Freud, Lucien

Lucien Freud was born in Berlin into a wealthy family of Austro - Jewish descent. His father, the architect Ernst Ludwig Freud (1892-1970), was the youngest son of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud ; mother - Lucy Freud (nee Brush, 1896-1989) - came from a family of large forest and grain merchants.

Freud and his family moved to the UK in 1933 due to the Nazis coming to power. In the same year he received British citizenship. In 1939, Sigmund Freud moved to London with his youngest daughter, the founder of child psychoanalysis, Anna Freud .

He studied at the Central School of Art (Central School of Art, London), the School of painting and drawing in East Anglia ( East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing , Dedham in Essex ), Goldsmiths College ( Goldsmiths College , London) (1942-1943). He served as a merchant seaman in the Atlantic convoy in 1941, and in 1942 was disabled.

The first solo exhibition of the artist took place in the London Lefevre Gallery (Lefevre Gallery) in 1944 . In the summer of 1946, he came to Paris for a few months to visit John Craxton, and then traveled to Italy . In the early 50s, he often visited Dublin, where he shared a studio with Patrick Swift. He lived in London until the end of his life.

Freud was one of the artists of figurative painting, who made the center of his creative work a man, later called Ron B. China by the London School group. From 1949 to 1954 he worked as a visiting teacher at at University College London .

He died on July 20, 2011. According to art dealer Freud, the artist died of an illness in his home in London. The circumstances of the death were not reported.

In 1948, Lucian Freud married Kitty Garman, the daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) and one of Garman 's three sisters , Kathleen ( Lady Epstein , 1901-1979); Kitty subsequently became the object of several of the most famous portraits of the artist. In this marriage, Freud's daughters, Annie and Annabel, were born.

Four years later, the artist met and in December 1953 married the writer Lady Carolyn Blackwood (1931-1996), the daughter of the famous conservative politician Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (1909-1945) - the grandson of the 1st Earl Dufferin . The marriage broke up during their trip to Mexico in 1958 .

At different times, as a result of extramarital affairs, Lucien Freud gave birth to several more children: future artists Jane MacAdam Freud (born 1958) and Paul Freud (born 1959), as well as David and Lucy MacAdam Freud from a relationship with Katherine McAdam; fashion designer Bella Freud (born 1961, wife of journalist James Fox ) and novelist Esther Leah Freud (born 1963, wife of actor David Morrissey ) from a relationship with Bernadine Coverley; five children born between 1957 and 1968 from a relationship with the artist Susie Boyt, including the elder Alexander Boyt (born 1957), the novelists Rose Boyt (born 1959) and Susie Boyt (born 1969), Isabel Boyt - whose portrait husband (1992) left for 11.4 million dollars at Christie's auction in 2007 .

Brother Lucien Freud - British radio presenter and liberal politician Clement Rafael Freud (1924-2009). Nephews are the founder of Freud Communications advertising agency Matthew Freud (his wife is the daughter of media magnate Rupert Murdoch Elizabeth Murdoch ) and television presenter Emma Freud (wife of screenwriter and director Richard Curtis ).

Early Period

The works of Lucien Freud are classified as naturalism . His early paintings by Freud, mostly small, are often associated with German expressionism (an influence that he, however, denied) and surrealism , they depict human figures, plants and animals in unexpected combinations. Some works anticipate mature paintings, such as the portrait of Cedric Morris (1940, National Museum of Wales ). After the war ended, Freud painted in a muffled gamut, with a planar linear image, without emphasizing the volume, such as the self-portrait “The Man with the Thistle” (1946, Tate ) and a series of portraits of his first wife Kitty Garman, including “The Girl with the Kitten” (1947, Tate) ^[7] . They were written in a technique reminiscent of the painting of the early Dutch ^[8] .

Since 1950, Freud worked mainly in the genre of portraiture and nudity (however, he wrote a full-fledged canvas in this genre only in 1966), changing the painting technique, he painted pastily, applying paint in thick layers, more freely, widely. The color scheme is usually muted. Freud, painting the human body, brushed his brush after applying each stroke so that the color constantly changed. One of the works characterizing the transition period, which combines the features of the early style and the style of the 1950s, is “Girl with a white dog” (Girl with a white dog (1951-1952)) - a portrait of Kathleen Epstein’s first wife. Freud took the habit of standing up to see the model a little above, in the last years of his life he used a high chair. He usually wrote people from his environment - friends, acquaintances, relatives. According to the artist, in his paintings they appear "not as they are, but as they could be." He painted human bodies using all the possibilities of the palette, while he depicted the human environment in a restrained color scheme.

