Lucian Freud

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Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud.
Born 8 December 1922 (1922-12-08) (age 85)
Berlin, Germany
Nationality British1 German2 Austrian3
Field painting
Training Central School of Art, London, East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, 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]

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[edit] 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 U.K. 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.

[edit] Early career

The Painter's Room, 1943, private collection.
The Painter's Room, 1943, 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. Thereafter, he served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942. Freud's first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, featured the now celebrated The Painter's Room. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Italy 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 quite thin paint, but from the 1950s he began to paint portraits, often nudes, to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, and began to use 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 just depict the sitter, sometimes sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed, but sometimes the sitter is 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.
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 a number of 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.

[edit] 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, but the marriage ended after four years 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 Cezanne, 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.
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. [4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Freud work sets new world record", BBC News Online, 14 May 2008. Retrieved on 2008-05-14. 
  2. ^ Button, Virginia. "The Turner Prize: Twenty Years". Tate Online, 2003. Retrieved on March 28, 2007.
  3. ^ "Freud royal portrait divides critics" BBC News (December 21, 2001). Retrieved on February 26, 2008.
  4. ^ Robert Ayers (December 18, 2007), Curator’s Voice: Starr Figura on Lucian Freud’s Etchings, ARTINFO, <http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/26397/curators-voice-starr-figura-on-lucian-freuds-etchings/>. Retrieved on 23 April 2008 

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

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