Lucian Freud, one of Britain’s most distinguished and acclaimed artists, has died at the age of 88. Described as a “great realist painter,” Freud first came to prominence when he was just twenty-one, with his first highly successful one-man-show in 1944.

Freud’s early work was illustrative - doe-eyed portraits of his wife Caroline Blackwood, or his friend, Francis Bacon, which are reminiscent of the work of Stanley Spencer, and seem almost polite representations compared to his later giant nudes. Freud was greatly impressed by Bacon, and the older artist influenced Freud’s development as a painter. Freud and Bacon exhibited alongside Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, a loose grouping of London artists,  whose work established the foundations for figurative painting for decades to come.

The critic David Sylvester named Bacon as the head, while Freud

“produced easily the best portraits painted in this country during the last decade.”

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Freud’s technique changed as he began to use impasto to create intense, almost physical assaults on his sitters. Freud said of his portraits:

“I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.”

The New York Times writes:

Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud and a brother of the British television personality Clement Freud, was already an important figure in the small London art world when, in the immediate postwar years, he embarked on a series of portraits that established him as a potent new voice in figurative art.

In paintings like “Girl With Roses” (1947-48) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends and intimates — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection.

From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Mr. Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass. His subjects, pushed to the limit in exhausting extended sessions, day after day, dropped their defenses and opened up. The faces showed fatigue, distress, torpor.

The flesh was mottled, lumpy and, in the case of his 1990s portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the phenomenally obese civil servant Sue Tilley, shockingly abundant.

The relationship between sitter and painter, in his work, overturned traditional portraiture. It was “nearer to the classic relationship of the 20th century: that between interrogator and interrogated,” the art critic John Russell wrote in “Private View,” his survey of the London art scene in the 1960s.

William Feaver, a British critic who organized a Freud retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, said: “Freud has generated a life’s worth of genuinely new painting that sits obstinately across the path of those lesser painters who get by on less. He always pressed to extremes, carrying on further than one would think necessary and rarely letting anything go before it became disconcerting.”

Amongst Freud’s great late paintings were his enormous portraits of the performance artist, Leigh Bowery. Theirs was a special relationship, as Freud’s portraits of Bowery revealed the shy humanity hidden behind the make-up and costumes of a performer who invested all in concealing himself.

As Bowery discovered, sitting for Freud was a challenge, as the sitter allowed Freud “maximum observation”, as the BBC reports:

Lucian Freud’s portraits were not concerned with flattery or modesty - disturbing was one adjective applied to them - and some were said to have compelling nastiness.

His early work was the product of “maximum observation”, Freud said
Though sometimes startling, his portraits could also be beautiful and intimate. Freud had been an admirer of the artist Francis Bacon and painted a striking portrait of him.

Freud, who lived and worked in London, said his work was purely autobiographical - he painted “the people that interest me and that I care about and think about in rooms I live in and know”.

A close relationship with sitters was important to him. He painted several affectionate portraits of his mother and his daughters Bella and Esther were also models.

Sittings could last for a year and sitters were often profoundly affected by the process. One of them once said: “You are the centre of his world while he paints you. But then he moves on to someone else.”

Freud seldom accepted commissions. His work is in a number of galleries in Britain and overseas, but much of it is privately owned.

He was one of few artists to have had two retrospective exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London.

The following short documentary looks at Lucian Freud’s portraits through the people who have posed for him, from David Hockney to Duke of Devonshire.
 

 
Rest of documentary plus Lucian freud speaks, after the jump…
 

 
As Marc Campbell pointed out on DM last month, when a b&w Coke bottle by Andy Warhol sold for $35, “some things are recession proof.” Now, a painting of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon has turned up after being kept in a private collection and not exhibited anywhere since 1965. This triptych goes on sale next month at Sotheby’s, in London, and according to the Daily Telegraph its $10m-$14m estimate “does not seem unreasonable.” Not unreasonable if you think of art as just a money-making exercise, like Warhol once said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud is a powerfully rendered triptych of small, 14in x 12in portraits, and is a testament to one of the most significant artistic relationships of the 20th century.

Bacon and Freud met in 1945 through the artist Graham Sutherland and became close if competitive friends, painting each other on several occasions. At one point, they met on an almost daily basis, frequently at their favourite watering hole, the Colony Room in Soho. But their friendship cooled in the late Seventies after an argument.

Only four portraits of Freud by Bacon have been at auction in the past 20 years. The last was in 2003 when a very similar small triptych sold to Pierre Chen, chairman of the Taiwanese Yageo Foundation, for $3.8 million (£2.2 million), which was record for a Bacon painting of these dimensions.

Since then, the price of Bacon has risen dramatically, climaxing in May 2008 with the $86 million (£44 million) paid by Roman Abramovich for a large-scale triptych.
However, top-drawer paintings by Bacon have been scarce at auction during the credit crunch. Since the summer of 2008, four works of varying quality have been unsold, creating a state of uncertainty in the Bacon market, and potential sellers have been waiting for someone else to make the first move to ascertain its strength. Hopefully for Sotheby’s, that deadlock was broken last November when a late painting of a cricket player belonging to Bacon’s doctor, Paul Brass, sold for $14 million (£8.7 million), comfortably above its estimate.

Considering that two small-format self-portrait triptychs by Bacon made £14 million and more in 2008, the £7 million-£9 million estimate for this triptych of Freud does not seem unreasonable. The only thing against it is that it has recently been offered privately and not sold, but that was for a much higher sum.

Sotheby’s is not saying who is selling the portrait, which was bought directly from Bacon’s dealers, Marlborough Fine Art, in 1965, apart from indicating that it is part of a family inheritance. Trade sources, however, confirm that the painting belonged to the Geneva based collector, George Kostalitz, who died last year. A private man about whom little is on public record, Kostalitz is said to have had a close working relationship with Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Warhol’s $35million Coke Bottle