Lucian Freud Quotes

Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draftsman, specializing in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century British portraitists.

He was born in Berlin, the son of a Jewish architect and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to Britain in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. From 1942-43 he attended Goldsmiths College, London. He enlisted in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War.

His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.

✵ 8. December 1922 – 20. July 2011
Lucian Freud photo
Lucian Freud: 7   quotes 3   likes

Famous Lucian Freud Quotes

“I paint people not because of what they are like… but how they happen to be.”

"A Queen of many colours," interview with Martin Gayford, Daily Telegraph, (2006-04-20), p. 3
Other

“URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST”

Words cited by Hughes as written by Freud on a wall in his studio.
Lucian Freud: Paintings (1987), p. 22
Lucian Freud : Paintings (1987)

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