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About PeopleLucian Freud
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Enduring Understanding
Students will understand that artworks do encapsulate the themes of identity and relationships in a variety of
ways
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Essential QuestionsOverarching Questions- What is an identity?- How can relationships within a family or society be shaped?- How artists form identity or relationships
withtheir art?Topical Questions- Is nakedness nudity?- How is an artwork autobiographical?
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Biographical Outline1922: Born in Berlin, Germany.1933: Escaped to UK from Nazism.1938-39:Arrival of grandfather Sigmund Freud in
London and death of Sigmund Freud.1939-42:Studied at Central School of Arts and Craft in
Holborn and East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing.
1942-43:Attended Goldsmiths College, University of London.
1946: Spent two months in Paris.1966: Served at North Atlantic convoy for three
months. 2007: The highest paid living artist for the work
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995.
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When (1922- )
1933-45: The Third Reich (Germany under Hitler).
1939: World War II began.
1856-1939: Sigmund Freud.
1941: Lucian Freud sailed with Merchant Navy convoy for three months.
1945: He met Francis Bacon.
1970: The demise of his father.
1989: The demise of his mother.
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Where
GermanyThe rise of Nazism which is also a form of fascism. It refers to
theideology and practices National Socialists German Workers
Partyunder Adolf Hitler. The Nazis believe themselves as the master race and purged the Jewish by mass killings- also known as the Holocaust
UKThere’s a sudden and renewed interest in figural painting
amongsome artists like Freud and Bacon, despite the trend then was steering away from that.
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WhichFreud is often called the greatest realist painter of the 20th century. While that description holds true, it also separates him from the mainstream of art history during the modern period, when abstraction and other non-objective styles were in ascendance. A contrarian who always went his own way, Freud felt no compunction to respond to movements or trends. For many decades his work was little known outside of a circle of aficionados in Britain. Then, in the 1980s, when a new international development known as New Figuration or Neo-Expressionism signaled a move toward painterly figuration, many in the art world began to pay attention to Freud.
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His Painting- Early Work
The Painter’s Room, 1943-44
Oil on canvas, 62.2 x 76.2 cm
Private Collection
The Painter’s Room 1943-44, with its ripped couch, frazzled yucca and red and yellow zebra’s head reaching in through the window, is a classic Surrealist array of the implausible and the theatrical.
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What
Subject Matter- His Early Works• Horses- they were usually drawings.• Portraits- concentration on the face with
downcast eyes. His early portraits seem to show what’s beyond the face, revealing some inner states of mind. It shows signs of psychological atmosphere.
• Group Portraits- his group portraits do not show relationships between members of the group but separate existence of individuals.
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WhatSubject Matter- His Mature Works• They are classified into two main categories- naked
portraits and portrait heads.• They are usually the people in his life- family members
and friends (people that interest him and people that he cares for). To quote him, “Whom else can I hope to portray with any degree of profundity?” (Smee, 2007).
• The emotional connections with his subject matter directs him to a deep and concentrated involvement. He would paint the same sitters again and again, so he can understand them mentally and physically.
• His models would sit for him for hours and successively on a daily basis.
• He never dictates their poses, nor compose his pictures.
• There are also other subject matter like, animals, plants, and observed in close quarters.
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WhatTheme- His Mature Works• These portraits are often awkward rather than
idealized.• They are reflections of their human nature with
the absence of “theatrical poses” or “symbolical props” or “narrative devices” (Figura, 2008).
• They are concentrated on the faces, with “close-in descriptions of heads, often with downcast eyes” (Smee, 2007).
• The poses of his portraits are never theatrical. • Props are usually stuff that happens to be in his
studio and they are never symbolical.• His portraits are not meant to flatter the sitter or
promote public personae.• Hence, they are not traditional portraits in that
sense.
