Books by Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud's Sketchbooks
by Sarah Howgate, Lucian Freud, Martin Gayford
Previously unpublished drawings from the private sketchbooks of the pre-eminent British painter offer a new perspective on the artist’s personality and artistic genius
This revelatory publication features a selection of beautifully reproduced images from the sketchbooks of Lucian Freud (1922–2011), one of the world’s greatest realist painters. Most of the sketches – which include works in pencil, pastel, and watercolor from across the artist’s long career – are published here for the first time. These fascinating images extend our understanding of Freud’s work and demonstrate the scrutiny he brought to his subjects.
The sketchbooks, now in the archive of the National Portrait Gallery, London, include portraits of Freud’s family members, friends, and lovers. Designs for book covers, images of his beloved dogs and horses, landscapes, and interiors appear among nudes, still lifes, and several sketches that relate to major works. Around and between the drawings are Freud’s annotations and jottings – appointments, racing tips, notes, musings – which, with startling immediacy, provide a glimpse into the working life of one of the 20th century’s most important artists. The book includes an insightful essay by Martin Gayford, who sat for portraits by Freud and knew him well, and an illustrated chronology of the artist’s life.
Published in association with the National Portrait Gallery, London
Exhibition Schedule:
National Portrait Gallery, London
(06/11/16–09/06/16)
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Lucian Freud: 1996-2005
by Lucian Freud
“The greatest living realist painter” is how Robert Hughes described Lucian Freud in 1998. He is probably most famous as a portraitist, a portraitist above all of nudes. Stripped of their clothes, his sitters—mostly friends or family members—are revealed in all their vulnerability. Their gorgeously painted flesh is alive. As Freud himself has said of his nudes, “I used to leave the face to the last. I wanted the expression to be in the body. The head must be just another limb.”
Freud has always worked outside the conventions—academic as well as modernist—of contemporary art. However, his vision reflects the anguish of his time as powerfully as the work of his close friend, the late Francis Bacon, once did. Where Freud triumphs is in his ability to get inside his sitters: not to analyze them, as his grandfather did, but to bring them to sentient life in paint.
Although he works very slowly—most portraits take months to finish—Freud has spent the last ten years (since the publication of the 1996 monograph Lucian Freud) painting day after day, usually from 8 a.m. until midnight. The result has been a corpus of great new works, which reveal him to be the only heir today of Rembrandt, Courbet, and Cézanne.
The most daring of Freud’s recent portraits is a full-length painting of Andrew Parker-Bowles—a new, subtly satirical take on the grand manner that stretches back through van Dyck to Titian. Like Goya, Freud is without reverence. With his portrait of the Queen, you feel the canvas is a window through which Her Majesty is bursting, diadem and all. Freud has also indulged his passion for animals in some wonderfully perceptive studies of horses and his whippet, Pluto. And he has proved to be an acute observer of nature in obsessively meticulous but wonderfully fresh paintings and engravings of the buddleia bush in his garden. This book is a dazzling record of a powerful late period by our last great painter.
Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, the son of the architect Ernst Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to England in 1933. His work has been exhibited in major museums around the world with retrospectives at the Tate Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He lives in London.
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Lucian Freud On Paper
by Lucian Freud
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.
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Modern Art Despite Modernism
by Henri Matisse, Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Robert Storr, Ben Shahn, Salvador Dali, Georgia O'Keeffe, Glenn Lowry, Balthus, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Beckmann, Francesco Clemente, George Grosz, Glenn D. Lowry
Throughout the twentieth century, the evolution of mainstream Modernism in the arts has been shadowed and made complex by alternative expressions of a seemingly retrograde type, art that appears to set back the clock or to redirect the stream of progress. Modern Art Despite Modernism explores the anti-Modernist impulse in painting and sculpture through socio-cultural conflicts of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Texts by Robert Storr advocate the strengths of this impulse in paintings and drawings by Otto Dix, Lucian Freud, Francesco Clemente and even Pablo Picasso--and note the enduring popularity of such artists as Pavel Tchelitchew, whose "Hide and Seek," along with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World," remain among the public's favorite pictures. Storr also discusses taste and its implications, both part and present, for institutions like The Museum of Modern Art. This book was published as the second in a series of three titles, in conjunction with the millennial exhibitions schedule of MoMA2000 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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