Andy's Window

Lucien Freud (1922-2011) was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of modern times. The grandson of Sigmund Freud, he was noted (not surprisingly) for the intense psychological penetration of his portraits, models and even animals.

Lucien Freud, Self Portrait

Freud after some years of experiment settled into what was first taken as a traditional pursuit of conventional oil painting. He was in fact cautioned by his artist friends (like Francis Bacon, the ‘other’ and more wildly controversial British artist of the 20th century) that his direction as a painter could be perceived as an out-dated 19th century style.

My own first opinions of Freud’s original works, which I saw over several years in London, Los Angeles and New York were mixed at best, because Freud could care less about ‘beauty’ and did not easily fit into a category. But he grew on me, as I came to appreciate how he, like Morandi and Cezanne, was determined to reveal the profundity of ordinary people. I also found the neutrality of his devotion to oil painting as satisfyingly ruthless as his observation, and in his late work almost sculptural in the rich thickness of his canvases.

Freud’s models were often friends and family, with a preference for middle-aged bodies, aging flesh, and sometimes grotesquely odd subjects. As he painted, Freud entered into the lives of his sitters, by chatting about himself and thoughts as he painted. He often hosted dinner after a long sitting (sometimes months of weekly sessions)—as if he wanted to know his model from the inside out as well as outside in.

His canvases have an all-over neutral accuracy. Freud paints the floor under the model or the wall behind the model with the same careful attention that he gives to the figure. Freud’s steady observation gives each canvas an integrity of completion that, to me, endows each work with its living presence as art.

I recommend the book The Man with the Blue Scarf by Martin Gaylord, which is the author’s account of the four months he sat for Lucien Freud—an eloquent record into the painter’s mind as he worked. And in a future essay I would like to explore Freud’s extraordinary large line etchings, which paralleled his painting career.