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 emigrated to England in 1938 and Lucian, barely 11, was uncomfortable at school--even though he attended the wildly free Dartington Hall which specialized in "training the young to social responsibility by giving them freedom of choice" (Hughes, Lucian, 10). Freud went his own way at the school and his choice was usually to tend goats rather than attend classes. As he recalled, "I was very solitary. I hardly spoke English. I was considered rather bad-tempere...