Lucian Freud
Born
8 December 1922 (age 85)
Berlin, Germany
Nationality British1 German2 Austrian3
Field painting
Central School of Art, London, East
Anglian School of Painting and Drawing,
Training
Dedham, Essex, Goldsmiths College,
London
Movement Realism, Expressionism, Surrealism
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH (born 8 December 1922) is a British painter of
German Origin.
In May 2008, his 1995 portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold by auction by
Christie's in New York City for $33.6 million, setting a world record for sale value of
a painting by a living artist.[1]

Early life and family
Freud was born in Berlin, Germany in 1922, son of Jewish parents Ernst Ludwig
Freud, an architect, and Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud,
brother of writer and politician Clement Raphael Freud and of Stephan Gabriel Freud,
and uncle of radio and television broadcaster Emma Freud.
Freud and his family moved to the United Kingdom in 1933 to escape the rise of
Nazism, and gained British citizenship in 1939. During this period he attended
Dartington Hall school in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School.
Early career
The Painter's Room, 1944, private collection.
Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London then, with greater
success, at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham,
and also at Goldsmiths College - University of London from 1942-3. He served as a
merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service
in 1942. In 1943, Tambimuttu, the Ceylonese editor, commissioned the young artist to
illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled "The Glass Tower". It was
published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other
drawings, a stuffed zebra (-cum-unicorn) and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in
The Painter's Room on display at Freud's first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid
& Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to
Greece for several months. Since then he has lived and worked in London.
Freud's early paintings are often associated with surrealism and depict people and
plants in unusual juxtapositions. These works are usually painted with relatively thin
paint, but from the 1950s he began to paint portraits, often nudes, to the almost
complete exclusion of everything else, employing a thicker impasto. With this
technique he would often clean his brush after each stroke. The colours in these
paintings are typically muted. Often Freud's portraits depict only the sitter, sometimes
sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed or alternatively juxtaposed with something
else, as in Girl With a White Dog and Naked Man With Rat. Freud's subjects are often
the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. To quote the
artist: "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and
sensuality and involvement, really."
Girl with a white dog, 1951 - 1952, Tate Gallery The subject is Freud's first wife,
Kitty (Kathleen) Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman.
"I paint people," Freud has said, "not because of what they are like, not exactly in
spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be." Freud has painted fellow
artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. He produced a series of portraits
of the performance artist Leigh Bowery, and also painted Henrietta Moraes, a muse to
many Soho artists.
Recent years
Freud is one of the best known British artists working in a traditional representational
style, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989.[2] According to the Sunday
Telegraph of 1 September 2002, he is rumoured to have up to 40 illegitimate children,
acknowledging them when they have become adults. After an affair with Lorna
Garman, he went on to marry her niece Kitty (daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and
socialite Kathleen Garman) in 1948. After four years and the birth of two children,
their marriage ended when he began an affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood, a
society girl and writer. They married in 1957. He has children by Jacquetta Lampson,
daughter of the first Baron Killearn, and by Bernardine Coverley (fashion designer
Bella Freud and writer Esther Freud), Suzy Boyt (5 children: Ali, Rose Boyt, Isobel,
and Susie Boyt), and Katherine Margaret McAdam (4 children). His daughter Jane
McAdam Freud is an artist.
His painting After Cézanne, which is notable because of its unusual shape, was bought
by the National Gallery of Australia for $7.4 million. The top left section of this
painting has been 'grafted' on to the main section below, and closer inspection reveals
a horizontal line where these two sections were joined.
After Cézanne, 1999 - 2000, National Gallery of Australia.
Lucian Freud served as a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art (1949-54),
University College, London.
Although Freud is internationally acknowledged as one of the most important artists
working today, there have been few opportunities to see his paintings and etchings in
Britain. In 1996, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted a major exhibition of 27
paintings and thirteen etchings, covering the whole period of Freud's working life to
date. This was followed most notably by a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002.
During a period from May 2000 to December 2001, Freud painted Queen Elizabeth II.
