The Lives of Lucian Freud: YOUTH 1922 - 1968
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
SELECTED AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, NEW STATESMAN, SUNDAY TIMES, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND SPECTATOR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019
'This exceptional book is far from standard biography … A compendium of high-grade gossip about everyone from Princess Margaret to the Krays, a tour of the immediate post-war art world, a snapshot of grimy London and a narrative of Freud's career and rackety life and loves … Leaves the reader itchy for volume two' SUNDAY TIMES, ART BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Brilliant … Freud would have approved' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Sparkling' SUNDAY TIMES
'Superlative … packed with stories' GUARDIAN
'Brilliant and compendious ... It does justice to Lucian' FRANK AUERBACH
'A tremendous read. Anyone interested in British art needs it' ANDREW MARR, NEW STATESMAN
Though ferociously private, Lucian Freud spoke every week for decades to his close confidante and collaborator William Feaver – about painting and the art world, but also about his life and loves. The result is this a unique, electrifying biography, shot through with Freud's own words.
In Youth, the first of two volumes, Feaver conjures Freud's early childhood: Sigmund Freud's grandson, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1934 before being dropped into successive English public schools. Following Freud through art school, his time in the Navy during the war, his post-war adventures in Paris and Greece, and his return to Soho – consorting with duchesses and violent criminals, out on the town with Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret – Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man's coming of age.
An account of a century told through one of its most important artists, The Lives of Lucian Freud is a landmark in the story its subject and in the art of biography itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art, debauchery, nightlife, and lowlifes fill out this rollicking biography of the celebrated British painter. Art critic and curator Feaver (Frank Auerbach) follows Lucian Freud (1922 2011), grandson of psychologist Sigmund Freud, through his rise to the top of Britain's art scene, where his realist portraits thrummed with tension and suspicion, perhaps because of the marathon sittings his models endured or the pitiless depictions of flesh in his paintings. Feaver has much to say about the art "Here are individual fingernails and individual hairs, some with split ends," he writes of the landmark Girl with Roses, "as fully realized as the golden tresses of a D rer" but more about Freud's daily picaresque: the relentless womanizing (he fathered 12 illegitimate children), the studied eccentricities (he carpeted his studio with broken glass), the gambling addiction that saddled him with debts to gangsters, and the swirl of colorful acquaintances, from nobility to famous artists to petty criminals, all of whom he painted. Feaver heavily quotes from his interviews with Freud, and the artist's chatty, insouciant voice "I said, I'm going to pay you when I've got the money and if you kill me you won't get the money,' an argument that impressed them" suffuses the book. The result is a riotously entertaining narrative that immerses readers in Freud's beguiling sensibility. Photos.
