The State Higher Educational Establishment
Tyumen State University Institute of Philology and Journalism
Department of General Linguistics Intercultural communication
Lucian Michael Freud
The paper is made by Kolbina Ekatherina 27L1512A
2016
Contents
Introduction & Synopsis
Early life and family
Personal life
Early career
Mature style
Later career
Art market
Conclusion
Introduction & Synopsis
Lucian Michael Freud was born on December 8th 1922 in Berlin, Germany. He died on July 20, 2011 in London, England. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Archbishop Rowan Williams officiated at the private funeral. He was a German-born British painter and draftsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century 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 1932-33 he attended Goldsmiths College, London. He enlisted in the Merchant Navy during World War II.
His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Lucian Freud, renowned for his unflinching observations of anatomy and psychology, made even the beautiful people look ugly. One of the late twentieth-century's most celebrated portraitists, Freud painted only those closest to him: friends and family, wives and mistresses, and, last but not least, himself. His insightful series of self-portraits spanned over six decades. They are generally somber and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and city scapes. 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. Unusual among artists with such long careers, his style remained remarkably consistent. Perhaps inevitably, the psychic intensity of his portraits, and his notoriously long sessions with sitters have been compared with the psychoanalytic practice of his famous grandfather, Sigmund Freud.
Early life and family
Born in Berlin, Freud was the son of a German Jewish mother, Lucie, and an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect. He was named after his mother, Lucie. He was a grandson of the paradigm-shifting psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and elder brother of the broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (1924-2009; thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud (1921-2015).
In Berlin, the Freuds led a comfortable middle-class life (in an era of grave political instability in Germany). When Hitler came to power in 1933, Lucian's parents saw how their lives could change, even for secular Jews. They immigrated to England that same year. The family emigrated to St John's Wood, London.
Freud became a naturalized British citizen in 1939. From an early age, young Freud had exhibited an interest in art, which was fostered by his family. Even his grandfather, Sigmund, acknowledged his inclination by giving him a set of color reproductions of Brueghel's Months. In London, Freud and his brothers were enrolled in a progressive coeducational private school, Dartington Hall. Freud proved to be a rebellious student, often skipping art class because he disliked the teacher. Instead of gaining an education at Dartington, all Freud acquired was a bad reputation. After two years, his parents enrolled him at Dane Court, a preparatory school that was intended to serve as an entree to Bryanston. While Bryanston was not coeducational, it was progressive enough to ban corporal punishment. Thus the unruly Freud, who loved the outdoors, spent many hours on so-called punishment runs. Eventually Bryanston tired of his rebellious behavior and expelled him. In 1937, Freud produced a remarkable sandstone carving of a three-legged horse. On the strength of this piece, he was accepted in the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Freud's truancy continued, though between bohemian adventures he produced some extraordinary artwork. Years later, when his fame was established, these and other early works were exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Critics were astounded at the maturity of the pieces, which were done when Freud was between fifteen and twenty-three years old. Martin Gayford noted in The Daily Telegraph that "between 1937 and 1945 he was already producing work imbued indelibly with that characteristic and unmistakable intensity. He was still searching for his idiom. To an extent, at that stage he was trying on different styles and approaches to see what fitted best. Surprisingly loose handling alternated with the meticulous graphic sharpness that became characteristic of Freud in the late forties and early fifties." In the Independent, Richard Ingleby pointed out how some of the early work showed the influence of German expressionism. In the late 1930s, Freud fell in with Stephen Spender, Peter Watson, and Cyril Connolly. The latter two were the founder and editor of the avant-garde magazine Horizon, which published Freud's drawings in 1939 and again in 1944. He also began attending the East Anglian School of Art though, as usual, his attendance over the next three years was erratic. There were two major interruptions in Freud's studies at East Anglian. The first came when the school caught fire (Freud's careless smoking was most likely the cause); the second in happened 1941. Freud won a prize of £25 for a textile design and used the money to travel to Liverpool where he joined the Merchant Marine. After a round-trip crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, Freud managed to get himself discharged from the service and promptly returned to the school.
While life drawing classes had long included nude models, the expressive detail with which Freud paints genitals sets him apart from other artists in the history of portraiture. With the analytic scrutiny and detail a botanical illustrator might devote to a rare flower, Freud paints primary and secondary sex characteristics.