Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open

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by Phoebe Hoban

Phoebe Hoban, author of authoritative biographies of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alice Neel, now turns her attention to Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund and one of the greatest painters England has produced. Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the first biography to assess Freud’s work and life, showing how the two converge. In Hoban’s dramatic and fast-paced narrative, we follow Freud from his birthplace in Berlin to London, where he fled with his family in the 1930s, and then to Paris, where he mixed with Picasso and Giacometti. He led a dissolute life in Soho after the war, gambling and womanizing with fierce energy. He painted his wives nude, his children nude, himself nude. He married twice, had an uncountable number of children, and kept working through it all, painting everyone from close friend and rival Francis Bacon to Kate Moss to Queen Elizabeth. He sometimes spent years on a single painting, which could require hundreds of hours of sittings. However various his subjects, his intent was always the same: to find and reveal the character hidden within by means of his intense visual imagination.

Along with its startling biographical revelations, the great thrill of Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the way Hoban deconstructs the art itself—its influences, models, and technique—to show how Freud reproduced reality on the canvas while breaking down the illusion that what we see is real.

Genres: Art, Biography, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Criticism, British Literature

194 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 15, 2014

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open by Phoebe Hoban is an exhilarating introduction to the life and work of Lucian Freud, the 20th into the 21st century artist of "famously intense focus," whose belief that art should "astonish, disturb, seduce, convince," was arguably realized in his work. Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, father of many children, including author Esther Freud, as well as other writers and visual artist, was charismatic, charming, faithless to everything but his art, brilliant.

Hoban's book pushed me to look at Freud's paintings. Her portrait made me want to read everything else about both the man and his art. His art, what I have seen so far, has frightened, fascinated, and intrigued me. I feel more awake about the world.

The book is an easy read, hard to forget, with an excellent bibliography. If you don't know Freud's work or you are interested in knowing more about the man, I highly recommend this book as a place to start. There are very few biographies I want to reread: this is one of them. The biggest problem I had was that the pictures on my old kindle were unclear so if you don't have a color kindle, you might want a paper copy of this book. In the end, I didn't care. The book pushed me to seek out further encounters with Freud's work. I think that's what a good biography of an artist should do-teach you something about the person and push you back towards their work.

I will now seek out Hoban's other books about artists - Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty and Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art.

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

What should have been an amazing read, given the fascinating subject, turns out to be basically a straight reporting of the many lovers Freud had and the number of children he spawned, somewhat irresponsibly, though I doubt any of them, if they could, would argue their way back to their mother’s womb successfully. This book happened to be my introduction to Lucian Freud. His art is nothing really that interests me a great deal, but his methods and possible psychosis I think would. Being a grandson of Sigmund Freud would offer much to consider regarding the artist’s long life and relationships with other notable characters from the British SOHO that existed in the same underbelly as regards their art. More of a personal study of his relationships with Francis Bacon and John Deakin alone would have been thrilling to me. But, it was not to be. And perhaps never will unless it gets made-up as most of history undoubtedly seems to.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Engagingly written but the lack of references is a bit troubling as it's not always clear where Hoban is getting her information. When I did manage to trace something, (Freud's first published work, in a small journal in 1940) it was published as 'Portrait' but Hoban states it's a self-portrait with no reasoning of why she thinks this is. Made me a bit leery of taking other statements at face value. The index was also pretty bad but luckily didn't have to rely on that as it's a short & quick read!

[Tanya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poorly conceived. Poorly written. Poorly edited. Very few photo references. I don't mind disjointed time in novels but it's very difficult to follow in a biography. The author hops from decade to decade hardly keeping to a dedicated theme. Once I crested the 50% mark in this slog, there still wasn't a single mention of Freud's working process. This is a book about a painter but it doesn't mention the paintings except to regurgitate the list of sitters from other sources- often without linking sitters to painting titles. And the core writing, strung like beads between quotes from other sources, is so confusing it almost takes on surreal cast. Like these lines, ostensibly about a painting of Freud's pregnant daughter:

"The painting is unsparing in its detail, from her swollen breasts to the redness above her distended belly; she gave birth the next day."

