Book of the Month

Donal's picture

Lucian Freud changes name and dies at 88

by Donal 7/21/2011 - 9:15 pm   |

Self Portrait (~1986), above.

Factory In London (1972), above. 

Update: That's funny. I've always seen it spelled Lucien, but now it is Lucian.

Lucian Freud: 10 things you didn't know about his paintings

5. Freud had an almost visceral hatred of almost all art of the Renaissance. It makes sense: the Renaissance was the period, above all, during which man was celebrated as the crown of creation. Freud’s belief was the opposite: man, he seems to say, must never forget the fact that he is deteriorating matter. It was Kant who first observed that an aesthetic encounter can be one that is mixed with pain, and Freud proves it eloquently.

6. Freud disliked art that looks too much like art. On sitting for a Freud portrait the art critic Martin Gayford remembered that “the awkwardness that critics complain of in LF’s work is deliberate.” A 1950 painting in the Tate Britain called ‘Boy Smoking’, for example, is not a realistic portrait. The eyes are glassy and hollow, the face so flat you could tear it. But the flatness here tells us something of the boy’s circumstances: it is as if a hard expression has been ironed in place on his youthful skin. Freud met the boy, named Charles Lumley, when he and his brother were “in the act of breaking into his studio”. Freud was living in Paddington, a working-class area at the time, and he befriended some of his criminal neighbours

I have always thought he was Lucien, and that is how I landed here, by searching for the consensus, which seems to be Lucian, so I am surprised by that, and glad to find I am not alone.

Everywhere says "he died of an illness" ...  umm ... being 88 ?  and hardly getting any active physical exercise?  His funeral will be oh so glamorously attended if all his (living) subjects appear.  The late Leigh Bowery is from my hometown.  RIP.

by Ann O'Dyne (not verified) 7/21/2011 - 10:03 pm

Can't say I'm familiar with his work, but just these two images show there is something that separate the great ones from the mere talented.

by Another Trope 7/22/2011 - 1:10 am

Lucian Freud In Memoriam: His death is a real body blow . . . .

See "Freud's Body Ego or Memorabilia of Grief: Lucian Freud and William Kentridge" by Jennifer Arlene Stone (ISBN 0967916186) New York 2003 (paperback on Amazon).
See also  "Lucian" on THE APP on javari
http://javari.com/Lucian.pdf

by FreudPsa (not verified) 7/22/2011 - 11:56 am

In the end a master painter, artist, aesthete passes away and in his place a hungry burden of talent dares to become the vacuum he has left behind, and inevitably someone will. Because we need them to. It’s people like Mr Freud that inspire us with our collective lot, no matter how ghastly or appealing it all may be at any moment. Especially at death.

Rest in peace Mr Freud, because we certainly wont…

 

http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2011/07/lucien-freud-gone-what-will-we-d...

by Vagabonds (not verified) 7/22/2011 - 3:43 pm

Amidst all of the dilettantes who will become more aware of the art of this original artist, speculators are now scrambling, no doubt, to find a way to cash in.

Just observing.

PS-Captcha is goofy.

by Vincent van Going (not verified) 7/23/2011 - 7:02 pm

I'm not sure why you want to pick on the members of this band and their lack of knowledge of the world of painters,

but it is a truism that artist become more profitable once they are dead.

by Another Trope 7/23/2011 - 7:23 pm (re: Vincent van Going)

Latest Comments

more