TITLE

Lucian Freud: The Studio

IMPRINT

Hirmer Verlag

PRICE US

$65.00 CDN $65.00

ISBN

9783777426914 TRADE

FORMAT

Hbk, 9.25 x 11.75 in., 256 pgs, 201 color, 43 b&w.

CATALOG

FALL 2010 p. 19   

DISTRIBUTOR

D.A.P.

PUB DATE

5/31/2010

STATUS

Active

STOCK

In stock

HIRMER VERLAG

Lucian Freud: The Studio

Foreword by Alain Seban. Preface by Alfred Pacquement. Introduction by Cécile Debray. Text by Éric Darragon, Jean Clair, Laurence des Cars, Philippe Comar, Richard Shiff, Cécile Debray, Elsa Urtizverea.

One of the greatest living painters and portraitists, Lucian Freud (born 1922) brings a powerfully obsessive scrutiny to bear upon his subjects. "I want the painting to be flesh," Freud has avowed, and through this aspiration he achieves almost devastatingly unsentimental and revelatory portraits of his sitters, as he translates the act of scrutiny into strokes of paint. Like the studio of his friend Francis Bacon, Freud's own studio has attained its own intensity as the site of his one-on-one encounters, and as a backdrop or stage in his paintings, and the atmosphere of his interiors, and in the light in them, are among his paintings' most pungent qualities. (One of his earliest canvases, from 1944, is titled "The Painter's Room.") Accompanying the critically acclaimed spring 2010 Pompidou retrospective, this mammoth survey posits Freud's studio as the decisive stage for his art, and tracks his career in over 200 color illustrations of paintings, graphic works and photographs. Included here are his large interiors, his nudes and variations on portraits by earlier masters, his famous series of self-portraits and imposing portraits of sitters such as Leigh Bowery and substantial photographic documentation of the studio. Lucian Freud: The Studio is the essential book on the artist.
Grandson of Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud was born in Germany in 1922, and permanently relocated to London in 1933 during the ascent of the Nazi regime. After seeing brief service during the Second World War, Freud had his first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery in London. Despite exhibiting only occasionally over the course of his career, Freud's 1995 portrait "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" was sold at auction, at Christie's New York in May 2008, for $33.6 million--setting a world record for sale value of a painting by a living artist.

Lucian Freud, whose 1985-86 "Double Portrait" is featured above, died on Wednesday, July 20, at the age of 88. Considered by many the greatest figurative painter of the twentieth century, Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, "was a bohemian of the old school," according to The New York Times' William Grimes. "He set up his studios in squalid neighborhoods, developed a Byronic reputation as a rake and gambled recklessly ('Debt stimulates me,' he once said)." His paintings, often of "friends and intimates, splayed nude in his studio… 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 façade… His female subjects in particular seemed not just nude but obtrusively naked. Mr. Freud pushed this effect so far, [art critic John] Russell once noted, 'that we sometimes wonder if we have any right to be there.' By contrast, his horses and dogs, like his whippets Pluto and Eli, were evoked with tender solicitude." Featured image is reproduced from Hirmer Verlag's Lucian Freud: The Studio.

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FREUD, LUCIAN