"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, died London 20 July 2011. Freud 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 invalided 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."
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