Lucian Freud(1922 — 2011)
Lucian Freud
Royaume-Uni, Allemagne
5 min read
British painter and printmaker of German origin, grandson of Sigmund Freud. A major figure of 20th-century figurative painting, he is famous for his portraits and fleshy nudes of stark realism.
Frequently asked questions
Famous Quotes
« I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.»
Key Facts
- Born in 1922 in Berlin, he emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1933 with his family to flee Nazism.
- Grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
- A central figure of the “School of London” alongside Francis Bacon, with whom he was close.
- In 2001 he painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
- Died in 2011 in London; his painting “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” broke sale records for a work by a living artist in 2008.
Works & Achievements
Portrait of his first wife, Kitty Garman, in a style still smooth and precise. An iconic work from his early manner.
A double portrait showing the artist standing and his second wife lying in bed, marking the shift to a denser, more tormented brushwork.
An unflinching self-portrait in which Freud scrutinizes his own aging face with the same rawness he applied to his sitters.
A monumental nude of Sue Tilley, a welfare officer, which in 2008 became the most expensive work ever sold at auction by a living artist.
A small, controversial official portrait of the monarch, unusually candid for a royal likeness.
A full-length nude self-portrait, brutally honest, in which Freud depicts himself palette and knife in hand.
Anecdotes
Lucian Freud was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the famous founder of psychoanalysis. His Jewish family fled Nazi Germany in 1933, when Lucian was ten years old, to settle in London, where he would become one of the greatest British painters.
Freud painted with extreme slowness: his models had to pose for hundreds of hours, sometimes for more than a year for a single painting. He worked standing up, scrutinizing every centimeter of skin, and demanded a real physical presence, refusing to paint from photographs.
In 2008, his painting *Benefits Supervisor Sleeping*, depicting a nude, sleeping social services worker, sold at auction for more than 33 million dollars, a record at the time for a work by a living artist.
In 2001, Freud created an official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. The small-format work, with its careworn face, sparked heated controversy in the British press because it broke so sharply with traditional flattering royal portraits.
Freud had a passion for horses and racing, and he sometimes lost large sums of money gambling. As a young man, he even worked in a stable, and animals often appear in his paintings, rendered with the same intensity as humans.
Primary Sources
“I want paint to work as flesh.” This was how Freud expressed his ambition to make the painted material the equivalent of the human body he was depicting.
Freud stated that he worked only from people he knew well, refusing anonymous professional models, because he sought to paint a particular presence and life.
The press hotly debated the royal portrait painted by Freud, deemed unusually candid, showing the sovereign’s face without any conventional flattery.
Key Places
Lucian Freud's birthplace, where he spent his early childhood in a cultured Jewish family before going into exile.
His adopted city, where Freud lived, painted, and worked for most of his life, and where he died in 2011.
The neighbourhood where Freud's studio was located, in which he painted many of his most famous portraits and nudes.
The art school run by Cedric Morris where the young Freud received a formative training in the 1930s and 1940s.
Where Freud represented Great Britain in 1954, an important milestone in his international recognition.
