Lucian Freud On Paper

by Lucian Freud, Richard Calvocoressi (Contributor), Sebastian Smee (Contributor)

Lucian Freud is widely regarded as one of the greatest living artists, and drawing is fundamental to his development as an artist and to how he sees. Speaking recently about his early years he claimed, "I would have thought I did 200 drawings to every painting in those early days. I very much prided myself on my drawing." Drawing became an important part of Freud’s life from the start and a famous sketchbook, The Freud-Schuster Book, has survived dating back to January 1940, when Freud was in Snowdonia with Stephen Spender, as do sketches from Freud’s life as a merchant seaman on a cargo vessel in the Atlantic in 1941. His then surreal style lent itself to illustrations and his fascination with animals, birds, and fish was revealed in the famous line drawings he produced for Nicholas Moore’s book of poems, The Glass Tower (1944). This volume charts Freud’s work on paper, including the etchings, over his entire career. It includes the formative early work, the sketches in preparation for painting his masterpiece, Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) (1983), the sketches of the completed painting in the studio and the astonishing later studies of his mother. The book ends with the etchings of recent years. The works on paper are an extraordinary achievement, providing even deeper insights into the work of perhaps the greatest figurative artist of our time.

Genres: Art

264 pages, Hardcover

First published November 25, 2008

About the author

Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.

His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.