Analytical review of Lucian Freud

‘Complete an analytical review of Lucian Freud’

Lucian Freud is a German painter, he became working as a full time artist in 1942 when he was taken out of the navy after serving in action for three months. Known to be the greatest figurative painter of all time, using close friends, fellow painters, lovers, children and acquaintances to pose for him rather than using professional models.
This was all to do with memories, hope, sensuality and the involvement. He did this as he wanted to paint someone who wanted to be in the pictures, rather than someone who simply wanted the money for being there.

Freud began his studies at the central school of art, London from 1938/1939. From there he went onto the East Anglian school of painting and drawing in Debham in 1942/1943. Also he attended Goldsmiths’ College part time in these years.
His first exhibition was held in 1974 at the Hayward gallery in London, However his first sell out exhibition wasn’t until 2002 at the Tate Gallery.

Lucian Freud had an early fascination with comic strips, dating from the mid 19th century. Which affected the development of his work.
His work was highly influenced by Ingres, this was mainly because he would spend a lot of time copying his work.

The style of Lucian Freuds’ work has been changed significantly since he first started his career to where he has ended up today. His earliest work was often looked at as ‘Surrealism’ before experimenting with expressionism and realism. This work depicted people, animals and plants. From the 1950’s he began painting portraits, excluding most other things, for this he was using a thicker impasto. His work is often the model he is painting ‘sprawled’ on a floor or across a bed. Alternatively, the sitter is positioned with something else like in his paintings; Girl with a white dog or Naked man with a rat. When looking through the work he has created it is clear that the use of animals in his work is widespread.
The bulk of his work including nude females, interiors, city landscapes and plants. All of this work would’ve been created with a ‘muted’ palette and very visible brushwork.

His techniques varied highly, until the mid 1950’s he worked in a tight focused style pretty much working from ‘trial and error’ The piece of work known as ‘Landscape with Birds’ was an experiment with enamel paints. He experimented with these as he thought this was something that Picasso would have used.

After 1956, his style changed dramatically. He had now began to loosen his style, gradually beginning to put his own mark on his work. He began using stiffer hogshair brushes instead of his fine pointed sable brushes.


An example of his transformation in his painting technique is ‘Woman Smiling.’ Comparing this painting to his ‘Landscape with Birds’ We can see a large number of differences, the overall difference being that he now paints in a realistic style where before hand he seemed to paint a more surrealistic style.

Another thing that changed in the 1950’s is that Lucian Freud had always painted sitting down, he began to create his work standing up which saw more energetic and ‘athletic’ feels come into his work.
After a phase in the 60’s Lucian Freud soon settled into a constant style of painting after reaching a ‘traditional’ style in his career. In the 70’s he soon began using a pigment known as ‘Cremnitz white’ which was to be used for the painting of flesh.

Deliberately Freud would work extremely slowly, a new technique he developed would be to clean his paint brush using cloths after every brush stroke. Taking a minimum of seven months to complete one piece of work it wasn’t unusual for Lucian Freud to scrap an image. He now worked on two or three images at any one time, consisting or two or three sessions every day starting early in the morning and finishing under artificial lighting at night.

The paintings he creates are nearly always grotesque in some form. For him ‘ The ugly is the beautiful, everyone is ugly.’ Yet this is what causes all the fascination in his paintings. Critiques gave a mixed response to his work using the words; ‘violent, affected and shocking’ as just a few of the words to describe his creations.

I feel Freud is an artist I could look to for inspiration in my life drawings as I find the way he has developed his techniques in painting something I could learn from.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1184364,00.html


http://painting.about.com/od/famouspainters/p/bio_LucianFreud.htm

http://www.answers.com/topic/lucian-freud

http://arthistory.about.com/cs/namesff/p/freud_l.htm

http://painting.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=painting&cdn=hobbies&tm=135&f=10&su=p284.9.336.ip_p504.3.336.ip_&tt=11&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/freud/default.htm

http://wwar.com/masters/f/freud-lucian.html