The next day? The next day after what? There is a progression of time being illustrated but no qualifier. Are we supposed to assume that she gave birth after the painting's completion? A few paragraphs prior it said that Freud only completed 6 paintings a year. He certainly didn't complete this work in a day but over the course of several months. Why am I spending so much time trying to figure out this single non-consequential sentence? The whole book is just utterly confusing. The only clarity came from quotes from other sources.

Really, this is a waste. There must be other reads out there on Freud. I learned more from a few Guardian articles. But I leave you with one other major quibble. The author describes Freud's supposed first love as woman named Lorna Wishart. In illustrating her as a despicable femme fatal who causes irreparable harm to Freud, the author shares an anecdote about how Lorna snagged her first husband by seducing him when she was fourteen. What she is describing in such scintillating and lurid terms isn't a seduction. I believe there is another word for a situation where a man in his third decade has sex with a child of fourteen. And to use this anecdote to vilify a woman as a proven vixen is beyond reprehensible.

[Moritz Mueller-Freitag · Rating 3 out of 5]

This concise and engagingly written biography of Lucian Freud offers a good introduction to the artist and his legacy. Hoban does a great job in tracing Freud’s evolution as an artist through his paintings – from the illustrative, empathetically flat style of his early works (1940s through early 1950s) to the more painterly, sculptural approach of his later works (mid-1950s onwards). Unfortunately, the book is very poorly illustrated. If you have some money to spare, consider investing in the 2007 Rizzoli publication by William Feaver or the new slip-cased monograph by Phaidon, both of which feature full-page color plates of the paintings that Hoban discusses. Without one of these two monographs open in front of you, it is a somewhat painful reading experience.

Another point of criticism is Hoban’s armchair theory that Freud might have had Asperger’s, as apparently demonstrated by his obsessive attention to detail and the addictive nature of his personality (womanizing, gambling, painting). These and other salient idiosyncrasies lead Hoban to speculate that Freud’s realism was “perhaps not so much an aesthetic choice as an instinctive strategy, a coping mechanism to transmute an inherited behavioral tic into highly original art.” I frankly don’t buy that argument and it seems highly unlikely given Freud’s colorful social life and his irresistible charm.

[Chris Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is worthwhile.

[Betty-Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, concise biography of Lucian Freud. Just what I was looking for.

[Caroline Mathews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow.

I never respected the artist Lucian Freud nor his unsettling work.

Now, at least, I understand how the man was driven by his deep-seated, personal, need to dominate - to command obedience even from the very colors going down onto the canvas. He mixed specific paint for every individual brush stroke. He persevered in his life's work until the very light, itself, at last seemed subservient to him as he worked his will on the surfaces of the paintings.

Of course, we knew that the works of Lucian Freud, themselves, were nothing like any before or since. They stand alone as one man's expressionistic/surrealistic vision of the world as only he saw it; his own lusts, fears, doubts, inability to accept less than absolute control, were all reflected in the eyes of his subjects who sat for hours, weeks, months for him to complete one portrait.

That he could compel everyone he knew, both men and women - beautiful and not - to throw off their clothing and assume unfavorable positions (to the viewer) for him is, itself, a sign of how Freud surreptitiously commanded complete obedience from his family and friends.

I won't go into all of that now. The grandson of Sigmund Freud - compulsive gambler, risk taker, filling London from corner to corner with his illegitimate children and cast-off lovers, painting all night and most of the day, using his own unclothed adult children in his paintings is simply not my favorite personality in the art world, but I think I've come to grips with the work itself. That is an accomplishment for me, personally, albeit the paintings of Lucian Freud have commanded some of the highest prices in modern art history.

The book is heavily annotated but somehow doesn't read like a research paper. Many of the insights are actually author Phoebe Hoban's and she gives other thinkers and analysts credits when credits are due. When I went back to look at the paintings again, I noticed many of her personal explanations and descriptions and could finally see something amazing, if not "beautiful," in the startling and disconcerting paintings.

