Monday, June 10, 2019
Lucian Freud, Reflection (Self-portrait), 1985, Private collection, Ireland (The Lucian Freud Archive. Photo: Courtesy Lucian Freud Archive)
Grandson of Sigmund Freud, founder of modern psychoanalysis, Lucian Freud is an expressionist painter who leaves no one indifferent. Born in 1922 in Berlin, he emigrated to London in 1934 with his parents to flee Nazism. Its relation to the flesh is very intimate, almost morbid and it is through this raw representation of the body that the identity of the subject is revealed. The soul is really naked thanks to the expression of the carnation, so real and disturbing … It pushes this realism to the extreme by staging bodies sometimes in a violent ways, highlighting all ungrateful marks of the times that fit forever into this tormented skin. He really has a signature style, marked by thick paint application and a preoccupation with both the physical and psychological flaws of his sitter, developed through his progressive works. He experimented with different types of brushes and the situation of the canvas on his easel.
Painter Working, Reflection (detail; 1993), Lucian Freud.
Photos: © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images
He painted himself obsessively. While it may lack the range of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, or Schiele, Freud’s self-portraits form one of the most complete visual autobiographies of any painter, yielding insight into the self-absorption and relentless drive that fueled the artist. After mostly painting rather lean or even emaciated figures, he worked in the 1990s, on the contrary, on imposing characters: the performer Leigh Bowery and his obese friend Big Sue. A representation of Sue asleep on a sofa sold in 2008 35 million dollars, an absolute record for a work in the lifetime of its author. He began his last work, “Portrait of the hound” four years before his death. Lucian Freud continued until his forces abandoned him but failed to finish.
« I want the painting to be flesh(…) ».
GRAPHIC TRAFIC 