Freud

Portraits which scrutinized beneath the skin

Lucian Freud (19222011)was interested in the telling of truths. Always operating outside the main currents of 20th-century art, the esteemed portrait painter observed his subjects with the regimen and precision of a laboratory scientist. He recorded not only the blotches, bruises, and swellings of the living body, but also,beneath the flaws and folds of flesh, the microscopic details of what lies within: the sensation, the emotion, the intelligence, the bloom, and the inevitable, unstoppable decay.

Despite rejecting parallels between him and his renowned grandfather, the correlation between Lucian Freuds sitting process for portraiture andSigmund Freuds psychotherapy sessionsis a fascinating element to this figurative oeuvre. Despite the thickness of the impasto surfaces, Freuds portraits of subjects as varied as theQueen, Kate Moss, and an obese job center supervisorpenetrate the physicality of the body with a direct and often disarming insight. The result is as much apsychological interrogationas it is an uneasy examination of therelationship between artist and model.

This book brings together some of Freuds most outstanding and unapologetic portraits, to introduce an artist widely considered one of the finest masters of the human form.