Lucien Freud

b. 1922

The British painter Lucian Freud is celebrated for his provocative portraits and nudes, which combine his interest in anatomy with an attention to the psychology of his sitters. His studies of the human body are frank and dramatic, seemingly implying intimate narratives of private, secret moments of life. Focusing on detailed and often unflattering nudes (known as his ‘Naked Portraits’) from the 1960s onward, Freud’s insightful art became increasingly methodical and analytical. The artist’s own likeness was the subject of his famed series of self‐portraits, which he produced until his death in 2011.

Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, celebrated for his provocative portraits and nudes. Hailed by some critics as the last great figurative artist, Freud combined his interest in anatomy with an attention to the psychology of his sitters. Over a 60‐year‐long career he completed hundreds of portraits of friends and family, immediately recognisable for their sombre palette, angular anatomies and thick impasto.

Born in Berlin in 1922, Freud and his family immigrated to England in 1933 to escape the oppressive Nazi regime. After honing his artistic skills at the Central School of Art in London and the School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, he became a full‐time painter. An important step for his career was his trip to Paris in 1946, where he befriended Picasso and Giacometti. Soon, Freud decided to dedicate his art solely to realistic renditions of the human body, combined with an evocative, intense psychological element. His attention to his sitters’ emotions recalls the psychoanalytical explorations of his grandfather, Sigmund Freud.

Freud’s artistic output contributed to the development of the so‐called School of London, a group of artists who embraced figurative realism in opposition to contemporary avant‐garde movements. While stylistically traditional, Freud’s works reveal an underlying passionate, even obsessive, practice. His studies of the human body are at the same time frank and dramatic, seemingly implying ulterior narratives of private moments of life. Experimenting with unique tools and techniques (such as stiff hog‐ hair brushes and his habit of standing while working), Freud almost always painted from life. His models recounted that his slow and meticulous process meant he would spend a very long time on each subject and that he even demanded their presence when painting backgrounds.

His practice matured in the 1960s when his detailed and often unflattering nudes (known as his ‘naked portraits’) joined with multiple painterly layers on the canvas, now covered in heavy brushstrokes. Freud’s own likeness became the subject of his famed series of self‐portraits, which continued until the end of his career.

Freud’s sitters are often shown against dark backgrounds, their bodies becoming anatomical territories to be explored. He translated forms onto canvas through crude confrontations of nude flesh, represented in keen detail but with a sort of detached indifference. Through a limited range of greys and browns, Freud refused to idealise the body in pursuit of deeper, more intimate meanings, thus disavowing the traditions of western portraiture. His avoidance of idealisation is most striking in his later paintings of ‘extreme’ body types, such as the elderly and the obese, that increasingly fascinated him.

In the late 1980s Freud’s art was brought to an international level. Critics began to celebrate the raw honesty of his paintings, which is suggestive of the sitters’ innermost thoughts. Since then, his works have been displayed in solo exhibitions and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Freud died in 2011, leaving behind a vast legacy of uniquely challenging artworks. While Freud’s style continuously evolved throughout his career, his subject was always the translation of his own perceptions onto canvas. His paintings are loaded with his intellectual acuity, analytical painterly methods and attentiveness to human forms. Freud’s portraits are not only honest representations of naked bodies but also investigations of profound psychological complexities.

ETCHED PORTRAITS

Lucien Freud

Although best known as a painter, etching was an integral part of Lucian Freud’s practice and work in portraiture. He first experimented with etching techniques in 1946, while on a trip to Paris. Like the creation of his paintings, meticulously detailed and painstakingly produced, that of his etched portraits was equally lengthy and complex.

Working with live models, copper plates set on easels and homemade acid baths, many of the six prints he produced between ’46 and ’49 are close-ups of his first wife, Kitty Garman. Despite the spontaneous appearance of these images, their production entailed a long process that often required many modelling sessions. It is perhaps for this reason that Freud abandoned the medium until 1982, when he returned to etching with expressionistic portraits composed of fine lines that capture various physical and emotional states.

Freud’s etched compositions became progressively larger and more complex over the decades. In prints such as ‘Esther’ (1991) or ‘Portrait Head’ (2005), figures are dramatically cropped and juxtaposed against empty backgrounds made of crosshatched lines. In his etchings, as in his paintings, Freud achieved a unique level of psychological insight. His impassive investigations into skin and flesh avoid eroticism, highlighting emotional narratives rather than idealising his subjects.

Perhaps inspired by his gambling habit, Freud saw in the process of etching an element of chance and uncertainty that he could not find in other media. Translating designs onto copper plates and subsequently onto paper allows for unforeseen variations, such as unintentional marks or signs of modifications to initial designs. Such fortuitous qualities echoed, for Freud, the inherent imperfections of his subjects which he endeavoured to uncover throughout his practice.

SELF-PORTRAIT

Lucien Freud

Lucian Freud was an exceptionally private person, known for shielding his face in photographs and adamant about hiding his artistic inspirations. Yet, he is nonetheless heralded for his captivating, at times mischievous, self-portraits, produced from age 17 until his 80s.

Freud started with drawn self-portraits before expanding into painting and etching. Infamous for the gruelling sessions he subjected his models to, Freud claimed that ‘after putting so many other people through it, I ought to subject myself to the same treatment’.

These self-portraits are not products of introspection, despite much belief that they are imbued with the influence of his grandfather, Sigmund Freud. Instead, they experimentations with artmaking and the strange process of observing oneself. ‘With self-portraits “likeness” becomes a different thing, because in ordinary portraits you try to paint the person in front of you, whereas in self-portraits you’ve got to paint yourself as another person’.

