6/8/2023 0 Comments Lucian Freud by William Feaver![]() ![]() 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. William Feaver, a friend and collaborator of Freud’s for 30 years, gives us a Lucian who always resisted categorisation. 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. Nor was he, in the course of a 70-year career, ever much interested in composition, disliking the element of stagecraft involved. 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. ![]() ![]() 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”. I n 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”. ![]()
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