There was significant criticism of this portrayal of the Queen in some sections of the
British media. The highest selling tabloid newspaper, The Sun, was particularly
condemnatory, describing the portrait as "a travesty".[3] In late 2007, a collection of
Freud's etchings titled "Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings" went on display at the
Museum of Modern Art. The etchings allow viewers to get a closer and more detailed
look at the artist's creative process. Freud's works sometimes involve the same person
and similar compositions, since his works are about getting to know the subject,
prompting him to use the same person more than once when he feels there is more he
can learn from him or her physically, mentally, or emotionally.
Room Guide
Chronology
Freud's Technique
Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait) 1965
© The Artist
Collection Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Freud was born in Berlin in December 1922, and came to England with his family in 1933. He
studied briefly at the Central School of Art in London and, to more effect, at Cedric Morris's
East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. Following this, he served as a
merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941. His first solo exhibition, in 1944 at the
Lefevre Gallery, featured the now celebrated The Painter's Room 1944. In the summer of
1946, he went to Paris before going on to Greece for several months. Since then he has lived
and worked in London.
Freud's subjects are often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers,
children. As he has said 'The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and
memory and sensuality and involvement really'. Paintings in the exhibition will range from Girl
with Roses 1948 to Garden, Notting Hill Gate 1997, and highlights include the marvellous
series of portraits of his mother, portraits of fellow painters John Minton, Michael Andrews and
Frank Auerbach, and other major works including Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) 1981-3.
Sharp pictures of his youth will contrast with the works of his maturity, paintings filled with life
and liveliness, each in its way a celebration.
'I paint people', Freud has said, 'not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what
they are like, but how they happen to be'.
| Technique
Until the mid 1950's, Freud worked in a tightly focussed style, which he had begun to use at
the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, run by Cedric Morris. The school was very
informal; as Freud said, there was 'No teaching much but there were models and you could
work in your own room'. In many ways he worked by trial and error: Landscape with Birds (no.
3, shown in room 1) was an experiment with the kind of enamel paint he thought was used by
Picasso. As he said later, 'Learning to paint is literally learning to use paint.'
Around 1956 Freud exchanged his finely pointed sable brushes for stiffer hogshair and began
to loosen his style, gradually amplifying his touch. Woman Smiling 1959 (no. 45, shown in
room 3) marked a transformation in his painting style and can be seen as a landmark work.
Also in the late 1950s Freud, who had until then always painted sitting down, began to work
standing up. This injected his work with a more athletic, energetic feel. His new approach
received a mixed response from critics, some of whom used words like 'shocking', 'violent'
and 'affected', but after a transitional phase in the 1960's Freud soon settled into a consistent
style. In the mid-1970s, he began using the heavy, granular pigment called cremnitz white,
which he has since then reserved for the painting of flesh.
As a painter, Freud works extremely slowly and deliberately, wiping his brush on a cloth after
every stroke. Great piles of these rags lie on the floor of his studio, and have featured in
several of his paintings from late 1980s onwards, such as Lying by the Rags 1989-90 (no.
115, shown in room 6). Often Freud will take several months to complete a painting, and it is
not unusual for works to be scrapped in the early stages. He usually has two or three
paintings on the go at once, and will work on them in shifts of two or three sessions a day. His
working day often starts early in the morning in his top-lit Holland Park studio, and ends in his
night studio where he works under artificial light.
During the 1980s, Freud began enlarging his canvases, partly to suggest more breathing
space around his sitters. Sometimes he would do this during the course of working on a
painting, by adding new strips around the edges of canvas; this can be seen in Leigh Bowery
(Seated) 1990 (no. 116, shown in room 6). Eventually this led to irregularly shaped works,
such as After Cézanne 2000 (no. 145, shown in room 8) and Two Brothers from Ulster 2001,
shown in the final room of the exhibition.
