Lucian Freud on Paper

Speaking recently about his early years as an artist Lucian Freud claimed, 'I would have thought I did 200 drawings to every painting in those early days. I very much prided myself on my drawing.' Drawing is fundamental to Freud's development as an artist and to how he sees in a way that that it was not, for example, at the foundation of the work of Francis Bacon. Drawing became an important part of Freud's life from the start and a famous sketchbook, "The Freud-Schuster Book", dating back to January 1940 when Freud was in Snowdonia with Stephen Spender, has survived.So too do sketches from Freud's life as a merchant seaman on a cargo vessel in the Atlantic in 1941. His then surreal style lent itself to illustrations and his fascination with animals, birds and fish was revealed in the famous line drawings he produced for Nicholas Moore's book of poems, "The Glass Tower" (1944). "On Paper" charts the works on paper, including the etchings, over his entire career. It includes the formative early work, the sketches in preparation for painting his masterpiece, "Large Interior W11" (after Watteau) (1983), the sketches of the completed painting in the studio and the astonishing later studies of his mother. The book ends with the etchings of recent years. The works on paper are an extraordinary achievement, providing even deeper insights into the work of the greatest figurative artist of our time.

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Authors Biography

Richard Calvocoressi was for many years Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and is now Director of the Henry Moore Foundation.

Authors Biography

Sebastian Smee has written frequently on Freud. His introduction to the artist's recent paintings appears in Lucian Freud 1996-2005 (Jonathan Cape, 2005) and his extended interview with Freud was published in Freud at Work (Jonathan Cape, 2006).

Artists Biography

(b Berlin, 8 Dec 1922. d 20 July 2011). British painter and draughtsman. He was the son of the architect Ernst Freud (1892–1970) and the grandson of SIGMUND FREUD. His family moved to England in 1932, and in 1939 he became a naturalized British subject and enrolled at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Dedham, run by Cedric Morris. Apart from a year in Paris and Greece, Freud spent most of the rest of his career in Paddington, London, an inner-city area whose seediness is reflected in Freud’s often sombre and moody interiors and cityscapes. In the 1940s he was principally interested in drawing, especially the face, as in Naval Gunner (1941; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 22), and occasionally using a distorted style reminiscent of George Grosz, as in Page from a Sketchbook (1941; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 17). He began to turn his attention to painting, however, and experimented with Surrealism, producing such images as the Painter’s Room (1943; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 26), which features an incongruous arrangement of objects, including a stuffed zebra’s head, a battered chaise longue and a house plant, all of which survived his Surrealist phase and appeared separately in later paintings. He was also loosely associated with Neo-Romanticism, and the intense, bulbous eyes that characterize his early portraits show affinities with the work of other artists associated with the movement, such as John Minton, whose portrait he painted in 1952 (London, Royal Coll. A.). He established his own artistic identity, however, in meticulously executed realist works, imbued with a pervasive mood of alienation. He was dubbed by Herbert Read ‘the Ingres of existentialism’ (Contemporary British Art, Harmondsworth, 1951, rev. 1964, p. 35) because of such images as those of his first wife, Kitty (the daughter of Jacob Epstein), nervously clutching a rose in Girl with Roses (1947–8; London, Brit. Council).

Reviews

`Read this book and the scales will fall from your eyes...Freud's etchings are a revelation.'

Tatler

`An extravagantly illustrated, satisfyingly fat volume about Freud's drawings in every medium.'

Sunday Times

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