Lucian Freud

Portraits

“Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s only a chair.”

Portraits are at the heart of Lucian Freud’s oeuvre. Working exclusively from nature, the artist said: “I’ve never been able to paint a picture of something that wasn’t really in front of me.” Lucian Freud was without doubt one of the greatest figurative painters of the last century. This new study of Freud’s portraits and other paintings aims to be an authoritative work and reviews seven decades of activity, from the early 1940s to the artist’s death in 2011. The book contains illustrations of 130 paintings, drawings, and engravings, chosen in strict collaboration with the artist. Lucian Freud, Portraits includes portraits and paintings which the artist made during the course of his long career. Gathering together the finest portraits from public and private collections throughout the world, the book traces Freud’s stylistic development and highlights his technical virtuosity. A series of previously unpublished interviews with Michael Auping held between May 2009 and January 2011 reveal Freud’s opinion on the complex relationship the artist builds with his model, on the difficulty of painting nudes and self-por- traits and on the painters he admired most. Freud’s psychological portraits are often imbued with an atmosphere of alienation. He was personally reserved, but established a very close relationship with his sitter behind the closed doors of his studio. Looking at these faces, we often sense there is a kind of latent emotional drama, but the subject remains elusive. The many subjects Freud portrayed include members of his family, especially his mother Lucy, and other artists, such as Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and David Hockney.

Sarah Howgate is a curator in the Contemporary Portraits Department of the National Portrait Gallery, in London. The many exhibitions she has mounted include David Hockney Portraits, a retrospective of the artist’s works, a combined venture of the National Portrait Gallery, in London, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Michael Auping is head curator at Fort Worth Modern Art Museum. He is well known as a curator and is an expert in abstract expressionism. His conversations with artists have been assembled and published under the title Interviews and Outtakes.
John Richardson was a friend of Lucian Freud and the author of A Life of Picasso.