Lucian Freud: Portraits
- Artist: Lucian Freud
- Published: 2011
- Publisher: Hirmer Publishers
- Edition: -
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 28cm
- Pages: 71
- Illustrations: Includes 35 colour plates
£24.95
Add to basketLucian Freud: Portraits
Lucian Freud - A Painted Portrait of his Mother and Eighteen Etchings 1982–2007
One of the foremost figurative artists, Lucian Freud has redefined portraiture and the nude. And while most are familiar with Freud’s thickly impasted paintings, few realise how integral etching became to his practice.
Presenting an exceptional overview of Freud’s works on paper over his more than six-decade career, this volume highlights the artist’s unconventional approach to the medium. Standing the copper etching plate upright on the easel, Freud treats the plate like a canvas as he depicts his sitters - very often friends, family members, or fellow artists - with meticulous networks of finely etched lines.
Freud was one of the most widely acclaimed British artists of our time and, with plentiful illustrations and an introduction by celebrated curator Norman Rosenthal, Lucian Freud Portraits art book brings Freud’s lesser-known etchings deservedly to the forefront.
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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).
