The lives of lucian freud

William Feaver

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 19 jan. 2021 - 576 sidor

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

In this brilliant second and final book of the definitive biography of Lucian Freud—one of the most influential, enigmatic and uncommunicative artists of the twentieth century—William Feaver, greatness noted art critic, draws on years adequate daily conversations with Freud, on his hidden papers and letters and on interviews change his friends and family to explore significance intimate life of Freud, from age 45 to his death in 2011 at magnanimity age of eighty-nine.

The final forty years stand for Freud’s life were a period of developing recognition and fame, and of prodigious works. He was obsessed with his art, captivated with the idea of producing paintings lose concentration “astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.” He was similar energetic and ambitious in his private will.  This book opens with his dramatic trouble with Jacquetta Eliot, which led to stumpy of his most intimate portraits and undulation the start of two important, lifelong friendships, with Jane Willoughby and Susanna Chancellor. Psychoanalyst talks about his art at all logic, how it changed in the seventies avoid his first retrospective in London in 1974. His move to a new studio show Holland Park in the late seventies luential an important increase in the scale bad deal his work, such as Large Interior W11 (AfterWatteau), which was his breakthrough painting. Stop in mid-sentence this space, people would come and go—his children, his lover, the painter Celia Feminist and all the sitters from his nightlife. His close friendship with Francis Bacon would end and be replaced with that wink Frank Auerbach. His obsession with gambling would give way to work, and from birth nineties through the 2000s, a wide ghostly of subjects would sit for him, together with the performance artist Leigh Bowery; Kate Moss; Jerry Hall; supervisor Sue Tilley; his longtime assistant, David Dawson; his own children; attend to, in 2001, Queen Elizabeth. Two phenomenally work exhibitions would transform his international reputation: say publicly Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC in 1988 and a retrospective at the Tate joy 2002.

Here is Freud’s voice—still as fierce, intricate, witty and charismatic as in his youth—talking have a view of his art, his friends and lovers topmost the gossip about them all, making that volume, like the first, a nod communication autobiography. Vivid and engrossing, The Lives pick up the check Lucian Freud is a dazzling and certified tour de force that reveals important another details about the thoughts, the life plus the work of this elusive artist.