Freud, Lucian
Freud, Lucian (1922- ). German-born British painter. He was born
in Berlin, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, came to England with his
parents in 1931, and acquired British nationality in 1939. His
earliest love was drawing, and he began to work full time as an
artist after being invalided out of the Merchant Navy in 1942. In
1951 his Interior at Paddington (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) won
a prize at the Festival of Britain, and since then he has built up a
formidable reputation as one of the most powerful contemporary
figurative painters. Portraits and nudes are his specialities, often
observed in arresting close-up. His early work was meticulously
painted, so he has sometimes been described as a `Realist' (or
rather absurdly as a Superrealist), but the subjectivity and intensity
of his work has always set him apart from the sober tradition
characteristic of most British figurative art since the Second World
War. In his later work (from the late 1950s) his handling became
much broader.
(1922-)
"At the outset there is always a mystery. We cannot know what a
painter brought to painting or what drew him to it. Yet everything he
paints throughout his life adds to our understanding of one or both
these things. When his last picture is painted in that predestined
way in which, one cannot help believing, an artist's work, and
therefore art, unfolds when the last predestined picture is finished
and the trajectory of his meaning completes its curve then we know
all there is to be known about these first riddles and understand
what can't be known, what remains unknowable about the sources
and the resources of a painter.
"This book offers a chance to look at work by Lucian Freud.
Generally the sight is not easy to come by, because most of the
pictures belong to people, not museums. It is nearly ten years since
as many of them as this were shown together. Unlike most noted
contemporaries, Freud does not paint museum pictures, though if
you come on one in a museum you may never forget it. Large
groups of them hang in a few collections; his pictures are sought
after and kept at home, as if there was something personal in their
significance. This book, in which Freud has taken a large part, is
exceptional in another respect. Not only the work but the view of it
here (though not the commentary) is his own. Seen through his
eyes, the pictures show aspects that are unexpected. In his
comparisons, cutting sometimes a little across the order in which
they may have been painted, they connect in ways that one had not
foreseen. Seen in his context they show more of ... something or
other, which one had not noticed, more of a character that is
peculiarly his. They not only complement each other; they reveal
more of the unpredicted discords that are an elusive element in
them. Led by the painter, one is aware at page after page of a
residual shock from which familiarity does not shield one. One
would not wish that it should. One rather, and shamelessly, prizes
the frisson, without particular sentiment for whomever, in what
unsparing involvement, inspired it. Familiarity does not shield but
sharpens, engaging one more deeply in a relationship that is
addictive.
"With modern art in particular one is always considering, or should
be if one is not, the shades of indispensability that attach to the
surprise. The way that Lucian Freud's world presents itself to him
and to us has been inseparable from a chill of incongruity that
preserves its particularity, its otherness, as if a coldness in the
figurative substance made the visual contact electric and
compelling.
"There is always something more or less unexpected in the
unfolding of an original artist's work; because few of such people
exist at one time we remain unaccustomed to the fact. One is never
prepared for the edgy, restless mobility that continually implies
something more and different until the artist's last picture has been
painted. As I write Freud has just passed his fifty ninth birthday; this
concluding and conclusive evidence is a long way off. The latest
picture on his easel is as full as any of the peculiar personal
momentum that one has known from the beginning, but in every
other respect so different that I find myself understanding afresh
and differently a condition of private liveliness that was already
apparent when I became aware of him more than forty years ago.
Apparent and slightly irksome; I was inclined to resent it, and was
lately concerned to find that Freud regarded this evidently
unconcealed inclination of mine as a positive qualification for writing
about him. I first knew this quality of liveliness, for which I should
prefer a word that did not suggest animation or wholesomeness,
when I think as much of a coiled vigilance and a sharpness in which
one could imagine venom (my critical equipment was primitive and
my sympathies limited) knew it as a quality of drawing, one that was
intrinsic to line and indeed to edges. Freud's view of a subject was
marked from the first by a serpentine litheness in the ready, rapid
way in which an object was confronted, the object of intellectual
curiosity or sociable advantage or desire it was apt then to be all of
them at once. A personal flavour that was unlike any one had
known was communicating itself to art; it still does. Going to look at
the heads in the new picture, I become aware that this uncommon
condition is now a condition of the paint, of the material itself and
the incomparable alertness with which it is moulded to the
experience of people. In the paint itself, through its receptive
granulation and equally through its miraculous lack of anything like
the approximating mellowness that one had thought endemic to
malerisch figuration, one feels the quality of sharpened perception
and pointed response that makes one think of the lowered muzzle
of some hunting creature, and think with involuntary admiration,
unless it is apprehension.
