Memorial Page for Lucian Freud (née Lucian Michael Freud)

Lucian Freud (born 8 December 1922 in Berlin; died 20 July 2011 in London) was a British painter and printmaker of German origin. He is regarded as one of the most important figurative artists of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He became best known for portraits and nude paintings in which bodies, skin, posture and psychological closeness appear without idealization.

Background and emigration

Freud was born in Berlin, the son of architect Ernst L. Freud and Lucie Freud; his grandfather was Sigmund Freud. In 1933 the Jewish family left Germany and moved to London to escape National Socialism. In 1939 Lucian Freud became a British citizen. The early experience of relocation, foreignness and a new beginning remained a quiet background for an artist who spent almost all his life in London.

Training and early painting

Freud studied at the Central School of Art in London and at Cedric Morris's East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, among other places. Even as a young artist he stood out for exceptional draughtsmanship. His early works often show plants, animals and people with a sharp eye, cool precision and an almost surreal tension. In 1944 he had his first solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in London.

Portrait as encounter

The human figure in a room became Freud's central subject. He painted friends, family members, fellow artists and people from his London surroundings. His models often sat for him over months, sometimes for very long periods. This slowness was part of the work: repeated looking produced an image that did not seek flattery, but held presence, fatigue, weight, tension and vulnerability.

Style and physical presence

From the 1950s onward Freud's painting became thicker, more physical and rougher. He worked with hog's-hair brushes and applied paint so that skin did not appear smooth, but as a living and marked surface. His nudes became famous because they did not arrange beauty according to classical forms. Bodies in his work appear concrete, heavy, unvarnished and at the same time dignified in their simple presence. From this came the particular intensity of his pictures.

London, recognition and late work

Freud remained an artist of the studio. He did not follow fashionable movements and held to figurative painting at a time when abstraction and conceptual art strongly shaped the art world. In the 1980s and 1990s his international recognition grew markedly. His known works include portraits of Leigh Bowery, Sue Tilley and Queen Elizabeth II. His etchings were also shown in museums, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007.

Farewell

Lucian Freud died in London on 20 July 2011. He was 88 years old. His work remains connected with an unusually uncompromising form of looking: people appear not as smooth likenesses, but as presences with weight, history and quiet tension. In British art his name stands for a figurative painting that remained modern precisely because it did not turn away from the direct gaze at the human being.