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WhatTheme- His Naked Works• Freud’s figures are labelled as naked, not
nudes. They are unflattering.• They are grossly frank than erotic, crude than
beguiling. • Their poses- “unusual vantage point, angular
limbs, foreshortened faces and tortured body language” subverts traditional nudes.
• They seem to be projected with an animalistic sexualism, which reminds one of his grandfather’s proposition that man exists to fulfil basic desires, (much like the animals).
• His naked portraits are not in adoration of nudity but rather to emphasize on the rawness of the naked body.
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What - Subversive of Traditional Nudes
Small Naked Portrait, 1973-74Oil on canvas, 22 x 27 cm
Ashmolean Museum
Normally I underplay facial expression when
painting the figure, because I want
expression to emerge through the body. I
used to do only heads, but came to feel that I relied too much on the
face. I want the head, as it
were, to be more like another
limb.
- Lucian Freud -
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His Paintings of Kathleen Garman
Girl with Kitten, 1947-48Oil on canvas, 105 x 74.5
cmBritish Council Collection
Kitty, the daughter of Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman, reappears in Lucian Freud's portraits over the course of five years - clutching a kitten, head under leaves or on the pillow.
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Girl with Leaves, 1948Pastel on gray paper.
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Girl with Roses, 1947-48Oil on canvas, 105 x 74.5
cmBritish Council Collection
From the outset Girl with Roses establishes a scale and ambition that is life-size. She and Freud married in February 1948. Newly pregnant, Kitty sits stiffly, her eyes averted in a dead stare. She clutches a rose, and another lies limp in her lap. A yellow-pink breed, renamed the 'Peace Rose' at the end of the war, it is more than the traditional love token and, like the glimmer of Kitty's teeth, adds a hint of menace.
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Girl with Roses, 1947-48 (explanations)
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Girl with a White Dog, 1950-51 (appeared in 2009 paper)
Oil on canvas, 95.4 x 120 cmTate Gallery, London
This picture shows the artist’s first wife when she was pregnant. The style of the painting has roots in the smooth and linear portraiture of the great nineteenth-century French neoclassical painter, Ingres. This, together with the particular psychological atmosphere of Freud’s early work, led the critic Herbert Read to make his celebrated remark that Freud was ‘the Ingres of Existentialism’.
The sense that Freud gives of human existence as essentially lonely, and spiritually if not physically painful, is something shared by his great contemporaries, Francis Bacon and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti.
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Girl with a White Dog, 1950-51 (explanations)
The sitter was the artist's first wife Kathleen, daughter of Epstein and Kathleen Garman. She appears in many of his early pictures.
Since the end of the Second World War, Lucian Freud has been the practitioner of a consistent realism based on working directly from the model. Yet his paintings also have an intensely personal character, an atmosphere of psychological revelation and force that goes far beyond the simple rendering of the presence of the model. (With Sigmund Freud as his grandfather, this aspect of his talent may not be surprising.) His paintings make statements about human existence, and also, perhaps incidentally, about the nature of painting and the business of being a painter; it is that, as much as any other ingredient, that makes them such extraordinary and compelling art.
Freud's career has so far fallen into two quite distinct parts. Up to about 1958 he worked in the smooth tightly focused manner exemplified in this picture. After that his handling of paint became much freer and the slight stylisations that can be detected in, for example, the treatment of the eyes and mouth of the model in 'Girl with a White Dog' disappear.
This is the last of the series of portraits of his first wife, Kitty, which Freud had begun at the end of the 1940s. It shows Kitty, her wedding ring displayed on her left hand, curled up on a striped mattress on the floor, with a white bull terrier, one of a pair they were given as a wedding present. It is painted in an extraordinarily detailed style which, combined with the emphasis on Kitty’s features, heightens the look of painful loneliness in her face.