"One may recognize the latest work and the earliest, as well as the
successive styles between, as one man's uses for art. That is not to
account for them. Painting offers itself unaccounted for,
uninterpreted, unexcused. Freud's rather few remarks about art in
general set store by the defiantly inexplicable spell that the image
arts achieve at their peak. The viable, surefooted, impenetrability of
his persona is intended. Again, one is now unaccustomed to a
daemon like this in the polite community of the visual arts, but in the
past art was full of such people. This is how the young men of the
Renaissance must have been, with their eyes on anatomy and the
main chance, on the street corners at evening when the botteghe
came out and the virgins were hurried indoors. I have been able to
confirm rather few even of the relevant details of Lucian Freud's
childhood and how he came to painting. There is no evidence for
most of the circumstances, least of all the highly coloured ones, that
have been described. These myths were not Lucian's myths."
Biography: Lucian Freud
"Painting:Self-Portrait: Reflection" by Lucian Freud.
"I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having
a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want
it to work for me just as flesh does."
Lucian Freud: Grandson of Sigmund:
Lucian Freud is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis. Born in
Berlin on 8 December 1922, he moved to Britain in 1933 with his parents after Hitler came
to power in Germany. His father, Ernst, was an architect; his mother the daughter of a
grain merchant. Freud became a British national in 1939. He started working as a full-time
artist after being invalied out of the merchant navy in 1942, having served only three
months.
Today his impasto portraits and nudes make many regard him as the greatest figurative
painter of our time. Freud prefers to not use professional models, to rather have friends
and acquaintances pose for him, someone who really wants to be there rather than
someone he's paying. "I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there
in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness."
In 1938/39 Freud studied at the Central School of Arts in London; from 1939 to 1942 at
the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Debham run by Cedric Morris; in
1942/43 at Goldsmiths' College, London (part-time). In 1946/47 he painted in Paris and
Greece. Freud had work published in Horizon magazine in 1939 and 1943. In 1944 his
paintings were hung at the Lefevre Gallery.
In 1951 his Interior in Paddington (held at the Walker Art Gallery, in Liverpool) won an
Arts Council prize at the Festival of Britain. Between 1949 and 1954 he was a visiting tutor
at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
In 1948 he married Kitty Garman, daughter of the British sculptor Jacob Epstein. In 1952
he married Caroline Blackwood. Freud had a studio in Paddington, London, for 30 years
before moving to one in Holland Park. His first retrospective exhibition, organised by the
Arts Council of Great Britain, was held in 1974 at the Hayward Gallery in London. The one
at the Tate Gallery in 2002 was a sell-out.
"The painting is always done very much with [the model's] co-operation. The problem with
painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of
someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the
whole naked body."
According to critic Robert Hughes, Freud's "basic pigment for flesh is Cremnitz white, an
inordinately heavy pigment which contains twice as much lead oxide as flake white and
much less oil medium that other whites."
"I don't want any colour to be noticeable... I don't want it to operate in the modernist
sense as colour, something independent... Full, saturated colours have an emotional
significance I want to avoid."
Lucian Freud. (British, born Germany,
1922)
British painter and draughtsman. He was the son of the architect Ernst Freud (1892–1970) and
the grandson of sigmund Freud. His family moved to England in 1932, and in 1939 he became a
naturalized British subject and enrolled at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing,
Dedham, run by Cedric Morris. Apart from a year in Paris and Greece, Freud spent most of the
rest of his career in Paddington, London, an inner-city area whose seediness is reflected in
Freud’s often sombre and moody interiors and cityscapes. In the 1940s he was principally
interested in drawing, especially the face, as in Naval Gunner (1941; priv. col., see Gowing, pl.
