Lucian Freud

From Philosopedia

Reflections, Self-Portrait

Freud, Lucian (8 December 1922 - 20 July 2011)

Freud, the painter, was the son of an architect who was the youngest of Sigmund Freud’s three sons. His brother Clement is a British television personality. Freud was the husband of sculptor Jacob Epstein’s daughter, Kitty, with whom he had two children before their divorce in 1952. A year later, he married writer Caroline Blackwood, from whom he was divorced in 1958. He is known to many as having once been a long and close friend of the painter Francis Bacon.

In his youth Freud is said to have set fire to Cedric Morris’s art school. He is also said to have shared his grandfather’s interest in zoology, one of his early drawings being that of a dead monkey which shocked viewers long before his contemporary paintings of nude fat people appeared.

Calling psychoanalysis “unsuited to the life span,” Freud claims to be fairly ignorant of his grandfather, who died when Lucian was sixteen. He told John Richardson that he liked his grandfather’s “humor and generosity and his fondness for conspiracy,” which Richardson explained “is a trait that Lucian seems to have inherited, though not to the extent of convening a secret committee, as Sigmund Freud permitted Ernest Jones to do in 1912, with the sole purpose of shielding him and his controversial work from prying outsiders.” These days, Richardson adds, Lucian Freud might do with such a shield in light of how prurient critics like to pry into his paintings “that depict the women in his life–friends, his daughters, mistresses–without any clothes on.” As for painting his daughters in the buff, Freud has explained,

• What could be more natural? I paint only people who are close to me. And who closer than my children. If I had thought it odd to paint them, I would never have done so. For me, painting people naked, regardless of whether they are lovers, children, or friends, is never an erotic situation. The sitter and I are involved in making a painting, not love. These are things that people who are not painters fail to understand. Besides, there is something about a person being naked before me that invokes consideration–you could even call it chivalry–on my part: in the case of my children, a father’s consideration as well as a painter’s.

One of the nudes he has painted is Leigh Bowery (1961—1994), a homosexual (who died of AIDS), a performance artist from Australia. Freud says he is drawn to homosexual models “because I respect their courage,” and his 1993 great back view of Bowery in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art shows that the artist has been influenced by German art such as Dürer’s “Adam and Eve.” Freud’s “And the Bridegroom” depicts both the mountainously huge Bowery and the toothpick-like Nicola as they lie naked on a bed. In an analysis, Richardson comments that the two are turning away from one another, “ambivalently in what could be taken–or more likely mistaken–for postcoital repose.” Viewing the 1993 Freud exhibition, Bowery wore a dress. “I’ve copied Lucian in thousands of ways,” he told reporter Margalit Fox. “Whatever he makes for dinner, I make for dinner. I copy the clothes he wears and the phrases he uses.” In return, Freud copies Bowery, sometimes using New York transvestite slang, the model told a reporter before picking up his skirt and gliding out of the museum. “So it’s slightly a two-way street.”

Freud, who was not a believer in the various organized religions, has worked at the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery in Melbourne, the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and elsewhere around the world.

Freud, who was born in Berlin, moved to England with his family in 1932. Of his grandfather Sigmund who died in 1939, he was quoted, "I liked his company very much. He was never boring. He told me jokes." During World War II, Freud served as a seaman in the British merchant navy. In 2008 one of his paintings of an overweight nude woman sleeping on a couch sold for $33,600,000.

His obituaries reveal that he was "a rake of epic proportions," allegedly having at least twelve illegitimate children and maybe as many as forty. Freud died after an illness at his London home.

"Astonish, disturb, seduce, convince." The Economist (11 February 2012) wrote that the four words summarize Freud's credo, claiming "he fathered at least 14 children."

(See examples of Freud's art.) Gogard Gallery wwar.com MoMA

- Lee Bowery by Lucien Freud