In 1995 the art critic David Sylvester caused a stir by suggesting in the Guardian that Lucian Freud – by then 73 and widely acknowledged as a major figurative British artist – was “not a real painter”. Freud, Sylvester wrote, lacked natural talent but had achieved his success through “a huge effort of will applied to the realisation of a highly personal and searching vision of the world”. Was Sylvester right? It’s pretty obvious from the clenched distortions of Freud’s apprentice portraits that his innate weaknesses contributed as much as his strengths to the development of a distinctive approach. Nor was he, in the course of a 70-year career, ever much interested in composition, disliking the element of stagecraft involved. And yet somehow the result of a lifetime of ferocious application was a style that is as singular as that of Rembrandt or Frans Hals.
William Feaver, a friend and collaborator of Freud’s for 30 years, gives us a Lucian who always resisted categorisation. The grandson of Sigmund and a Berlin-born refugee to Britain from Hitler’s Germany who spoke all his life with a foreign intonation, Freud became a key if reluctant member in the 1940s of the group of painters known as the School of London. The first volume of this capacious double-decker of a biography covered Freud’s two brief marriages; the shift away from his early enamelled surfaces to the loose fleshliness of his mature work; the many distractions – “gambling, betting and amorous pursuits” – of the 1960s. The second begins as he’s hitting middle age, with just over 40 years of studio life ahead of him.
Having enjoyed almost unrivalled daily access to Freud, Feaver records with little editorial filtering the egotism, the sexual prowling and the remorseless urge to produce of these later years, allowing Freud to reveal himself in his own words on every page. It’s a mesmerising picture of a paintaholic who was incorrigibly on the make. Freud’s search for new young female models was, Feaver shows, also a search for fresh sexual partners. Since he could have as many as nine canvases on the go at any one time, the women came and went in rotation.
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