Lucian Freud's Art
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The arc of Lucian Freud's unusual career can be summed up with the words, more paint and more flesh. Freud began as an extraordinary draughtsman but over the decades his thinly-washed canvases acquired greater and greater accretions of paint laid on in broad, rough strokes. At the same time his work encompassed a searching study of the human body--on a scale seldom seen in the twentieth century. With only a few exceptions Freud's subjects have been portraits, and the majority of these anonymous portraits have been nudes. As Freud increasingly drew with paint the flesh of his sitters was rendered with startling power. The unusual, perhaps unreadable, nature of the relationship between painter and model creates an aura in his paintings that can be, and has been, read as either disinterested or misanthropic, profoundly humane or sadistic. But even those who find Freud's work frightening admire the sheer brilliance of his attack and the single-mindedness of his devotion to his subject--the human body revealed. Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in December, 1922. He was the son of Lucie Brasch (a wealthy grain merchant's daughter) and architect Ernst Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Lucian was one of three brothers and their life in Berlin and at their mother's family estate on the Baltic was "protected, cosseted, close, and rendered all the more so by the anxieties of an Austrian Jewish family under the lengthening shadow of Nazism" (Hughes, Lucian 9). The family
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rgely attempted to achieve perfection rather than represent imperfection. The result of Freud's investigation of the body as it is has led to the opposition in critical positions of those who, as Gayford defines it, see Freud's subjects as "brutally stripped bare" or as "stripped of . . . the banality of conventional expectations" (46).
The nipples of the sitter in Pregnant Girl have a raw, explicitness that is shocking not because of what is shown, therefore, but because of the fact that it is shown much as it is. To audiences used to the idealization that characterizes "the nude," the presentation of the more 'private' parts of the body with the same attention to detail as Freud lavishes on the suggestion of the young woman's beautifully painted hair is startling. There really is little difference in the amount of detail he employs in these two parts of the painting. The hair gives the appearance of real hair made up of highlights that are struck of its darkly dull surface and broken up by the existence of hundred of individual hairs. The lank strand that seems to cling damply to the sleeping woman's neck is no less precisely rendered that the small nodules of darkened flesh that ring the left nipple. Both areas of the p
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Approximate Word count = 3828
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)
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