Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud OM CH[1] (/frɔɪd/; 8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011) was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.
Lucian Freud
20 July 2011 (aged 88)
- Cedric Morris (1940)
- Portrait of Kitty (1948–49)
- Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995)
- Ernst L. Freud (father)
His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism.[2] Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.[3]
Early life and family[edit]
Born in Berlin on 8 December 1922 (the city was then part of the Weimar Republic), Freud was the son of a German Jewish mother, Lucie (née Brasch), and an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect who was the fourth child of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.[4] Lucian, the second of their three boys, was the elder brother of the broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud.
The family emigrated to St John's Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. Lucian became a British subject in 1939,[4][5] having attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School,[6][7] for a year before being expelled owing to disruptive behaviour.[8]
Early career[edit]
Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 to 1942 with greater success at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 to Benton End, a house near Hadleigh, Suffolk. He also attended Goldsmiths' College, part of the University of London, in 1942–43. He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of the service in 1942. As a result of his poor physical condition he was able, unlike his two brothers, to avoid conscription.[9]
In 1943, the poet and editor Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu commissioned the young artist to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled The Glass Tower. It was published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in The Painter's Room on display at Freud's first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Greece for several months to visit John Craxton.[10] In the early fifties he was a frequent visitor to Dublin where he would share Patrick Swift's studio.[11] He remained a Londoner for the rest of his life.
Freud was one of a number of figurative artists who were later characterised by artist R. B. Kitaj as a group named the "School of London".[12][13] This group was a loose collection of individual artists who knew each other, some intimately, and were working in London at the same time in the figurative style. The group was active contemporaneously with the boom years of abstract painting and in contrast to abstract expressionism. Major figures in the group included Freud, Kitaj, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, and Reginald Gray. Freud was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949 to 1954.
Art market[edit]
In 2008 Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), a portrait of civil servant Sue Tilley, sold for $33.6 million – the highest price ever at the time for a work by a living artist. At a Christie's New York auction in 2015, Benefits Supervisor Resting sold for $56.2 million.[46][47]
On 13 October 2011, his 1952 Boy's Head, a small portrait of Charlie Lumley, his neighbour, reached $4,998,088 at Sotheby's London contemporary art evening auction, making it one of the highlights of the 2011 auction autumn season.[48]
On 10 November 2015 Freud's 2004 painting The Brigadier, a portrait of Andrew Parker Bowles in his British Army uniform, sold for $34.89 million US at Christie's in New York City, beating the $30 million US presale estimate for the work.[49]
Personal life[edit]
In the 1940s Freud and fellow artists Adrian Ryan and John Minton were in a homosexual love triangle.[50] After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry, in 1948, her niece Kitty Garman, the illegitimate daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman.[51][52] They had two daughters, Annabel Freud and the poet Annie Freud, before their marriage ended in 1952.[53] Kitty Freud, later known as Kitty Godley (after her marriage in 1955 to economist Wynne Godley), died in 2011.[54]
In late 1952, Freud eloped with Guinness heiress and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood to Paris, where they married in 1953; they divorced in 1959.[53] During the late 1970s and 80s, Freud was also famously in a relationship with fellow painter Celia Paul.[55]
Freud acknowledged fourteen of his children, two from Freud's first marriage and 12 by various mistresses.[56] Writer Esther Freud and fashion designer Bella Freud are his daughters by Bernadine Coverley.
Freud was noted for his aversion to being photographed; he once kicked a photographer on his departure from a private dinner.[57]