[J.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoban’s biography is an eye-opening look at the life and work of one of the premier realist artists of modern times.

Freud discouraged most attempts at biography during his lifetime. The frankness of family members, friends and possibly even a few enemies interviewed by Hoban discloses a man driven by an obsessive creativity as analytic as the mental probing of his grandfather, Sigmund Freud.

Like many artists, Lucian Freud began drawing at an early age. Though he was admitted to the Central Arts and Crafts School in London at the young age of 16, he lasted only one term, preferring to find his way with a teacher of his own choosing.

Lucian’s talent was nurtured by his father, Ernst, who gave up his own desire to paint in favor of the “more pragmatic” profession of architecture, as well as his grandfather, who gave him materials and was “marvelously understanding and amused” by the boy’s interest in art.

Touching on speculation Freud may have had Asperger’s syndrome, Hoban suggests his realism may not have been an aesthetic choice but rather an instinctive strategy for coping with the behavioral tic. She also sees this as a possible link to his addiction to women, gambling and other foibles as well as his difficulty in relating to his lovers and children, other than as models.

She also relates his long relationship with Francis Bacon. Given Freud’s stubborn independence, in some ways it seems surprising how quickly he abandoned his original graphically-based technique for the later impasto style under the influence of Bacon.

It was only late in life that he achieved financial success and an international reputation, both thanks to association with William Aquavella, a New York-based dealer, who even went to the extreme of paying off a hefty gambling debt.

The artist, who continued to paint up till his death at 88, married twice, had numerous lovers and fathered at least 14 children in addition to creating a remarkable collection of paintings and etchings. Not a bad legacy for any artist.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a great book. Although it is very disappointing to find out yet another great artist who was a narcissistic absent father. If a female artist or musician had abandoned 14 children (14 children because they refused birth control), drank, gambled, committed endless adultery and not paid child maintenance I do not think they would be this successful and highly regarded. Children who are emotionally or physically abandoned by fathers are 5 times more likely to suicide.

Coincidently if you look at Picasso's family you will find that his second wife, a longtime mistress and a grandson committed suicide. His oldest son was killed by drink and almost everyone else related to him was scarred by the experience.*

I still think his paintings are amazing but at what cost? Also is this sort of abuse that we want future artists to emulate and reward while looking the other way?

*http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/boo...

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

When working with such a difficult subject, the author needs to do more work not less. Lucian Freud was notoriously private, Horan doesn't do much to penetrate this, relying on long quotes from his family uncritically. She also fails to convince the reader of his brilliance or importance. The book also suffers from a lack of images of his work. However as a straightforward summary of Freud's life this brief introduction works fine.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reads like a senior undergraduate thesis with a multitude of quotes strung together from other authors. Facts are repeated often demonstrating weak editing. The cataloging of Freud's works, lovers, and children gets old quickly. For a subject which should easily create a fascinating work, the book is dry and boring.

[Marcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

My introduction to a fascinating artist......i read on my Kindle and used my iPad to find images......a bit awkward. The info was fascinating, the writing so-so. Lots of information, no spark of life.

[Akin]

My review for Ha'aretz
http://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.pr...

What is one to make of Lucian Freud? Most art critics would still agree with Robert Hughes’ assessment of him as “the greatest living realist painter” (this was in the 1980s: Freud died, at the age of 88, in 2011). But there was also the fascination, often prurient, with Freud the personality: the inveterate gambler, the misanthrope, the appetite for feuding and fornication.

It is difficult, I believe, to remain unmoved by the grandeur of Freud’s portraiture, the epic canvases revealing a meticulous – even obsessive – attention to detail and nuance. But is it possible to engage with Freud the painter without being swayed by the reputation of Freud the personality?

