Lucian Freud: The Witness of Flesh

Lucian Freud was born on December 8, 1922, in Berlin, into a family that carried a famous name and the weight that came with it. His grandfather was Sigmund Freud, his father an architect, his mother a woman who had studied art history. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the family left for London, and Lucian would spend the rest of his life there, drinking in Soho clubs, betting on horses, and painting in the same studio on Kensington Church Street for nearly four decades.

Flowering Genius

In the mid-1950s, Lucian Freud produced a tender mural of cyclamen in his Dorset home. He revisited the same subject in a wall painting at Chatsworth and, indeed, botanical still lifes were to become a perennial motif in his work. Now, for the first time, his florals are to become the subject of an exhibition

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He studied briefly at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and then at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham under Cedric Morris, where something in his approach began to take shape. He committed himself to painting full time after the war, and by 1951 he had won the Arts Council prize at the Festival of Britain for Interior at Paddington. Three years later he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale alongside Francis Bacon and Ben Nicholson. He was in his early thirties and already building one of the most uncompromising bodies of work in postwar British art.

What Freud did over the next sixty years was quietly radical. At a time when abstract painting dominated the conversation, he kept his eyes on people, specifically the people in his life: friends, family members, lovers, children, and increasingly strangers who became something more than strangers through the long, punishing sessions he required of them. Tate has described his work as filling canvases with bodies rarely given space elsewhere: fat bodies, ageing bodies, queer bodies, exhausted bodies. He once called himself “a sort of biologist”, interested in the insides and undersides of things, and that description fits better than most.

Portrait of the Artist: Lucian Freud

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His technique evolved slowly and deliberately. In the early work, the brushwork is tight and almost hyper-real. By the late 1950s, switching to stiffer hog-hair brushes, he moved toward a thicker impasto that built flesh up on the canvas in a way that felt almost sculptural. He cleaned his brush after every single stroke when painting skin, so the colour stayed constantly variable. He never painted from photographs. He never mixed natural and artificial light. He stood while painting for most of his career, only switching to a high chair in old age. These were not affectations; they were the result of someone who had thought very carefully about what it meant to be honest in front of a subject.

His work entered the collections of the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the National Portrait Gallery, among many others. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989 and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1993. He died in London on July 20, 2011, and is buried at Highgate Cemetery. His final work, a portrait of his studio assistant and friend David Dawson, was left unfinished on his easel.

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