22), and occasionally using a distorted style reminiscent of George Grosz, as in Page from a
Sketchbook (1941; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 17). He began to turn his attention to painting,
however, and experimented with Surrealism, producing such images as the Painter’s Room
(1943; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 26), which features an incongruous arrangement of objects,
including a stuffed zebra’s head, a battered chaise longue and a house plant, all of which
survived his Surrealist phase and appeared separately in later paintings. He was also loosely
associated with Neo-Romanticism, and the intense, bulbous eyes that characterize his early
portraits show affinities with the work of other artists associated with the movement, such as
John Minton, whose portrait he painted in 1952 (London, Royal Coll. A.). He established his own
artistic identity, however, in meticulously executed realist works, imbued with a pervasive mood
of alienation. He was dubbed by Herbert Read ‘the Ingres of existentialism’ (Contemporary
British Art, Harmondsworth, 1951, rev. 1964, p. 35) because of such images as those of his first
wife, Kitty (the daughter of Jacob Epstein), nervously clutching a rose in Girl with Roses (1947–
8; London, Brit. Council).
Two important paintings of 1951 established the themes and preoccupations that dominated the
rest of Freud’s career: Interior in Paddington (Liverpool, Walker A.G.) and Girl with a White Dog
(London, Tate). In the former an archetypal ‘angry young man’ figure (the sitter was
photographer Harry Diamond who would pose again for Freud), in dishevelled raincoat, cigarette
in one hand, the other fist clenched, is placed in claustrophobic proximity to a meticulously
executed man-sized potted plant in an anonymous interior space. Girl with a White Dog is a
virtuoso handling of fabrics and textures, juxtaposing the smooth hairs of the bulldog, the wool
of the sitter’s dressing-gown and the silk bedspread on which she sits, but of more enduring
interest is the expressive, staged quality of the composition, the way the model supports an
exposed breast on her wrist and stares resolutely beyond her canine companion. Both paintings
demonstrate an eagerness to establish a highly charged situation, in which the artist is free to
explore formal and optical problems rather than expressive or interpretative ones. Later poses
of comparable theatricality include Naked Man with Rat (1977; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 175)
and Naked Girl with Egg (1980–81; London, Brit. Council).
By the late 1950s Freud had lost interest in achieving a meticulous sheen on the surface of his
pictures: brushmarks became spatial as he began to describe the face and body in terms of
shape and structure, for example in Pregnant Girl (1960–61; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 90), and
often in female nudes the brushstrokes help to suggest shape. By the time of the tautly
modelled Reflection (Self-portrait) (562×512 mm, 1985; priv. col., see 1987 exh. cat., pl. 82),
attention to tonal detail had become so acute, however, that paint was built up in
concentrations devoid of any compositional function. Throughout his career Freud’s palette
remained distinctly muted.
A close relationship with sitters was often important for Freud. His mother sat for an extensive
series in the early 1970s after she was widowed, and his daughters Bella and Esther modelled
nude, together and individually. Such artists as Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon, and such
patrons as Lord Goodman and Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, sat for portraits. The performance
artist Leigh Bowery posed for an extensive series of nude pictures in the early 1990s. Although
the human form dominated his output, Freud also executed cityscapes, viewed from his studio
window, and obsessively detailed nature studies, such as Two Plants (1977–80; London, Tate).
The 1980s and early 1990s were marked by increasingly ambitious compositions in terms of
both scale and complexity, such as the Large Interior, W11 (After Watteau) (1.86×1.98 m,
1981–3; priv. col., see 1991 exh. cat., p. 64), which involves five sitters, including family
members and his then mistress, the artist Celia Paul (b 1959), arranged in homage to Watteau’s
Pierrot Content (1712; Lugano, Col. Thyssen-Bornemisza).
David Cohen
From Grove Art Online
© 2007 Oxford University Press