Lucian Freud

by Martin Gayford, Martin Gayford

Freud, Lucian / Lampert, Catherine. Lucian Freud. Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2007. 17.5 x 23.5 cm. 176 pages. Original Softcover. Excellent condition with only minor signs of external wear. with an essay by Martin Gayford ; and an introduction by Frank Paul. British figurative painter Lucian Freud's jolting, unsparingly candid portraits bear superficial resemblances to photorealism or to Francis Bacon's distortions, yet his people, at once vulnerable and potent, inhabit a world all their own. Born in Berlin in 1922, the artist (grandson of Sigmund Freud) moved in 1933 to England with his parents, who feared Hitler's growing power. The young girls in Freud's 1940s canvases are alarmingly aware. His subjects of the last few years--nude or clothed, epic or small-scale--invite the viewer to partake of an imaginary emotional intimacy that makes one complicit in the artist's extended dialogue with the sitter. This catalogue of an exhibit which opened in London and soon travels to Ne

Genres: Art

176 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2007

About the author

Martin Gayford is an art critic and art historian. He studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London. Over three decades, he has written prolifically about art and music in a series of major biographies, as well as contributing regularly to newspapers, magazines and exhibition catalogues. In parallel with his career as an art historian, he was art critic of The Spectator magazine and The Sunday Telegraph newspaper before becoming Chief Art Critic for the international television network, Bloomberg News. He has been a regular contributor to the British journal of art criticism, Modern Painters.

His books include a study of Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles, The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles (Little Brown, 2006), which was published in Britain and the USA to critical acclaim, and has been translated, to date, into five languages; Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter (Penguin, 2009), a study of John Constable’s romance with Maria Bicknell and their lives between 1809 and 1816; and A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (Thames and Hudson, 2011).