“Lucian Freud, Eyes Wide Open,” a brief and at times illuminating monograph by the American journalist Phoebe Hoban, goes some way toward answering this question. Hoban takes the context of the interpersonal, offering a consideration of Freud’s relationships with his family, his friends and his lovers as expressed on the canvas. It is correct that Freud’s reputation could for some occlude close consideration of his work. But, as Hoban points out, Freud walked a singular artistic path for many years, thanks to a stubborn insistence on the primacy of characterization in his work. (Kenneth Clark, a director of London’s National Gallery and an early admirer, wrote to Freud in 1963, accusing him of deliberately suppressing everything that had once made his work admirable.)

Hoban presents the artist’s life’s work as largely a war of attrition, a war he won through persistence and sheer bloody-mindedness, no mean qualities in the capricious and fad-driven art world. And these qualities manifested themselves in his private life, too, in relationships mediated by his single-minded obsession with the canvas.

“My object in painting pictures is to try and move the senses by giving an intensification of reality,” Freud once said. “Whether this can be achieved depends on how intensely the painter understands and feels for the person, or the object of his choice… the painter makes real to others the innermost feelings about all he cares for.”

It sounds a bit trite, but the intimate truth about Freud – and whether this was anyone else’s business but his own is another matter – was hiding pretty much in plain sight. The trick lies in knowing how to look; and when Hoban stays with the facts, she is a confident and shrewd guide.

‘Someone to be hunted down’

Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, the middle son of Ernst and Lucie. His architect-father was the youngest son of Sigmund, the founding father of psychoanalysis; his mother the daughter of a successful corn merchant. Hoban suggests that the Freuds were not particularly self-consciously Jewish: Lucian’s middle name, Michael, referred to the archangel, as did the middle names of his brothers. He would describe his early childhood in Berlin as conventional. “Then, around 1929, I became aware of being a Jew. Suddenly one was an outsider, someone to be hunted down. I rebelled of course, and became resentful.”

Hoban, perhaps surprisingly, does not follow this early sense of apartness very far, which is a shame. Freud, for his part, seems to have retained an ambivalence about his origins – or at least about the fact that they were foisted upon him – both then and later in life. “Being Jewish, I never think about it,” he told Leigh Bowery – one of his more famous sitters – many years later. “Yet it’s a part of me.”

Whether Freud thought of himself as Jewish then or not is perhaps a moot point, since the Nazis were going to do this for him in any case. The family moved to London in 1933 and Freud – who spoke no English at the time – had a fairly torrid time in school. This was much of his own doing, however. He was asked to leave one boarding school after baring his bottom in the street for a bet, and at another spent much more time in the school’s stables than in classes. But after an unsettled period, Freud was taken under the wing of Cedric Morris, who ran an art school in Essex. Freud, apparently, burned the school down by accident, but before this picked up important tips on theory and technique from his mentor that served him well.

“[Morris] worked in a very odd way,” Hoban quotes Freud. “Used to start at the top and then go down, like a tapestry maker, from top to bottom as if he was unrolling something that was actually there.”

Later, Freud would employ an approximation of the same method, applying himself thoroughly to one section of a canvas before moving on to another. After a brief stint in the Merchant Navy during World War II, Freud set himself up in a studio in the (then) insalubrious Paddington neighborhood of London, and began to find his way as an artist.

I suppose it’s pointless to expect a book about Sigmund Freud’s grandson not to contain some psychoanalysis by proxy. To Hoban’s credit, she does limit herself to gentle speculation rather than attempting dramatic exposition. Take his mother Lucie, for example. According to the art historian John Richardson, Freud’s notorious claim that he started off with no talent was a deliberate riposte aimed at his mother. Hoban reports that Lucie once bought out the entirety of a small show that Freud put on as a teenager.

“It traumatised him – that his mother had bought out everything,” she quotes Lady Caroline Blackwood – Freud’s second wife – as observing. “She didn’t give anyone any time to buy them, she just zoomed in. It’s an aggression, isn’t it?”

