Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis. Born in Berlin on 8 December 1922, he moved to Britain in 1933 with his parents after Hitler came to power in Germany. His father, Ernst, was an architect; his mother the daughter of a grain merchant. Freud became a British national in 1939. He started working as a full-time artist after being invalied out of the merchant navy in 1942, having served only three months.

Moving from different prep schools to different art schools,Freud, the self-proclaimed bad boy, learned early on to ride on the coattails of his own talent and lineage. By 1939, after successfully publishing several of his drawings in the progressive magazine Horizon, the 17-year-old Freud was socializing within important British homosexual cliques. These gay peers, includingStephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, and Peter Watson, were the driving forces behind the avant-garde of war-tornLondon, and Freud began to profess the importance of homosexuality and counter-culturalism in all artistic pursuits. After literally burning his art school to the ground, joining the merchant navy, losing his naval license, getting re-accepted at school, and entertaining the artistic élite with surrealist still life paintings and other adolescent wonders, the natural painter’s youthful exploration of art culminated in the exquisite Dead Heron of 1945.

With the war over and troubled adolescent years behind him,Freud began his relentless pursuit of the elusive, faithful portrait. He began this pursuit by painting his first wife Kitty(married in 1948) again and again. After his divorce, he continued this search by repeatedly painting his second wife Caroline (married in 1952) and a wide group of painters and friends. The results were always uncomfortable, disconcerting, and suggestive of the existential crisis that drove Freud’s work during the early part of his career. Witness the prize-winning picture for the Festival of Britain, entitledInterior, Paddington (1951). As artist and friend Bruce Bernard describes the piece: “Harry [Diamond]’s problematic, if not explicitly threatening, figure is ingeniously and incongruously coupled with one of the most memorable potted plants in the history of art, set in the most solid of plant pots, not quite hallucinatory but enhanced to a disturbing degree. Man and pot are both standing on an unforgettable painted carpet, and only in the view from the window, with the waif on the pavement below, is the curious, still tension — perhaps necessarily — dissipated.” This is Freud at his young best.

Freud works with his subjects on portraits very slowly. Subjects have described the experience of sitting for him as very intense but others have said how he makes them special, that he gives everything to them until the process is over.

Freud quote:

“I paint what I see, not what you want me to see”

Freud never flatters his subjects.

His work is all about truth and not turning away from it.

In 1990 the performance artistLeigh Bowery began to sit forFreud for what would become a series of paintings untilBowery‘s death in 1994.

Likes to keep every strand of his life very seperate, people are place in different compartments.