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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 quotes3 likes

Famous Lucian Freud Quotes

“When I look at a body I know it gives me choices of what to put in a painting; what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.”

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud: Paintings (1987), p. 20
Lucian Freud : Paintings (1987)

“I am only interested in painting the actual person; in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.”

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud: Paintings (1987), p. 20
Lucian Freud : Paintings (1987)

“My colour has no symbolic function whatever. I don't want any colour to be noticeable. I want the colour to be the colour of life, so that you would notice it as being irregular if it changed. I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent. I don't want people to say, "Oh, what was that red or that blue picture of yours, I've forgotten what it was."”

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud: Paintings (1987), p. 16
Lucian Freud : Paintings (1987)

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

Lucian Freud

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

“I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen … that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.”

Lucian Freud

Interview with Martin Gayford, Independent on Sunday 26 May 2002
Other

“URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST”

Lucian Freud

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

“I always felt that my work hadn't much to do with art; my admirations for other art had very little room to show themselves in my work because I hoped that if I concentrated enough the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures. I ignored the fact that art, after all, derives from art. Now I realize that this is the case.”

Lucian Freud

Said in conversation with Robert Hughes and quoted in Hughes' Lucian Freud: Paintings (1987) ISBN 0-500-27535-1, p. 14
Lucian Freud : Paintings (1987)

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