Lucien Freud
Lucien Freud has been called a “living old master”, though he is also squarely placed at the head of modern British painters. Freud’s figurative nudes are sensual and severe at the same time; his portraits are distorted and yet arrestingly accurate. Born in Berlin in 1922, he is the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Lucien Freud’s family moved to England in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism, and he became a UK citizen in 1939. Freud attended several schools on and off, including the East Anglian School of Art. His first major exhibition was at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944 and he participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the 1940s and 50s - mostly showing his portrait and still life work including the 1952 portrait of friend and fellow artist Francis Bacon. In the 1960s Freud produced nude portraits, and though his early work was influenced by expressionism and surrealism, his portrayal of the human form was realistic. During the 1970s Freud created cityscapes of the dilapidated Paddington district of London. In 1990 he met the performance artist Leigh Bowery, and Bowery became the subject of a series of nude portraits. Freud has had several retrospectives of his work, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993 and at the Tate Britain in 2002.