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His Paintings
Interior at Paddington, 1952
Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 114.3 cm
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Freud won a prize for this painting, commissioned for the Arts Council’s exhibition Sixty Paintings for 51, as part of the Festival of Britain. The canvas, unusually large for the post war period when canvas was still in short supply, was provided by the Arts Council. The painting itself conveys a sense of the anxiety and want associated with the last years of rationing. A sort of double portrait, it shows Harry Diamond, an East-Ender who at the time was working as a stage-hand, standing by a potted plant. Diamond complained bitterly while posing, but Freud was stimulated by his resentful aggressiveness: ‘He said I made his legs too short: the whole thing was that his legs were too short. He was aggressive as he had a bad time being brought up in the East End and being persecuted.’ The red carpet was bought especially for the painting, from a junk shop, and Freud was particularly proud of the way he painted it. Through the window is the Grand Union Canal and the area of London known at Little Venice. Despite its clear avoidance of the celebratory tones of the Festival of Britain, the painting was one of five awarded a £500 purchase prize.
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His Paintings
Francis Bacon, 1952Oil on metal, 17.8 x 12.7 cmTate Gallery, London
Francis Bacon painted a large full-length portrait of Lucian Freud in 1951, which was exhibited at the Hanover Gallery in December 1951. The two artists have been friends for many years.
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His Paintings
Portrait of John Minton, 1952
Oil on canvas, 40 x 25.4 cm
Collection Royal College of Art
John Minton was a painter and illustrator who taught at the Royal College of Art, where he advocated the tradition of figure painting, although by the early 1950s, when this portrait was painted, his work had become unfashionable. He is probably now best remembered for his illustrations to Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Food. Minton commissioned this portrait from Freud in 1952, after he had seen Freud’s portrait of Francis Bacon. His face seems full of regret, and the painting of his eyes suggests deep unhappiness. Minton committed suicide in 1957; he bequeathed this portrait to the Royal College of Art.
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Hotel Bedroom, 1954Oil on canvas, 91.1 x 61 cmThe Beaverbrook Art Gallery,
Canada
The beginning of changeThis painting show the change of style in Freud’s work during the 1950s. He became impatient with his earlier habit of working sitting down, painting in great detail on fine canvas with small, soft sable brushes. Instead he began working standing up, painting in a looser style with larger, hogshair brushes. Freud said that Hotel Bedroom 1954 was ‘the last painting where I was sitting down; when I stood up I never sat down again’. This double portrait shows Freud, with his second wife, Caroline Blackwood, whom he had married in 1953; the marriage was dissolved in 1957.
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Pregnant Girl, 1960-61Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 71
cmPrivate Collection
This is a study of Bernardine Coverley, pregnant with Bella. The sofa is one of a long line of ageing pieces of furniture which have become a familiar feature of Freud’s work; he has always disliked furniture which looks brand new.
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His Paintings
Reflection with two children (Self-Portrait),
1965Oil on canvas, 91.5 x
91.5 cmMuseo Thyssen-
Bornemisza, Madrid
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His Paintings
Naked Girl, 1966Oil on canvas, 61 x 61 cm
Private Collection
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His Paintings
Buttercups, 1968Oil on canvas,
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His Paintings
Naked Girl Asleep II, 1968Oil on canvas, 55.8 x 55.8 cm
Private Collection
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His Paintings
Large Interior, Paddington, 1968Oil on canvas, 183 x 122 cm
Collection Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
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His Paintings
The Painter’s Mother III, 1972Oil on canvas, 32.4 x 23.5 cm
Private Collection
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His Paintings
Naked Man with Rat, 1977/78
Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 91.5 cm
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
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His Paintings
Esther, 1980Oil on canvas, 48.9 x 38.3 cm
Private Collection
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His Paintings
Night Portrait, 1985-86Oil on linen, 92.7 x 76.2 cm
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund
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His Paintings
Girl with Closed Eyes, 1986-87
Oil on canvas, 45.9 x 58.7 cm
Private Collection
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His Paintings
Living by the Rags, 1989-92Oil on canvas, 138.7 x 184.1 cmAstrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
Norway
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His Paintings
Nude with Leg Up (Leigh Bowery), 1992Oil on linen, 182.9 x 229 cm
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund
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What- Nude with Leg Up• Leigh Bowery was a performance and disguise artist,
fashion designer and bandleader.• He died of AIDS in 1994, at the age of 33.• He sat for Freud since 1990 and the artist finds his
easiness and confidence perfect to capture the essence of his subjects.
