Lucian Freud: The Complete Story
Lucian Freud was the British painter of brutally honest nudes and portraits, who built faces and bodies out of thick, loaded paint.
The grandson of Sigmund Freud, he spent his life staring at people until every fold, vein and blemish became the truth of who they were.
He was not interested in flattery. He wanted the body as it actually is, heavy, mortal and specific, and he was willing to spend months on a single portrait to get there.
Born: Berlin, 1922, fled the Nazis to Britain in 1933
Known for: unflinching nude portraits, thick impasto
Died: London, 2011
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The grandson of Sigmund Freud
Lucian was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The family fled Berlin for London when the Nazis rose to power. Where his grandfather probed the mind, Lucian probed the body, reading character in skin rather than dreams.
He started with a fine, tight early style, then loosened into the thick, sculptural paint he is famous for.
Painting the unvarnished body
Freud painted mostly people he knew, family, friends, lovers, often nude, lit by a bare bulb in his cluttered studio. He stacked stiff, dense brushstrokes until the flesh looks almost modeled in clay.
He worked agonizingly slowly, demanding hundreds of hours of sitting. A single portrait could take many months, the sitter returning day after day.
Bowery, Kate Moss and the record nude
Among his great subjects was the performance artist Leigh Bowery, whose huge body Freud painted with awe. His portrait of a large benefits supervisor asleep on a sofa sold in 2008 for a then record price for a living artist.
He also painted a pregnant Kate Moss, and many of his own children, treating the famous and the unknown with the same unsparing eye.
Lucian Freud, common questions
What is Lucian Freud famous for?
Raw, thickly painted nude portraits. See what is portrait painting.
Was he related to Sigmund Freud?
Yes, he was Sigmund Freud's grandson.
Why is the paint so thick?
He built flesh in dense impasto. See what is impasto painting.
Why his honesty still stings
Freud insisted on the body as it really is, in an age of airbrushed images, and made honesty itself feel radical. His portraits are uncomfortable because they refuse to lie.
He was famously private and prolific in his personal life, with a large number of children, several of whom, including the novelist Esther Freud, became artists and writers themselves.