Lucian Freud Portraits

Portraits were central to the work of Lucian Freud (1922-2011). Working only from life, the artist claimed, "I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me." This major retrospective catalogue surveys Freud's portraits across the seven decades of his career. Featuring the finest portraits from public and private collections around the world, the book explores the stylistic development and remarkable technical virtuosity of an artist regarded as one of the most innovative figurative painters the medium has known.

Freud's chosen subjects were often his intimates—family members, friends, and artistic colleagues such as Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Leigh Bowery, and David Hockney. Freud was private man who rarely gave interviews, and his thoughts on the complex relationship between artist and sitter and the challenges of painting nudes and self-portraits are published here for the first time, documented in a series of interviews with Michael Auping, conducted between May 2009 and January 2011. An illustrated chronology of the artist's life provides fascinating insights into Freud's background as a grandson of Sigmund Freud, and his unorthodox artistic education.

An essential book for every personal art library, this lavishly illustrated volume celebrates the work and career of an artist who overturned traditional portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art.

"This remarkable exhibition catalogue for shows at London's National Portrait Gallery and the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, brings together the portraits of one of the masters of the form. In stark contrast to the trajectory of most painting in the 20th century — and even artists considered to be his peers such as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff — Freud's unwavering realist impulse 'established itself as a counterpoint not only to abstraction, but to much of the figurative art that was developing around him.' Viewing 'the process of sitting as a transaction between himself and his sitter,' he worked strictly with live models, hoping to capture 'the pulsating liquidity of the breathing body that was in front of him.' Certainly, this is what makes early efforts like 1952's 'Girl in Bed' so disturbing and effective; a simultaneously intimate and indifferent expression graces the face of the subject, which dominates the composition. Later paintings — such as those of performance artist Leigh Bowery, or Freud's elderly mother — work within a similar matrix of familiarity and alienation, the thicker layers of paint becoming at once lifelike and sterile. Without a doubt the recently deceased painter's oeuvre fulfills his own criteria for compelling artwork, in that it must, as he puts it, 'astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.' 200 color illus. (Apr. 17)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"For me, the paint is the person."—Lucian Freud

Sarah Howgate is curator of contemporary portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and author of David Hockney Portraits (Yale). Michael Auping is chief curator at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth and coauthor of Ed Ruscha: Road Tested. John Richardson is author of the three-volume biography A Life of Picasso.