Mature Art

Around 1960, Freud found his own individual style, which, with minor changes, will follow until the end of his life. He painted portraits in a waist section of almost life-size, but distorting proportions (usually depicting heads on a smaller scale). In recent years, he also performed several etchings from the figure portrayed in various poses.

In 1951, his exhibition was held in the Liverpool Interior at Paddington in the Walker Art Gallery, later he wins the prize at the Festival of Britain, where he earns a reputation as one of the best contemporary masters in the field of figurative painting . His work After Cezanne (1999-2000) of an unusual form was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for seven million. Between May 2000 and December 2001, Freud wrote to Queen Elizabeth II (the work was criticized by leading British publications).

In his portraits, the model is often depicted sitting, sometimes naked, lying on the floor or on the bed, at times next to some animal, as in The Girl with the White Dog (1951–1952) or The Naked Man with the Rat (1977–1978 ) According to Edward Cheney, the lying position in which Lucian Freud was so fond of depicting his models suggests a conscious or unconscious influence either of a couch for psychoanalysis of his grandfather Sigmund or the ancient Egyptian custom of mummifying the dead. This hypothesis is supported by the constant appearance of this pose in portraits of loved ones and, especially, in a series of images of Lucien's mother after her attempted suicide and after her death ^[9] .

Freud did not always explicitly indicate the person portrayed. So, the Dukes of Devonshire, who owned a portrait of the artist’s daughter, only a few years later found out who was depicted on this canvas. Often Freud wrote people with their pets. In the 1980s, the backdrop for his portraits often served as a view of the London roofs, which opened from his studio.

The artist began work with a preparatory drawing of charcoal on canvas. Then he applied paint to a small area of ​​the canvas and gradually filled it, moving from this point. If the model posed for him for the first time, he began to write from his head to “recognize” a person, then he moved on to the rest of the figure and in the final part of the work, when his understanding of the model deepened, he returned to his head. The image on the finished canvas, the result of months of intensive observation of the artist over the object, was created by numerous layers of paint overlapping each other. Part of the canvas was intentionally left unrecorded until the painting was completed. At the same time, Freud preferred that the model be present even when he wrote the background and attributes. It was important for the artist to establish contact between him and the portrait, if this connection did not arise, he, by his own admission, could not work. He also appreciated punctuality, there were cases when he quit work on a portrait, when the posing was late for sessions ^[10] .

Recent years

Freud always painted from nature, and, as a rule, the model posed almost all the time that he worked on the canvas. So, one of the Nudes (portrait of art manager Ria Kirby), completed in 2007, required sixteen months of work, during which the model posed almost every day, with the exception of four nights. Typically, the session lasted an average of five hours, the whole picture took about 2400 hours ^[11] .

The works of Lucian Freud are exhibited at the famous Wallace Collection family museum (London) - before him, not one of the contemporary artists has exhibited in these halls. This fact, along with the previous details of the exhibition biography of the grandson of Sigmund Freud, firmly places him among the "modern classics."

Not many artists are honored with such lifetime honors. In 2002, the Louvre, together with the Association of National Museums, presented at one of the main exhibition venues in Paris, at the Grand Palais , the " Constable exhibition - the choice of Lucian Freud." Which meant: one great English artist has the honor of being presented to the French public by another great English painter. In the same 2002, a retrospective of Lucian Freud took place in the London Tate Britain, which received great resonance.

Lucien Freud’s fame is not only in museum halls: in May 2008, Freud’s painting “The Social Caretaker Sleeps ” was sold at a record price of $ 33.6 million, and at the February 2009 Christie's auction, his work was listed first on the list of most significant works - and later the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat , Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol .

In the last days of his life, the artist worked on the painting “Portrait of a Dog”, which remained unfinished ^[12] .

• 1983 - Order of the Knights of Honor
• 1993 - Order of Merit
• 1997 - Rubens Prize

• Three Drafts for a Portrait of Lucian Freud

• WebMuseum: Freud, Lucian
• GIF.ru
• Sergey Gollerbach. Innovator, provocateur, anti-romantic, humanist? (Russian) . Gallery "Art Vladivostok" (October 2011). Date of treatment October 31, 2011. Archived February 24, 2012.
• Lecture by Irina Kulik at the Garage Museum. Lucian Freud - Ron Mueck. Tactile realism
• Marina Wasey. Lucien Freud. Rebel and his ideals. The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine, # 4 2011 (33)