Freud, for his part, described his mother as “insistently maternal”; it could be, although Hoban doesn’t make much of this, that he was at the least discomfited by her dominant female persona. What she does point out, though, is that Freud became a much more attentive son in the early 1970s, after Lucie tried to kill herself in the wake of Ernst’s death. It might be that Freud finally felt he could take the stronger role in the relationship. He painted her repeatedly over the period, with Lucie sitting for him for more than 4,000 hours. Once, during a casual conversation, she remarked to Freud colloquially that she wasn’t “in the picture,” meaning that she didn’t understand what he meant. He replied, “You’re in all the pictures.”

Priapic instincts

Where Hoban might have legitimately made something from the available material, but doesn’t, is in Freud’s notorious relationship with women. He was married twice, and had innumerable sexual liaisons throughout his life. He didn’t use contraception and – according to Hoban – refused to allow his partners to do so either. He had, according to informed estimates, 14 children: two from his first marriage, the others from assorted mistresses. He referred to himself, in jest one assumes, as “one of the great absent fathers of the age.” His contact with his children during their childhood was at best sporadic, the conventions of parenthood swept aside by unrepentant self-mindedness.

While Hoban retains a respectful authorial distance from Freud’s priapic instincts and parental strategies, I think there are two good reasons to explore this in closer detail.

The first is considering how it fits into the mythology of Freud that forms a part of his artistic legacy. Freud was frequently cast as a recluse, as someone who rarely gave interviews or talked about his work. Given its reliance on secondary sources, Hoban’s book goes some way toward dispelling this myth. Freud, it seems, was happy to talk about his work so far as he trusted his interlocutor to be artistically literate and fair. Hoban’s book pulls together an interesting and informed assessment of Freud by actually going to the trouble of finding out what he himself had to say about his work. Up to a point, the myth of privacy was a red herring, garnished with the salacious detail of his private life.

The second reason why Freud’s relationship with women is important is that, simply put, they are actually a part of his artistic legacy. The visual chronology of portraits like “Woman with a Daffodil” (1945), of Lorna Wishart, an early love, to “Girl In a Dark Jacket” (1947) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1950) – both of his first wife, Kitty Garman, also Wishart’s niece – through “Girl In Bed” (1952) and “Hotel Bedroom” (1954) (of Caroline Blackwood, his second wife) is revealing.

Hoban does an excellent job in tracing Freud’s evolution as an artist through his paintings. His maturity as a portraitist, she notes, coincides with his tempestuous second – and last – marriage to Blackwood, the Guinness heir. By all accounts, he was cut up quite badly when she left him, in 1959; during this period, his paintings took on the deeper, visceral quality that remained with him for the rest of his career.

“Although I’m not very introspective, I think that all this had an emotional basis,” he said about this period. “It was to do with questioning myself as a result of the way my life was going… I didn’t want my work to lean on anyone in particular. I wanted it to lean on me.”

From “Eyes Wide Open,” one gets the sense that Freud’s unconventionality in his personal life afforded him the liberty to do unconventional things on the canvas. Living and painting weren’t distinct and separate activities; there was a flow of information and ideas and emotions between the two.

Freud painted most of his daughters – and his sons, although fewer people seem exercised by this – in the nude, from the late 1960s onward. Esther Freud was one of the first, and she explains it in lucidly simple terms: “You have a choice, and not all his children have made it, from very young, that you can get the good bit if you want to accept what he’s like, or you cannot get it by being angry for him not being like someone else’s father.”

Getting Lucian Freud’s “good bit” did mean, for her, posing for her father. But as she describes it, it was a rewarding and fulfilling experience. Isobel Boyt, another daughter, says that “posing was a way of being in a relationship with Dad.” And Annie Freud, a third daughter: Posing for a nude portrait was “deepening the transaction.”

Hoban digresses briefly, genteelly, into speculating about whether Freud might have been homosexual (well, in his case, bisexual, quite obviously) or autistic. She doesn’t make much of either line of inquiry, but does make the useful point that for Freud, his canvases were his way of negotiating relationships.

