Being with Lucian Freud has been described by one of his models as “sticking your fingers into a socket and staying connected for half an hour to the mains”. That, just chatting with him, let alone posing for a portrait, a real electroshock. Being his friend, his lover, his wife (she rejected monogamy) or his son was very complicated at the best of times, of which his own life – now celebrating the centenary of his birth – is proof. more than reliable.
One of the giants of the last century in the world of art, oblivious to expressionist histrionics, no one has gone so deep psychologically with his brush into the intimacy of people, or painted with such detail and tender scrutiny all the nooks and crannies of the human body. , from a pimple on the neck to the veins of the feet. The variety and density of his multidirectional brushstrokes, the complexity of colors and textures, is amazing. He did not paint simply to offer a recognizable image of something or someone, or to penetrate the soul of an individual with his scalpel, but to generate disturbing or uncomfortable sensations.
“You must think that I am incredibly slow, but believe me when I say that I am going a hundred miles an hour and if I go any faster the car is going to fall off a cliff,” he told the already nervous Queen Elizabeth after twenty sessions. posing for the famous –and controversial– portrait he did of her. He did not have so much contemplation with his models, who were often at the same time his lovers, and with his daughters Bella and Annie (he had no shame in painting them nude, independence and art came first, and then came all other considerations ).
Influenced in his early days by surrealism and later inclined towards realism, Freud sometimes proved too risky for conservative critics, patrons and collectors who would have preferred him to be less crude in his portrayal of the human body, and to place a little more emphasis on beauty. traditional. For others, however, his devotion to portraiture and painting was not "radical" or "avant-garde" enough.
Up to seven different exhibitions – a retrospective with sixty paintings at the National Gallery and other smaller ones on his family life, his painter friends, his paintings of plants and flowers, his fascination with horses and his passion for gambling – pay him these days tribute in an already wintry and dark London. Grandson of Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, and son of the architect Ernst Freud, he was born in Berlin in 1922 and his family left Germany to flee from the Nazis. The year Hitler came to power, when he was eleven, he settled in England, and obtained British citizenship before he was twenty. He studied at the prestigious Goldsmith College and, during World War II, served in the Navy and the merchant marine.
If his grandfather revolutionized the way we understand the human mind, Lucian Freud revolutionized the vision of the human body and the history of 20th century art in a long career that spanned seven decades. The influence of his ancestor is evident in his psychological insight and almost forensic analysis of parent-child, love relationships (he married Kitty Garman and Caroline Blackwood, had countless lovers and at least fourteen children), friendship, and artist-model relationships. . An exhibition at the Gagossian gallery deals with his long relationship with Francis Bacon –which ended like the rosary of the author, in an irreversible rupture–, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach (with whom he had a common history, since he also fled as a child from the Nazis). All of them were rivals, shared models, and appear together in an iconic black and white photo in London's Soho (1963).
Aesthetically speaking, he has been placed in the same league as Rembrandt, Degas, Rodin, and Courbet, and was a professional seducer who rubbed shoulders with criminals, gangsters, supermodels, novelists, movie stars, and aristocrats. But above all he made portraits that, more than paintings, are authentic autopsies. A prodigy of texture, density and color, his works, in reality, have nothing to do with reproductions.
