Notícias
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From February 9th to May 27th
the National Portrait
Gallery will be exhibiting over 100 portraits by Lucian Freud. The
celebrated British figurative painter, who died in July 2011, used
Winsor & Newton Artists' Oil Colour extensively during his long
career and the used tubes can be seen amongst the detritus in
photographs and paintings of his studio.
Freud worked exclusively from life, usually using a nude model posed on
his studio’s threadbare furnishings or against piles of painter’s rags.
He would start with a rough charcoal sketch on the canvas, and then lay
in the paint, working from the head outwards. Occasionally he would
extend the canvas by gluing on extra strips to accommodate the
composition.
At the start of his career Freud built a reputation for drawing but soon
moved on to painting with, initially, mixed results. An early painting,
‘Landscape with Birds’ (1940), was made using enamel paints because he
had heard Picasso used the same material. Freud’s painting curdled but
it prompted him to remark, ‘learning to paint is literally learning to
use paint.’
Moving on to oils, Freud, as a young painter, would sit at the easel and
paint, wet on wet, using small sable brushes, creating what the critic
John Berger called, ‘a painstaking naturalism.’ This changed in the
early 1950s when Freud was invited to spend the weekend with the painter
Graham Sutherland and his family. He met a fellow guest by arrangement
at Victoria Station and Freud and Francis Bacon remained close friends
until the late 1970’s.
Freud’s decision to change his style at this time must have crystallised in conversation with Bacon, who he was to paint over 2 to 3 months in 1952. Abandoning sable brushes in favour of hog’s hair, which he loaded with paint, Freud stood up at the easel and developed the looser, expressive style for which he became famous. He also changed his paints. Freud had been invited by William Coldstream to be a visiting lecturer at the Slade, something which made him nervous and uncomfortable. It was, however, a friend at the Slade who introduced him to Cremnitz White, a paint so dense as to be sculptural. Freud decided this would be good to paint flesh tones, and lead whites became a mainstay of his palette. Cremnitz White is basic lead carbonate; Flake White is lead carbonate with some zinc oxide. In the early 2000’s there were plans to ban lead based paints on health and safety grounds*; indeed in many markets, these are now sold only in tins, although tubes are still sold in the US. Freud had been told by his paint retailers that these plans were afoot and instructed his solicitors to write to Winsor & Newton requesting 100 tubes of Flake White for his personal use.
By the time of his death in 2011, Lucian Freud had an international
reputation as a bold and uncompromising painter of human flesh. He also
had a reputation for being a charming womaniser and an argumentative
friend.
Born in Berlin in 1922, Freud’s father, Ernst, was an architect and his
grandfather was the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. In 1933
the Freuds left Berlin for London. They arrived not as refugees but with
all their possessions, as émigrés. Lively and spirited, Freud’s first
school was Dartington Hall where classes were not compulsory. He was
soon moved to Bryanston where he joined the Oil painting club. Accounts
of his expulsion from Bryanston differ. He is rumoured to have run a
pack of hunting hounds through the school during matins, but art critic
and Freud’s friend William Feaver believes it was for dropping his
trousers on a Bournemouth street!
After a brief stint at Central School of Art, too dull and academic for
Freud’s taste, he enrolled at the East Anglian school of Drawing and
Painting, founded by the painter Cedric Morris. By now Freud had a
reputation as a precocious and charismatic talent; he had his first one
man show at the Lefevre gallery, London in 1944.
Freud began teaching at the Slade and married Kitty Garman, daughter of
the sculptor Jacob Epstein. He took a studio on the rough side of
Paddington and began to cultivate both the top and the bottom of London
society. He would eat in a working man’s café, spend the afternoon in a
bookmaker’s, then spend the night drinking with the Duke of Devonshire
and Princess Margaret’s set. The journalist and famous Soho drinker,
Jeffrey Bernard, admired Freud’s ability to straddle both worlds: ‘He
has cracked the nut of how to conduct a double life.’ In 1952 Freud
divorced Garman and married Caroline Blackwood, daughter of the Dowager
marchioness of Dufferin, who strongly disapproved of the match. They
were divorced in 1957. Critics, including David Sylvester, began to
wonder if it was Freud’s turbulent private life that prompted him to
paint women with the forensic harshness of his new style.
Critics questioned the merciless quality of his depiction of human
flesh, the dull eye of his sitters. It can also be argued that this is
what he saw during the prolonged sittings in his studio. ‘The picture in
order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a
life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life.’**
Freud’s paintings were not like people, but of people.
Freud was apparently cautious of using models with exotic physiques.
However one of his most famous models was the Australian performance
artiste Leigh Bowery, someone who fascinated him as much for his mind
and outlook on life as for his gigantic frame, and was the subject of a
number of works. Later, Freud was to paint ‘Big’ Sue Tilley, an official
at the DHSS. In 2008, ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,’ (1995) was to sell
for $33.6 million, a record for a living artist. These paintings and
many others including his last, unfinished painting of his assistant and
friend David Dawson, will be on show at the National Portrait Gallery.
**See our
Health & Safety Section for more information
**Lucian Freud, ‘Thoughts on Painting’. Encounter,
July 1954
Bibliography:
William Feaver Lucian Freud. Exh. cat. London, Tate Britain,
2002