Freud produced self-portraits to mark life events such as important birthdays, effectively capturing the passage of time. This is notable in his later portraits in which his aging is noticeable, but the works are nonetheless unsentimental.

Freud produced his self-portraits using mirrors, which he left around his studio hoping to discover unexpected angles. Mirrors helped him capture natural light and revealed ‘the aura given out by a person or object’ which he believed to be ‘as much a part of them as their flesh’.

Freud referenced reflection often by playfully sneaking his portraits into corners, reflections or backgrounds of unfinished works. These subtle self-portraits are distinctly elusive, offering unexpected glimpses of this private artist.

A self-critic, Freud destroyed more self-portraits than he preserved, ascribing an increased importance to those that exist today. Self-portraiture was a crucial tool for developing his artistic skill, rendering the existing portraits as notable traces of Freud’s artistic development.

STILL LIFE

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud made his name as one of the great portraitists, producing intimate and exposing studies of his sitters. The techniques and skills used to produce these formidable works has much to owe to his still lifes. Across roughly 100 paintings, drawings and etchings, Freud’s still lifes of mostly fruit and plants are deeply close, somewhat clinical, studies of his subjects.

Freud examined fruit as exercises in close study. Speaking of the process of producing these works, Freud stated ‘I felt that the only way I could work properly was using maximum observation and maximum concentration. I thought that by staring at my subject matter and by examining it closely I could get something from it’.

This intense, almost scientific, study of his subjects recalls the practically photorealistic works of the Dutch masters, however, Freud’s still lifes differ greatly from his predecessors. His subjects were not idealised, nor were they picture perfect subjects; Freud chose rotting fruit and greenery that inhabited his life, including weeds and straggly potted plants. The zinmerlinde, a bushy, large-leaf plant which Freud’s grandfather, Sigmund Freud, brought with him on his move to England, is his most reoccurring subject.

Freud referred to his plant works as ‘lots of portraits of little leaves’, produced by a painstaking process: ‘I felt like I was composing an enormous symphony, and since I’m completely unmusical, the difficulties were many. And when I took one tiny leaf and changed it, it affected all other areas of it, and so on’.

Freud’s still lifes, be they autonomous or existing within his portraits, constitute a piercing scrutiny. Divorced from idealisation and the notion of the perfect subject, Freud‘s still lifes are exceptional contributions to art history, worthy of the same status as his monumental portraits.

ANIMALS

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud, a German émigré, was considered to nonetheless be British in nature, most notably due to his love and fascination for animals. Animals, both dead and alive, were important features of Freud’s work, subjects that were additional sites for his exploration.

From early on, Freud studied animals in the London Zoo, however, he predominantly worked from taxidermy and cadavers. He sourced dead animals from across London, including birds, monkeys and zebra heads, which became subjects of his investigative sketches and paintings.

Through his studies and depictions of animals, Freud honed his skills as a portraitist. This is particularly true of works like ‘Still Life with Squid and Sea Urchin’ (1949), the white, fleshy surface of the dead squid an apt subject for refining his skill in rendering human flesh.

Perhaps his most notable animal subjects were his dogs, first Pluto and later Eli. Since he first adopted Pluto in 1988 and until his death in the early 2000s, Freud’s beloved whippet was a reoccurring subject. Pluto and Eli appeared particularly in etchings, both in their own individual portraits as well as alongside human sitters.

Freud asserted that dogs were not sentimental subjects but important living beings. Nonetheless, one cannot help but notice the difference between his dog portraits and those of humans. Freud’s dogs are not exposing, they do not exude a sense of unprecedented intimacy. Instead, they are tender and affectionate.

Portraiture, in all forms, was Freud’s greatest preoccupation, the skills of which can be seen and their development tracked in his animal works. ‘I’m really interested in people as animals. Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason. Because I can see more…I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals’.

NAKED PORTRIATS

Lucian Freud

Across his subjects, Lucian Freud argued for a truthfulness that is ‘revealing and intrusive, rather than rhyming and soothing’. This aesthetic is no better employed than in his ‘Naked Portraits’, paintings and prints that obsessively and honestly capture human flesh.

In 1966, Freud produced his first ‘Naked Portrait’, works he refused to refer to as nudes with the belief that the term implied an object, not a person. Portraiture had existed as a fundamental practice from the beginning of his career, however, his portraits largely focused on the sitter from the neck up. Effectively, Freud referred to his ‘Naked Portraits’ as portraits of a whole person.

Freud produced penetratingly honest, distinctly intimate but notably respectful portraits of his sitters. Each work portrays not the skin of his sitters but their flesh, which truthfully falls, twists and folds. Freud exhibited these skills particularly remarkably in the works produced in the final two decades of his life for which he used sitters with varying amounts of flesh.

Critics attribute his ability to produce such revealing portraits to the uniquely long time he spent on each work. For several months, each day the same sitter would sit for hours as Freud painstakingly studied and rendered their bodies.

Freud’s ‘Naked Portraits’ exude an unprecedented form of realism, both in depiction and range of body type, eviscerating notions of idealisation. They are sites of some of Freud’s most skilful work, yet, he nonetheless speaks of their production as a partnership: ‘Not everyone wants to be that honest about themselves, that means I feel an obligation to be equally honest in how I represent them. It is a matter of responsibility, in a way I don’t want the painting to come from me, I want it to come from them’.