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| Lucian Freud |
July 22: Lucian Freud, whose uncompromising, fleshy portraits made him one of the world’s most revered artists and stirred cries of treason for painting Queen Elizabeth the way he saw her, has died. He was 88.
The artist, who was allowed to take his own decisions by his family when he was a teenager though he was thrown out of a school for dropping his trousers, died in London on Wednesday night.
Friends said Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, had become gravely ill over the last week. The broadcaster Emma Freud, the artist’s niece, broke the news to many when she announced his death using her Twitter account. She wrote: “Oh ... My uncle Lucian has died. Oh.”
William Acquavella, Freud’s dealer in New York, said that he would mourn Freud as “one of the great painters of the 20th century”. Throughout the 1980s, Freud’s reputation grew steadily, and since the death of Francis Bacon in 1992, he was widely recognised as the greatest living painter.
His passion and skill were highlighted last year when a portrait of him nursing a black eye sold for more than £2.8 million.
The oil on canvas, Self-Portrait With A Black Eye (1978), shows Freud sporting a swollen left eye, the result of a row between the artist and a taxi driver during which Freud was struck in the face.
Freud was said to have retreated to his studio rather than seek treatment — using his crumpled, swollen features as the inspiration for the important new work.
The artist previously discussed his habit of getting into scrapes, saying: “I used to have a lot of fights. It wasn’t because I liked fighting, it was really just that people said things to me to which I felt the only reply was to hit them.”
He completed the portrait of the queen in his characteristically uncompromising and unflattering style. Some commentators described the monarch’s expression as “glum” while others hailed the picture as bold, uncompromising and truthful.
Arthur Morrison, the arts editor of The Times, London, wrote: “The chin has what can only be described as a six-’clock shadow, and the neck would not disgrace a rugby prop forward.” The newspaper’s royal photographer said Freud should be thrown into the Tower of London. Some accused Freud of treason.
But flattery was not in his vocabulary. “I paint what I see, not what you want me to see,” Freud once said.
Far gentler on the eye was his nude portrait of the waif-like model Kate Moss, which he executed after reading that it was her ambition to be painted by him. Another model, Jerry Hall, then Mrs Mick Jagger, also posed for him naked, and pregnant.
The relationship between sitter and painter, in his work, overturned traditional portraiture. In paintings like Girl With Roses (1947-48) and Girl With a White Dog (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection.
From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass. His subjects, pushed to the limit in exhausting extended sessions, day after day, dropped their defences and opened up. The faces showed fatigue, distress, torpor.
Perhaps those of his subjects to whom he was kindest were animals, whippets in particular, lying sleekly, innocently alongside a naked human being. There is a magnificent painting of a horse’s backside in Skewbald Mare, which he used to observe being ridden at a riding school near his home.
Freud was a member of the Order of Merit, one of Britain’s most prestigious chivalry honours. The honour is a special award presented to individuals of great achievement in the fields of the arts, learning, literature and science. The honour is restricted to 24 members at any one time, plus additional foreign recipients. Members include Margaret Thatcher, the naturalist David Attenborough and the inventor of the worldwide web Timothy Berners-Lee.
Freud was certainly the leading figure in what has been called the school of London -- named on the model of the Ecole de Paris, and, like that, consisting largely of immigrant artists rather than natives.
But leadership of such heterogeneous assemblage should not be taken to imply the existence around Freud of any significant body of disciples, let alone pupils. As a painter, Freud was always the cat who walked by himself.
Though Freud was originally German, born in Berlin the son of Sigmund Freud’s youngest son Ernst, he and his family moved to London when he was 10, on Hitler’s accession to power in 1933.
In 1938, he was expelled from Bryanston school in Dorset after dropping his trousers on a dare on a street in Bournemouth.
However, he had already marked himself out as a compulsive draughtsman. Clearly he had the makings of a prodigy to more people than just his adoring, artistic family.
When he found artistic expression for his second great passion, horse-riding, by sculpting a stone horse at the age of 15, his father was sufficiently impressed to take it to the Central School of Arts and Crafts. More significantly, the school was sufficiently impressed to admit him immediately.
His family indeed seems to have been amazingly willing to let him run his own life on his own terms, and when he decided, on the advice of someone casually met in a cafe, to exchange the Central School for the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Essex, no one raised any objection.
At Dedham, Freud was the star pupil, and remained so even after he had contrived to burn the place down with a carelessly disposed of cigarette end. (That, at least, is the legend, and the school certainly was destroyed by fire in July 1939.)
In addition to his various less regular liaisons, Freud was married twice. In his eighties, the enigmatic Freud was still immensely attractive to women, young women too. Freud is survived by many children.
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