Freud, Lucian

Freud, Lucian (1922– ). German-born British painter and draughtsman. He was born in Berlin, son of an architect, Ernst Freud, and grandson of Sigmund Freud. In 1932 he settled in England with his parents, and he acquired British nationality in 1939. His earliest love was drawing and he began to work full-time as an artist after being invalided out of the Merchant Navy in 1942 (his formal training was brief but included an important period in 1939 studying with Cedric Morris, who encouraged his pupils to let feelings prevail over objective observation). From 1948 to 1958 he taught at the Slade School. He first exhibited his work in 1944 and first made a major public impression in 1951 when his Interior at Paddington (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) won a prize at the Festival of Britain; it shows the sharply focused detail, pallid colouring, and obsessive, slightly bizarre atmosphere characteristic of his work at this time. Because of the meticulous finish of such paintings, Freud has sometimes been described as a ‘Realist’ (or rather absurdly as a Superrealist), but the subjectivity and intensity of his work has always set him apart from the sober tradition characteristic of most British figurative art since the Second World War. From the late 1950s he painted with much broader handling and richer colouring, without losing any of his intensity of vision. His work includes still-lifes, interiors, and urban scenes, but his specialities are portraits and nudes, often observed in arresting close-up, with the flesh painting given an extraordinary quality of palpability (The Painter's Mother, Tate Gallery, London, 1982). He prefers to paint people he knows well, one of his favourite recent subjects being the Australian Performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961–94), who was a friend from the mid-1980s: ‘If you don't know them, it can only be like a travel book.’

Freud's work has been shown in numerous one-man and group shows and he has steadily built up a formidable reputation as one of the most powerful contemporary figure painters. In 1993 Peter Blake wrote that since the death of Francis Bacon the previous year, Freud was ‘certainly the best living British painter', and by this time he was also well-known abroad (a major retrospective exhibition of his work in 1987–8 was seen in Paris and Washington as well as London). His fame has been won in spite of an aversion to self-publicity. Sir John Rothenstein writes of him: ‘Freud holds himself aloof not only from official life but also from conventional social life as well. This is due largely to his determination to preserve the utmost possible independence, but even more because he needs an exceptional measure of freedom from distraction in order to work … Freud is, in fact, an anomalous figure, a socially sought-after solitary with a seemingly facile mind to whom the pursuit of his vocation is a sombre ordeal daily renewed, a seemingly material temperament, who, like Francis Bacon [a close friend], beyond needing ready cash in his pocket, is without the acquisitive urge, and whose successive studios would be rejected as unfit to live in by the student of today’ (Modern British Painters, vol. 3, 1984).