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Thursday, 21 July 2011
girl with a kitten, 1947
girl with roses, 1947-1948
the painter's daughter, 1977-1978
man in a chair 1983-1985
queen elizabeth
from nyt:
lucian freud, whose stark and revealing paintings of friends and intimates, splayed nude in his studio, recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art, died on wednesday night at his home in london. he was 88.
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 relationship between artist and subject, in freud's work, overturned traditional portraiture.
on rare occasions mr. freud took on something akin to official portraits. he painted the collector hans heinrich thyssen-bornemisza, fully clothed, in “man in a chair” (1985). His stern 2001 portrait of queen elizabeth, showing the royal head topped by the diamond diadem, divided the critics and public.
such a loss .... one of my favorite painters. i was lucky enough to see his work at the moma here in los angeles - incredible. you see pictures of his paintings in books and magazines and online and you have no idea how massive they are in real life, how thick with paint. so much talent.
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