What was the grandson of the great psychoanalyst Freud famous for and what does he have to do with Elizabeth II

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

One of the most famous portrait painters of our time, Lucian Freud is also one of the few painters to depict himself with such spectacular consistency. Is he just a shadow or is he staring at us with his mouth open and wide-eyed? The great self-dramatist remains curiously incomprehensible to this day, and self-portraits put the artist on a par with Dürer and Rembrandt.

Biography

Lucian Freud (8 December 1922 - 20 July 2011) was a contemporary British artist. He gained fame thanks to his shocking and cutting-edge portraits. Lucien was the son of the Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud. The name of the boy was given by his mother, naming her son in honor of the ancient Greek writer Lucian of Samosata (lat. Lucianus Samosatensis). In 1933, the family was forced to flee Berlin to Great Britain in order to avoid the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime.

Lucian Freud recalled that once in his childhood in Berlin he saw Hitler: “He seemed to me a little man surrounded by huge guards,” the artist recalled. It was this image of Nazism as a little man surrounded by guards that remained in his memory. Freud was educated in London at Goldsmiths College, where he also became friends with Francis Bacon. Subsequently, during World War II, he served in the British merchant navy. For the rest of his life, the artist called London his home.

Artist career

Freud's early work developed under the influence of surrealism. The main stylistic shift came under the influence of Bacon in the late 1950s, when Freud took a much more pictorial approach. He replaced his fine-edged sable brush with a coarse wool one. As a result, his strokes have become larger and bolder, so that a close-up of the canvas reveals an almost sculptural dense surface.

Subsequently, the individual style of the master was characterized as impasto. Unfortunately, at this stage the artist was not well known. For more than two decades - from the late 1950s, when abstraction prevailed, followed by conceptual art and minimalism - figurative painting was out of fashion. It was only with the arrival of Expressionist painters in the 1980s that Freud's star began an ascent that continues to this day. Freud observed his practice and wrote: "The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes and, ironically, the more real." The artist's paintings are little known, as they belong mainly to Freud's friends and family. They tend to be gloomy and surrounded by disturbing interiors and dark cityscapes. The works are known for their rare psychological insight and the often subtle relationship between model and artist.

Freud's portraits

Lucian Freud was one of the main figures in the 20th century. Working in an uncompromisingly confrontational style, his portraits were painted with a thick brush. Often self-portraits, as well as portraits of family and friends, his works are permeated with a kind of psychological space.

Freud is a great self-dramatist, and he takes pleasure in catching himself in mirrors, peering between the foliage of a potted plant, creating the image of a London gangster in the 1960s, then courteously and boldly passing by. By the middle of the twentieth century, Freud was directing his modified technique and deeply exploratory view into the discipline of portraiture, which became the core of his work. As the master himself said: “Everything is biographical, and everything is a self-portrait.” Covering almost seven decades, his self-portraits demonstrate an excellent understanding of his psychological state and creative development. Periodicals run from the earliest portrait, painted in 1939, to its last, completed 64 years later. At first, the artist portrayed himself as the Greek hero Actaeon, in a gloomy reflection on his later life. Through the prism of these works, a staggering evolution can be traced from linear graphic work in the early period to a more experienced, painterly style. Freud is known to paint paintings up to 14 hours a day, and woe to anyone who did not follow this schedule. In the late 1990s, supermodel Jerry Hall was late for a couple of portrait sessions, and Freud's response to non-compliance was to paint a man's head on her body. The characters in Freud's paintings belonged to completely different sectors of society. He could paint a portrait of the Queen, and then move on to create a portrait of a bank robber or a neighbor.

The famous portrait of Elizabeth II

Over the course of his career, Freud has achieved widespread success and critical acclaim, including painting a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II between 2000 and 2001. For her, the only one Lucian Freud made an exception - unlike others, she did not pose for the artist. The result was criticized by the British press but was favorably received by Elizabeth II. The painting is exhibited at the Royal Collection of Painting.

At all times, artists painted images of royal persons, embellishing nature as much as possible for quite understandable reasons. Freud did not strive for beauty, but he managed to convey the main thing - royal greatness, breed, unshakable faith in his highest destiny. The portrait is undeniably true. Freud resisted the influence of his grandfather Sigmund on his own paintings, but both worked in identical scenes where people come and go, leave and return and have their secrets. In Lucian Freud's paintings, secrets are what the body says. And Sigmund Freud has secrets in what they say.

Lucian Freud achieved recognition as one of the foremost British painters, renowned for his carefully watched portraits. The artist died on July 20, 2011 at the age of 88 in London. Today his works are kept in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Gallery in London, etc.