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Lucian Freud, in full Lucian
Michael Freud, (born December 8, 1922, Berlin, Germany—died July
20, 2011, London, England), British artist known for his work in
portraiture and the nude. Sometimes called a realist, he painted
in a highly individual style, which in his later years was
characterized by impasto.
The son of the architect Ernst Freud and a grandson of Sigmund
Freud, he immigrated with his family to England in 1933,
becoming a naturalized citizen in 1939. He was trained at the
Central School of Art in London, where he was as much known for
his unconventional behaviour as for his drawing talent, and at
the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. Freud
turned to painting full-time after World War II.
His Interior at Paddington (1951) exhibits many of his lifelong
concerns—the human figure rendered in a realist manner and
imbued with a stark and evocative psychological intensity.
Freud’s many portraits of his friends and associates and of
members of the British gentry extended a grand English
tradition. His series of paintings and drawings of his mother,
begun in 1970 and continuing until the day after her death in
1989, are particularly frank and dramatic studies of intimate
life passages.
Freud’s many studies of the nude make up a major part of his
work. For 50 years he posed friends, neighbours, models, and
family members in his studio, often as if strewn casually across
dilapidated furniture, and confronted their nude flesh with both
keen interest and a kind of clinical impassiveness. In this work
he typically used a limited tonal range of creamy tans and
browns. In studies such as Night Portrait (1985–86), Freud both
highlighted and undercut the erotics of the female nude, opting
out of the idealizing tendencies of much of the history of
Western art. Beginning in the 1980s, Freud was increasingly
drawn toward what could be called extreme body types. His work
maintained the place of traditional subject matter in art while
introducing personal and psychological attitudes that are fully
modern.
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