Berlin
The grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, among Lucian Freud’s earliest memories were his grandfather’s visits. The elder Freud would bring reproductions from the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna. The walls of Lucian’s room were adorned with master paintings by Hokusai and Dürer. He would study the details in Brueghel’s Seasons. Hunters in the Snow and The Return of the Herd were his favorites because of the animals. Other times, he received The Arabian Nights, illustrated with watercolors by Edmund Dulac, and a two-volume Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Lucian began to draw at a young age, and his grandfather encouraged his ambition to become an artist.
There were only two things Lucian wanted - to work with horses and to paint.
Lucian’s father was an architect, a friend and contemporary of Richard Neutra, an admirer of Walter Gropius, and an amateur artist who took after Klimt. They had a library of modern literature, including Conrad and Kafka. The most daring was George Grosz’s Ecce Homo, a satirical collection of watercolors depicting politicians, prostitutes and degenerates in various stages of lust and despair.
England
In 1933, when Lucian was 11, his family left for England. It was the year Hitler became chancellor, and although the Freuds were not practicing Jews, they were ostracized, and the atmosphere in Germany was ominous.
Lucian was sent to progressive schools but still managed to get expelled from them. Only art and reading could hold his attention. Inspired by the character of a stone carver in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, he took up sculpture. Measuring two feet and made of sandstone, the Three-Legged Horse was stylized and intimate, quite a surge of expression for a 15-year-old.
Three-Legged Horse (1937)
Cedric Morris (1940)
Man with a Feather (self-portrait 1943)
After leaving the more academic Central School, he transferred to the East Anglican School of Painting and Drawing in Essex. It was informal and stressed individuality. Students were provided with models. They could paint out on the lawn or in separate rooms. Under the tutelage of the sympathetic Cedric Morris, Lucian began to take art seriously, devoting time and energy to painting and developing his own style. It was also when he painted his first self-portraits.
Soho
Lucian explored London. The backstreets of Soho was the center of bohemian life and a meeting place for artists. He credited Café An as where his life began. Darkly atmospheric with pornographic photos on the walls, it was filled with interesting real-life characters – occult figures, expatriates, outcasts, and femme fatales. Lucian also frequented the theater and cinema. He referred to them as schools outside of school.
Boy on a Balcony (1945)
Woman with a Tulip (1945)
Hotel Bedroom (1954)
He met important figures who became essential to his artistic development. Peter Watson, financial backer of Horizon and principal benefactor of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, was an avid art collector. He bought some of Lucian’s early paintings, and Horizon was the first magazine to feature them.
Later in life, when asked why he became a painter, Lucian would refer to this time, still in his teens, when he was already presenting himself as one. He resolved to live up to it.
Paddington
He became devoted to art. When he wasn’t in school, he would spend all day painting and all night sketching by lamplight. Barely 19, he won a textile design competition. In 1943, he moved to Paddington, a run-down area by the canals known for criminal activity. Bombing raids were frequent, and one blew out his window. The freedom and danger inspired him. He would stay there for thirty years.
Painted in wartime - his muse and lover, Lorna Wishart, found this dead bird by his flat.
The following year, he drew illustrations for The Glass Tower, a book of poetry by Nicholas Moore. He held his first show at the Lefevre Gallery – ten paintings sold on opening night. The work was varied, from portraits and animals to still life and nature, from Surrealism to Symbolism. Lefevre hosted several exhibitions of his work afterward. The Tate bought one of his paintings. He was now a professional and accomplished painter.
Paris and Greece
The war ended, and the borders opened. He went to Paris in 1946. Watson introduced him to Picasso and Giacometti, who became a role model. He also met Jean Debuffet and André Breton, an admirer and follower of Sigmund Freud. Lucian was inspired by Sartre and existentialism and fascinated by the Marquis the Sade and his depravity.
Afterward, he went to Athens, but Greece was embroiled in a civil war. He headed to Poros, a small idyllic island to the south. Electricity was scarce; he drew by candlelight at night and filled his sketchbooks.
Man with a Thistle (self-portrait 1946)
Head of a Greek Man (1946)
Still Life with Green Lemon (self-portrait 1947)
Muses Turned Lovers
Lucian first met Lorna Wishart when he was nineteen, and she was thirty and married. She was notoriously unfaithful. Even in the three years she and Lucian were lovers, she was passionately involved with the poet Laurie Lee, among others. When she discovered love letters from an actress to Lucian, she ended the affair.
