For a man who painted the human body with such visceral detail — nude, overweight, old, sagging skin, blotchy colouring, awkward poses — Lucian Freud’s Self-Portrait with Hyacinth in Pot, painted in 1947-48, cuts a rather handsome figure.
These portraits did more than express detail; they revealed the inner life of their subjects. A trained artist, his initial works were landscapes and still lifes, and he attained a great deal of critical acclaim from the start of his career. “Despite the later stylistic shifts in his painting, Freud’s mythically-conceived personality was thus largely fixed already by the end of the 1940s. The lecture, later this month, is part of a summer exhibition on display at the Louisiana until end-September, organised in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, London (which first hosted the show from February to May). In Woman Smiling, modelled on artist Suzy Boyt, for instance, the nose and cheeks possess both colour and heft, drawing the viewer’s attention away from her small smile. This is where the light pools and dips when Boyt puckers her mouth, Freud seems to say. He also painted celebrities and public figures, from Queen Elizabeth II to supermodel Kate Moss.
David Dawson, Freud’s former assistant, told The Guardian in 2008 that the artist would often stand extremely close to his subjects, and possessed a nervous energy that could keep the sitter on the edge of their seat. Born in Berlin in 1922 to Jewish architect Ernst L Freud (son of Sigmund Freud), Lucian fled Germany with his family in 1933 and settled in London. In 1958-59, he began to use a hog’s-hair paintbrush, which was coarser and added lines and depth to faces he rendered. His canvases often depict people from his inner circle: wives Kitty Garman (an artist) and Caroline Blackwood (a writer); artist-friends Francis Bacon and Leigh Bowery; many of his children (he formally acknowledged 14).
“When Lucian Freud first appeared on the London art scene during the second world war, he and his work were met by journalistic hyperbole,” art historian Andrew Wilson writes, in a note to an upcoming lecture on the artist at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. “His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand comparison with the great figurative painters of any period,” then director of the Tate Gallery Nicholas Serota said, when Freud died in 2011.