• Bowery is lying on the wooden floor with his right leg resting on a green and beige striped mattress which is on a metal bed.
• His right leg is bent at an angle and his body/torso is propped up with a mountain of cloth at his back.
• The body is heavy but calm, while the eyes are directed towards Freud with an expressionless matter-of-fact gaze.
• His wide-opened legs exposes his genitalia with “unpretentious shamelessness”, as if telling the viewer to accept it as part and parcel of nature.
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His Paintings
Naked Man Back View, 1992Oil on linen
Freud and Leigh Bowery at his studio.
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His Painting
Fat Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995 Oil on canvas, 150 x 250 cm
Private Collection
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What- Benefits Supervisor Sleeping
• The model is Sue Tilley, a London Jobcentre supervisor.
• Freud refers her rather affectionately as ‘Big Sue’.• Her size has the capacity to render “amazing
craters” as he calls it.• She is stretched over a shabby-looking sofa. And
her physical presence is imposing.• This painting is a world record
as the most expensive paintingever auctioned by a living artist.
• It costs a whooping $33.64 million.
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His “After”
Large Interior, W11 (After Watteau), 1981-83
Oil on canvas, 186 x 198 cmPrivate Collection
Pierrot Content, 1712Oil on canvas, 35 x 31 cmby Jean-Antoine Watteau
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
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His AftersJean- Antoine Watteau (1684 - 1721)• A French Rococan painter who was recognized as the man
who invented the genre of (fêtes galantes- scenes of country and idyllic charm, suffused with an air of theatricality), of rich aristocrats in the 18th C (app. 1715-70).
• Watteau earns from his private clients but he also wanted the recognition from Académie des Beaux- Arts.
• The academy ranked scenes of everyday lives and portraits (paintings that are desired most by private patrons) lower than those bearing the themes of history and mythology.
• Watteau found his way around this by painting for patrons but placing them in scenes that looked like mythical Arcadia.
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After Watteau
In Mezattin’s Costume, 1720-21Oil on canvas, 28 x 21 cmby Jean-Antoine Watteau
The Wallace Collection, London
The Scale of Love, 1715-18Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 59.7 cm
by Jean-Antoine WatteauNational Gallery, London
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His Drawing- Early Work
Palmtree, 1944Pastel, chalk and ink on paper, 61.5
x 43.5 cmFreud Museum, London
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His Drawing- Mature Work
The Painter’s Mother Dead, 1989Charcoal on paper, 33 x 24.4 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art
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His Etching- Mature Work
Lord Goodman in his Yello Pyjamas, 1987Etching with watercolour on paper, 31 x 40.2 cm
The Whitworth Art Gallery
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His Etching- Mature Work
Large Head, 1993Etching, 79.4 x 63.5 cm
MoMA, New York
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WhyHis BackgroundFreud was the second son of Ernst Freud, an
architect who had practised art with a style that’s aligned with the Vienna Secession.
His grandfather was the legendary Sigmund Freud, who was the founder of pyschoanalysis.
He came from an affluent background, with his home decked with prints from Hokusai and Dürer.
His grandfather brought him artworks on his visits to Berlin for medical treatment.
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WhyHis BackgroundHe admires his grandfather although he
claims to not know much of his grandfather’s work in later years.
Freud began drawing as a child with much pride and was developing ambitions to be an artist.
He was an unruly child at school who were more at ease with animals than with other children. He often slept in the stables with the horses.