Hoban, at the very beginning of the book, remarks that it would be almost impossible to write about Lucian Freud without drawing a parallel between his grandfather’s psychoanalytical sessions and Freud’s repeated sessions with his sitters. (One painting, from a few years before his death, required 2400 hours of sitting over 16 months. Every day of those 16 months, except five.) Initially, I thought that perhaps Hoban was stretching a metaphor a bit too far. But by the end of her book, it feels rather apt. Painting was a very public way for Lucian Freud to make sense of his world.

Akin Ajayi is a freelance writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv.

[Sally Loper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucien Freud's claim to fame had nothing to do with being the grandson of Sigmund Freud. On his own, he was an extraordinary complex, extraordinarily talented, and brilliant man. He was, apparently, also quite charming, fun, witty, and an with an intensity that would "mesmerize" people

He is described as being "addicted to women, gambling and painting." So what! He succeeded profoundly in all these areas. He lived life "on the edge." Impossible to keep up with the number of women with whom he was involved, deeply at times, nor the number of children he had -- a loving father at times. He was amazingly broke until his later life, despite making good money, because of his gambling. (He owed several millions at various points in his life. The idea GA would have been a joke to him.}

He literally painted day and night, working on one set of paintings during the day, and another set at night. He went through a multitude of stages with watercolor, painting, and sculpture.

He lived in a hovel for a long time, only in his later years moving to a lovely loft.

Quite funny -- he was an inverse and obvious snob. He was involved with very poor young women, models, etc., and proud of the extremely wealthy and titled women, as well. They were, of course, all really beautiful, as shown in the photos with him. They also got younger and younger, e.g., in his 60's, he was involved with an 18-year-old-model. I forgot to mention he was incredibly good-looking. I was stunned when I saw his photo; he certainly could have been a movie star.

I was sorry to finish the book. I was enthralled.

Perhaps a good ending is a quote from his grandfather, Sigmund Freud to Ferenzi:

“A man should not try to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.”

Finito!

[James Frase-White · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've shelved this book: a poorly written history of this painter's life; a party of egotism and elitism, of the worst British kind. I find my enthusiasm for Freud's work dwindling as I read of his egocentricity, manipulation and use of others, female and male. To trace his actions to psychological faults is too tempting, which he would disregard. The refusal to use birth control, and the fathering (physically, not emotionally) of the 14 known is indicative of his demanding/commanding charms. His early works, so praised by critics, I find to be meager, often things that I would have thought good in a young artist are hardly masterly. In order to respect his works again, many of which are powerful, I feel I must deny myself by continuing to look into his life story.

[Krista Park · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a lot about an artist I'd previously only heard mentioned in passing. The arc of his career helps me better understand the place of figurative painting in today's art culture. The narrator was also decent on the audiobook. This was a short, informative book. It could have used a slightly better editor because some phrases were repeated suspiciously close themselves.

[Sean Baity · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great to learn his work habits, not so great to hear he beat people up and fathered a score or more children out of wedlock as he hated contraceptives.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of Freud and his life.

[Scott Gilbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but poorly written. Very repetitive, flat delivery. No insight into the paintings.

[Le · Rating 3 out of 5]

不知道是不是传记都这么难读……（严重怀疑翻译太差）

[Candace Ethelston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doesn’t want to be his granddad!!

[Fredrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gateway to the William Feaver bios?

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phoebe Hoban's biography of Lucian Freud is a well-written, well-researched, and fascinating book. I knew little about the artist until I read this book; I have always admired his art, although there is much I also do not admire about the man after reading this biography. He was a womanizer, a lousy father, and often matter-of-factly described himself as selfish, but he was a brilliant artist. Some of his behaviour (and his artistic brilliance) can possibly be explained by the suggestion that he probably had Asperger's syndrome, something I believe was quite likely. This book is packed with information and insight's about the artist's family, history, relationships, artistic achievments, etc., and I thoroughly enjoyed it, not only because I am an artist myself, a lover of art, and I admire the work of Lucian Freud, but also because the book is engaging and insightful. I recommend it.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

sexsexsex

[Christopherch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly illuminating account of a man in art absorbed. Most of the source material came from video documentaries.