Lucian Freud was a British painter, born in Berlin in 1922 and dead in London in 2011, and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. He is known for thick, unflattering portraits and nudes that took months of sittings, among them Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which sold in 2008 for 33.6 million dollars, then a record for a living artist.
The surname gets people through the door. What Freud did once he had them there took seventy years and a great deal of other people's time.
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Freud always refused to be read through his grandfather. In interviews he dismissed psychoanalysis and denied that it had anything to do with his art, although he got along well with Sigmund as a boy and sometimes wore the old man's coat in London.
Yet his method looked like a treatment. Sitters came for hours at a time, for weeks, for months, sometimes for years. The painter David Hockney gave him about 120 hours, always in the morning. Critics have compared the intensity of those sessions to psychoanalytic practice, and Freud never accepted the comparison.
Then the roles were reversed. When Hockney sat down to paint Freud in return, according to Sotheby's, Freud came to only two sittings and fell asleep at both. The man who demanded a hundred hours from others gave back almost none.
What You'll Discover
How close he really was to his grandfather.
What he changed in his brushes.
What vanished from a Berlin museum.
Who he owed, and how he paid.
What he asked of his sitters.
How big he made the Queen.