LONDON – Lucian Freud, the British artist famous for his paintings of ordinary people portrayed in all their fleshy glory, has died aged 88.
Freud died last night at his home in London after a brief illness, said William Acquavella, owner of Acquavella Galleries in New York, Freud’s worldwide dealer.
A grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud preferred to use friends and family members, including his mother, as subjects of his portraits, using thick gobs of paint to reveal the human body’s curves, folds and imperfections.
Critic Jorg von Uthmann, in a review of a 2010 show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, called Freud’s work “unashamedly traditional, stubbornly figurative and realistic to the point of being brutal”.
Born in Germany, Freud moved to the UK at age 11 and later became a naturalised citizen. In 2000 and 2001, Queen Elizabeth II sat for a portrait that provided fodder for his fans and critics alike.
He painted model Kate Moss in 2002, while she was pregnant.
Freud generally needed as much as a year's worth of regular sittings to complete a portrait. In 2008, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, his portrait of a 280lb civil servant named Sue, sold for $33.6 million (€233 million) – the highest price ever for a work by a living artist – in an auction at Christie's International in New York.
The buyer was reported to be Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.
In February 2010, at Sotheby’s in London, a 1978 Freud self-portrait showing him with a black eye after a fight with a London taxi driver sold for £2.8 million .
At a June 2011 auction at Christie's in London, Woman Smiling, a 1958-1959 Freud portrait of his lover, Suzy Boyt, sold for £4.7 million .
Though he lived simply, Freud's artwork made him a wealthy man, and he had a well-known taste for gambling. The London Timesestimated his net worth to be £125 million.
Art critic Robert Hughes called Freud “the best realist painter alive”. “Most of the major stylistic events in art since 1900, starting with late Cézanne and going on through cubism to abstraction in its various forms, have had no apparent impact on Freud’s painting,” Hughes wrote. “He is a rebuke to superficial notions of determinism.”
Lucian Michael Freud was born in December 1922 in Berlin, the second of three sons in a Jewish family. His mother, Lucie, and his father, Ernst – an architect who was the second son of Sigmund Freud – moved the family to London in 1933 as Nazism was on the rise in Germany. – (Bloomberg)