Lucian Freud
Portrait painter of flesh and presence.
Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, painted nudes and portraits with thick paint and an unsparing eye.
Lucian Freud was born in 1922 in Berlin. His grandfather was Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and his father was an architect. The family was Jewish and moved to London in 1933, when the Nazis came to power. Lucian studied at, among other places, an art school in East Anglia run by the painter Cedric Morris, and served briefly in the merchant navy during the war.
His early paintings are small, highly detailed and almost unreally sharp, with large eyes and carefully drawn strands of hair. Girl with a Kitten of 1947, a portrait of his first wife Kitty Garman, is in the Tate in London. In the 1950s he switched to coarser brushes and began painting standing up. The paint grew thicker and the skin took on a heavy, fleshy quality.
Freud painted almost nothing but people, usually people he knew well. They sat or lay for him for hundreds of hours, often naked, and he depicted the body without flattering it. Well-known sitters include the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the benefits supervisor Sue Tilley, whose portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping of 1995 sold in 2008 for a record price for a living artist. In 2001 he painted a small and much-debated portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
His private life was chaotic and much talked about. He was married twice and fathered a large number of children with several women. He was a close friend of Francis Bacon for many years, and they painted portraits of each other. His 1952 portrait of Bacon was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin in 1988 and has never been recovered.
Freud worked intensively until his death in London in 2011. He is regarded as one of the foremost figurative painters of the post-war era and as the artist who, more than any other, held on to the naked human body as a subject at a time when abstraction and conceptual art dominated.