Text by David Dawson, Joseph Koerner, Jasper Sharp, Sebastian Smee.
The artist stripped bare by himself: Lucian Freud’s self-portraits redefine the genre
In 1964 Lucian Freud set his students at the Norwich College of Art an assignment: to paint naked self-portraits and to make them “revealing, telling, believable ... really shameless.” It was advice that the artist was often to follow himself. Visceral, unflinching and often nude, Freud’s self-portraits chart his biography and give us an insight into the development of his style.
These paintings provide the viewer with a constant reminder of the artist’s overwhelming presence, whether he is confronting the viewer directly or only present as a shadow or in a reflection. Freud’s exploration of the self-portrait is unexpected and wide-ranging. In this volume, essays by leading authorities, including those who knew him, explore Freud’s life and work, and analyze the importance of self-portraiture in his practice.
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 World War II, 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. Freud died in London in 2011.
In the end, it is the painting that mattered most. 'I dont want to retire,' he once said. 'I want to paint myself to death.' And that's more or less what he did: It wasnt until two weeks before his death that he finally laid his brush to rest.
Financial Times
Jackie Wullschläger
Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits...is unprecedented: a celebration, and an enigma--of time, change, the leitmorifs of a life distilled on canvas.
Guardian
Adrian Searle
Hell isn’t only other people. One must include oneself and one’s body in this comedy of errors and terrors and that’s what Freud does.
Telegraph
Alastair Smart
Freud liked to take a long, hard look at himself--and more often than not, the results are stunning.
The Times
Nancy Durrant
[Lucian Freud's] portraits will capture the evolution of an artist as he moved from the exactitude of a youthful style towards an ever freer, looser and more overtly painterly technique. They will show us a human being who, through long self-contemplation, captures the frank truth about flesh as it ages.
Guardian
Rachel Cooke
Freud’s self-portraits...are all sorts of things: tender, witty, experimental and – yes, that dread word – visceral. To walk around this show is to be powerfully aware both of his intense single-mindedness – the sheer quality of his concentration – and of his abiding fascination with the idea of the shifting, slippery self; the experience is a little like being watched. But if some red thread does link them, it is surely this inescapable menace.
Frieze
Chloë Ashby
This is an artist who delights in confronting human flaws – both other people’s and his own.
Time Out New York
Eddy Frankel
Freud painted a human truth that no one wants to confront, and that’s why his ugliness is so goddamn beautiful.
Hyperallergic
Michael Glover
Seldom has a painter indulged in such relentlessly fierce, pitiless, lonely self-appraisal. And yet he could not stop himself. He had to plunge deep into the well of himself, no matter how dark the outcome.
Forbes
Natasha Wolff
This book presents German painter Lucian Freud’s stunning but lesser-known self portraits. These canvases display the artist’s flesh in somber, provocative ways.
Boston Globe
Murray Whyte
Freud on Freud, no filter. [...] As he painted life, he also was painting its inevitable slippage, its wither and fade. His blunt devotion to the world in front of him, as it was, made mortality his real subject, something “The Self Portraits” rings clear as a bell. As he painted life, he also painted death.
Wall Street Journal
Peter Plagens
...Stretches the definition of ‘self-portrait’ while revealing that the painter was as unsparing with himself as with his other subjects. [...] In Freud’s visceral self-portraits it’s a troubled landscape indeed.
Blackbook
Ken Scrudato
Captures [Freud's] most visceral essence, as his self-portraits were amongst the most emotional pieces ever painted.
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"Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-portrait)" (1967–68) is reproduced from Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits, published to accompany the "emotionally piercing" exhibition currently on hiatus at MFA Boston, en route from Royal Academy of Arts, London. "Freud always enjoyed Degas’s claim that he wanted to be ‘illustrious and unknown,'" Sebastian Smee writes. "He was conscious, I think, that for all the emphasis people place on the idea of art as self-expression, there is an ineluctable shame for any artist in being 'understood.' Hence his reluctance until late in life to be interviewed. The self-portraits often seem to be saying: 'You want to know me? Good luck.'"
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 10.25 in. / 160 pgs / 130 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $62 ISBN: 9781912520060 PUBLISHER: Royal Academy of Arts AVAILABLE: 12/3/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Royal Academy of Arts. Text by David Dawson, Joseph Koerner, Jasper Sharp, Sebastian Smee.
The artist stripped bare by himself: Lucian Freud’s self-portraits redefine the genre
In 1964 Lucian Freud set his students at the Norwich College of Art an assignment: to paint naked self-portraits and to make them “revealing, telling, believable ... really shameless.” It was advice that the artist was often to follow himself. Visceral, unflinching and often nude, Freud’s self-portraits chart his biography and give us an insight into the development of his style.
These paintings provide the viewer with a constant reminder of the artist’s overwhelming presence, whether he is confronting the viewer directly or only present as a shadow or in a reflection. Freud’s exploration of the self-portrait is unexpected and wide-ranging. In this volume, essays by leading authorities, including those who knew him, explore Freud’s life and work, and analyze the importance of self-portraiture in his practice.
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 World War II, 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. Freud died in London in 2011.
