Les Artistes

LUCIAN FREUD

Freud was born in Berlin in December 1922, and came to England with his family in 1933. He studied briefly at the Central School of Art in London and, to more effect, at Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. Following this, he served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941. His first solo exhibition, in 1944 at the Lefevre Gallery, featured the now celebrated The Painter’s Room 1944. In the summer of 1946, he went to Paris before going on to Greece for several months. Since then he has lived and worked in London.

Freud’s subjects are often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. As he has said:

The subject matter is autobiographical, it’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really.

‘I paint people’, Freud has said, ‘not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be’.

Until the mid 1950’s, Freud worked in a tightly focussed style, which he had begun to use at the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, run by Cedric Morris. The school was very informal; as Freud said, there was

No teaching much but there were models and you could work in your own room.

In many ways he worked by trial and error. As he said later:

Learning to paint is literally learning to use paint.

Girl with a White Dog 1950-1

Interior in Paddington 1951

John Minton 1952

Around 1956 Freud exchanged his finely pointed sable brushes for stiffer hogshair and began to loosen his style, gradually amplifying his touch. Woman Smiling 1959 marked a transformation in his painting style and can be seen as a landmark work.

Woman Smiling 1959

Also in the late 1950s Freud, who had until then always painted sitting down, began to work standing up. This injected his work with a more athletic, energetic feel. His new approach received a mixed response from critics, some of whom used words like ‘shocking’, ‘violent’ and ‘affected’, but after a transitional phase in the 1960’s Freud soon settled into a consistent style. In the mid-1970s, he began using the heavy, granular pigment called cremnitz white, which he has since then reserved for the painting of flesh.

Pregnant Girl 1960-1

Naked Girl Asleep II 1968

Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) 1981-3

As a painter, Freud works extremely slowly and deliberately, wiping his brush on a cloth after every stroke. Great piles of these rags lie on the floor of his studio, and have featured in several of his paintings from late 1980s onwards, such as Lying by the Rags 1989-90.

Nude With Leg Up (Leigh Bowery)

Often Freud will take several months to complete a painting, and it is not unusual for works to be scrapped in the early stages. He usually has two or three paintings on the go at once, and will work on them in shifts of two or three sessions a day. His working day often starts early in the morning in his top-lit Holland Park studio, and ends in his night studio where he works under artificial light.

Lord Goodman in his Yellow Pyjamas 1987

Benefits Supervisor Resting 1994

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