Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud: The Long Stare at Human Meat

He once kept a model, Ria Kirby, sitting for sixteen months, on all but four evenings of that stretch, for a single portrait. This was normal. Freud painted only from life, built the figure first and the room around it afterwards, and treated a human body as a problem of substance rather than likeness. When *Benefits Supervisor Sleeping* — a monumental nude of the benefits officer Sue Tilley, asleep on a sofa — sold in 2008 for $33.6 million, it set a record for a work by a living artist.

Berlin, Then London

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 to German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish parents. His father Ernst was an architect; his grandfather was Sigmund Freud, a lineage that would be invoked lazily against his paintings for the rest of his life. The family fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for London, and Lucian became a British subject in 1939.

His schooling was a chain of exits. Dartington Hall in Devon, then Bryanston, from which he was expelled after a year for disruption; a brief spell at the Central School of Art in London; then, decisively, the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing from 1939 to 1942 under Cedric Morris, which relocated to Benton End near Hadleigh in Suffolk in 1940. He finished at Goldsmiths' College from 1942 to 1943. In 1941 he served as a merchant seaman on an Atlantic convoy and was invalided out the following year, physically unfit. His first solo exhibition came at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, when he was twenty-two.

Tiny Brushes, Then Hog Bristle

The early work was surrealist and expressionist in flavour, then hardened through the 1940s and 1950s into something stranger: an intricate, stylised realism made with tiny sable brushes, colours vivid and forms drawn with almost heraldic precision, faces enamelled into stillness. *Girl with a White Dog* (1951–52), now at Tate, is the great transitional picture.

Then, around the middle of the 1950s, he threw the sable brushes away. He took up large hog's-hair brushes and much thicker paint, including heavy impasto, and turned his entire attention to the texture and colour of flesh. It is the single most consequential decision of his career. The surfaces stopped describing skin and started behaving like it — clotted, mottled, weighted by gravity, alive at the level of pigment. Everything he is famous for follows from that change of tool.

Soho, Bacon, and the Wreckage

From 1944 he was close to Francis Bacon, and through the 1950s and 1960s the two were virtually inseparable, drinking in the same Soho establishments with Frank Auerbach, Stephen Spender and Henrietta Moraes. Freud drew Bacon and painted a small, unnervingly attentive portrait of him in 1952; a second, begun in 1956, was never finished. Bacon made at least sixteen works of Freud, often working from John Deakin's photographs. Freud admired Bacon's economy: "he talked about packing a lot of things into a single brushstroke, which amused and excited me." The friendship curdled in the 1980s into a bitter falling-out, with rivalry the likeliest culprit. Bacon called the end of it "rather sad."

His private life was on the same scale as his work rate. He married Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, in 1948 and divorced in 1952; then Lady Caroline Blackwood, the Guinness heiress, in 1953, divorcing in 1959. He acknowledged fourteen children — two from his first marriage and twelve by mistresses — among them the novelist Esther Freud and the designer Bella Freud. He gambled heavily and lived by obsessive rituals, holding what amounted to a personal court and behaving, by most accounts, ruthlessly within it.

The Sitters

He taught at the Slade as a visiting tutor from 1949 to 1954, where he was known for standing behind a student's easel for long stretches saying nothing at all. His later sitters formed an unlikely cross-section of British life: dukes and duchesses, Kate Moss, the performance artist Leigh Bowery, the benefits supervisor Sue Tilley, and in 2001 Queen Elizabeth II — a small, unsparing head that parts of the British press received badly. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989. His market has continued to climb since his death; *Benefits Supervisor Resting* fetched $56.2 million in 2015.

Why Lucian Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on craft and on nerve, not on ideas. Freud's achievement was to make paint behave as flesh — not to depict flesh convincingly, which many painters can do, but to find a physical equivalence between pigment loaded on hog's hair and the actual weight, temperature and mortality of a body. That is a technical discovery, and it is his. The second element is duration: by demanding hundreds of hours from a sitter he was making time itself part of the medium, so that the painting records not a moment but a long, unflattering acquaintance. He was, as obituarists put it, often described as Britain's greatest living artist, and he almost single-handedly kept figurative painting central through decades when fashion had moved decisively to abstraction, then conceptualism.

The reservations are real. His range is narrow: nudes, a few interiors, dogs and horses, over sixty years. Some critics hold that the intricate, stylised early work of the 1940s and 1950s is the better painting, and that the late impasto nudes are a mannerism — one obituary noted the suspicion that in the final years he showed far more interest in his dogs and horses than in the humans in front of him. There is also the ethical weather around the studio: hundreds of hours of a stranger's time, exhaustively surrendered, converted into paintings worth tens of millions, by a man his own circle described as ruthless. Freud's answer, implicit in every canvas, was that unsentimental looking is the only honest kind. Whether that excuses the arrangement is a separate question from whether the paintings are extraordinary. They are.

Legacy

Freud died in London on 20 July 2011, of bladder cancer, aged eighty-eight, and was buried at Highgate Cemetery. He left a body of work that made the naked human body legitimate subject matter again in an art world that had spent fifty years explaining why it was not, and he did it without irony, without appropriation and without a manifesto: just a sitter, a lamp, a hog's-hair brush and an unreasonable amount of time.

Achievements

• Order of Merit — 1993
• Notable work: Benefits Supervisor Sleeping
• Movement: Expressionism and School of London