He is also a notorious gambler, on horses.
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WhyHis BeliefHe believes that art should be “true to life”.
The result can be horrifying and disturbing. He thought of “truthfulness as revealing and
intrusive, rather than rhyming and soothing.” (Figura, 2008).
He believes that his work is autobiographical- it is about himself, and his surroundings. His relatives (wives and children) and friends (Bacon and Bowery), his studio and his dog (Eli) are subject matter of his works, with the exception of works like Her Majesty, The Queen, 2000-2001.
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Why- His InfluenceSigmund Freud (1856-1939) Sigmund Freud- an Austrian Jew, Lucian’s grandfather. He was a legend in the field of psychology. He’s the father of psychoanalysis- a set of theories
developed on human behaviour which involves investigation methods and treatment.
Some concepts of psychoanalysis cover psychosexual and psychosocial developments, the unconscious, the stages of Id, ego and super-ego, libido and drive.
He believes that neurosis is based in suppressed sexual desires and repressed childhood memories.
And uses hypnosis to read the deep and dark subconscious of the mind.
His book Interpretation of Dreams, 1899 was a great source of inspiration to the Surrealist artists.
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Why- His InfluenceFrancis Bacon (1909- 1992)An Irish-born painter who lived in England.He’s a figural painter with an expressionistic
style.His works reek with death. They were violent,
explosive and risky endeavours. His human figures are reduced to lumps of meat and red bloody flesh.
Bacon was a friend who encouraged Freud to “think more seriously about painting.” (Figura, 2008).
Bacon proposed hog’s hair paintbrushes to Freud and suggested that he should work standing up than sitting down.
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Why- His Influence
Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962by Francis Bacon
Oil with sand on canvas, 198.2 x 144.8 cm
Guggenheim Museum, USA
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How- Etching
• He started etching since 1946 which lasted till 1948. He never etched again until the year 1982.
• His etchings and paintings are closely related which construct his understanding of aesthetics.
• His etchings can occupy him for many months.• They are consistently in black. He has never
even used aquatint for toning in his prints.• He thinks printmaking is like drawing with the
elements of risk and surprise, which is enticing to him.
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How- Drawing and PaintingHis Drawings• His drawings were hard-edged linear in style and
controlled before it became more painterly.
His Paintings• Freud has remained firm to using an old-fashion medium
at a time that witnessed consecutively, counter-realistic movements.
• He works in an extremely slow pace, eg: a painting can take from several months to a year to complete.
• He cleans his paintbrush after each stroke to prevent the colour from bleeding into another. Or he uses different paintbrushes for different colours.
• His paintings were initially immaculately linear and smooth.
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How- Drawing and PaintingHis Paintings• He painted sitting down with sable
brushes.• However, under the recommendation of
Francis Bacon, he started to stand while painting and use hog’s hair brush.
• He begins to use thicker impasto in his paintings from the 1950s onwards.
• His style is more random, more expressive and energetic in manner.
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SummaryOverview of Style
Animalistic realismHis figures are crudely naked
like animals unawareof their nakedness. The skin looks raw
and sallow.
StrokesLinear and controlled in his earlier works.Athletic, energetic
and expressive in his more mature works.
Uses impasto too.
ColourMostly raw umber and
granular pigment called cremnitz white
which is known to yellow because of
linseed oil.
He would often clean his paintbrush after each stroke to prevent the colour from bleeding
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ReferenceFigura, S. (2008). Lucian Freud: The Painter’s
Etchings. The Museum of Modern Art: New York.Smee, S. (2007). Lucian Freud. Taschen: Köln,
Germany.Schjeldahl, P. (2008). Let’s See: Writings on Art from
the New Yorker. Thames and Hudson: London.; Jagger, S. (2008). Lucian Freud’s
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping sells for record $33m. Times Online: UK
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment /visual_arts/article3928
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/contemporary/Lucian-Freud.html
