 1968-2011, the second volume of my biography. In England and in London, he was perhaps famous all his life, but globally not until he was in his seventies. As happens with most artists, he was rather a latecomer to the international scene. Richard Calvocoressi, Lucian Freud: Early Works, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1997. ISBN 0-903598-66-3

Notes to editors

Lucian Freud was one of the most significant artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and Phaidon is honoured to publish the most complete retrospective of his career to date. Lauter, Rolf (2000), Lucian Freud: Naked Portraits. Works from the 1940s to the 1990s, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 29.09.2000-04.03.2001. ISBN 3-7757-9043-8 ISBN 9783775790437