One of her sons, Michael Wishart, would meet up with Lucian in Paris and sit for his portrait. Michael was eighteen then, Lucian twenty-three. They had a brief affair. Two years later, in 1948, Lucian married Kitty Garman. She was Lorna’s niece – the initial introduction apparently made because Lorna had tired of him. Then, just a month after Lucian’s first daughter was born, he went to Ireland for a three-week tryst with artist Anne Dunn, who would turn to marry Michael in 1950.
This would become Tate Britain's bestselling postcard.
In 1949, he met Lady Caroline Blackwood, daughter of British nobility. She moved into his Paddington studio in 1951. They eloped to Paris a year later. But it was in 1953, after his divorce from Garman, that they legally married. They separated three years later. And within a year, one of his art students, Suzy Boyt, gave birth to the first of their four children. In between, Lucian also fathered two daughters with Bernadine Coverley, who was twenty years his junior. In all, he fathered fourteen children from six different women, although there were likely more.
Portrait of a Girl (Anne Dunn 1949)
Girl in Bed (Caroline Blackwood 1952)
Pregnant Girl (Bernadine Coverley 1961)
Naked Portraits
Everything is autobiographical, and everything is a portrait, even if it’s a chair.
Lucian continued to paint his many lovers, eventually shedding all their garments. He worked long hours in his studio and preferred to paint those closest to him. He was intensely private and fiercely passionate. You can see it in his paintings, even if they aren’t of him. His portraits are deeply personal, bold and beautiful in their nakedness and imperfections. While nudity in art has a long tradition, these were different. They were radical but not pornographic. These women were vulnerable yet commanding. This isn’t sexual fantasy but intimate reality.
They met when he was 55 and she was 18 and one of his students. They were lovers for a decade and kept up a complex intimacy until his death.
In the 1970s, he mixed Cremnitz white into his paint. The heaviness of lead oxide was perfect for portraying the textures of flesh. He was strict – no makeup, no nail polish, no tan – nothing to take away from the biological reality of the human body. He wanted to represent it as truthfully as possible. The paintings became more startling, and Lucian became a realist painter in the truest sense of the art.
The Unerotic
His first full-nude portrait was in 1963. It was of his fifteen-year-old daughter Annie. It was the first of many naked portraits he would do of his children. He received brutal criticism and even accusations of abuse. But his daughters defended him. Esther was sixteen when she posed for him. Because his studio was filled with naked portraits, she took off her clothes in her first sitting. She said it gave her a new sense of freedom and confidence.
Naked Child Laughing (1963)
Rose (1979)
Freddie Standing (2001)
Lucian had been painting all his models in the nude. Art historians have noted the distinct lack of eroticism in his portraits – the total sense of detachment. It was only natural he painted his children the same way.
I paint only the people closest to me. And who closer than my children? 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.
The Tireless Artist
In 1977, Lucian moved to a new studio in Holland Park. It had a skylight, large windows and views of rooftops. It was spacious, and he made use of light and space, sometimes adding strips of canvas to enlarge his paintings. Backgrounds became more prominent, and the settings more complicated. But he remained a realist. In the seven decades of his career, movements from Cubism to Expressionism bypassed him, but portraiture – the oldest art – was his, and he mastered it.
He painted standing up, usually one session for five hours in the morning, a break in the afternoon, and then working on another painting well into the night. This required stamina, but painting energized and revived him. He also required his models to be there even if he was just painting the background that day. One sitting lasted eighteen months. He was interested in human behavior and interactions, and the presentness was vital to him. His portraits of people became glimpses into their lives. You feel a sense of drama, like a scene out of a play.
Lucian did several paintings of Leigh Bowery, a drag performer and fashion designer, until Leigh's death of AIDS in 1994.
He hardly traveled and never gave interviews. His studio commanded all his time. He had many worthwhile lovers, yet, like Picasso, he was only loyal to his art, which ruled his entire life. The paintings were painstakingly done – he wiped his brushes clean after each individual stroke and mixed the palette himself, heavy on his other hand. The older he got, the more he challenged himself. He painted male nudes, pairs of lovers, marginalized bodies, and even a full frontal of himself. Folds of flesh, broken skin, drooping breasts, heavy frames – a sort-of resistance to society’s predilection for perfect bodies.
Painter Working (self-portrait 1993)
Leigh under the Skylight (1994)
