Lucian Freud

About Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin, the son of architect Ernst Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. In 1933, his family fled to London to escape the rising tide of Nazism, and Lucian and his two brothers were enrolled in English schools.

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin, the son of architect Ernst Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. In 1933, his family fled to London to escape the rising tide of Nazism, and Lucian and his two brothers were enrolled in English schools. Largely untrained as an artist, he was intermittently enrolled in various schools and received nominal artistic instruction as a youth. His early paintings, dating to the 1940s, depict people, animals, and plants in unusual juxtapositions. In delicately painted, thinly applied oils, Freud rendered his subjects with ultra-fine precision and crisp, clean contours. In the mid- 1950s, Freud traded his sable brushes for ones of coarse hog hair and began working with looser brushwork, thereby “liberating” his subjects from his prior meticulous technique. Over the course of the ‘50s, Freud gradually honed in on the portrait, which has become the core of his oeuvre. Painting his first characteristic nude in 1966, over the next few decades his nudes became ever more exposed, genuine, and revealing. By the 1980s, Freud was painting with thick paints and heavily built-up impasto. For Freud, the thick application of paint conveyed a tactile and tangible sense of reality: “I want paint to work as flesh ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me as flesh does (Lawrence Gowing,Lucian Freud, 1982, Thames & Hudson, p. 190-1).” Though his style has dramatically evolved over his seventy years of painting, he has remained committed to realism and the unembellished portrayal of his own perceptions. From the very young to the old, the small to the gigantic, Freud has depicted his subjects with penetrating honesty and psycho- logical depth. Most of Freud’s sitters have been his lovers, family, and friends, including fellow artists Francis Bacon and David Hockney as well as his dealer, Bill Acquavella. He has also painted portraits for the Baron Thyssen, Lord Rothschild, and the Queen of England. Drawn to people for both their looks and character, he invites his subjects to sit with him and subject themselves to his unrelenting scrutiny in order to realize their truest likeness. The process is long and laborious, completed in up to six-hour sessions held daily for weeks, months, or even years. Freud can only finish his paintings once he feels that they have a life of their own. As he explained in “Some Thoughts on Painting,” first broadcast on the BBC: “The picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life.”

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