Lucian Freud: A Century of British Figurative Mastery

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Three decades ago, Charles Satchi stood as one of Britain’s most influential art collectors, and Lucian Freud loomed large in the public eye. In a widely cited Vanity Fair piece, Freud was hailed as the greatest realist painter since Ingres, someone whose work would find a place in the world’s great museums for centuries. It happened sooner than expected. Today, more than fifty Freud canvases share the same rooms that once hosted Titian and Raphael, a testament to his lasting impact on the art world.

The Trafalgar Square Museum marks the centenary of Freud’s birth (1922–2011) with a sweeping retrospective that celebrates his pivotal role in 20th century British figurative art. Born to Jewish parents in Germany, he arrived in England as a child in 1933, escaping the Nazi era. The son of an architect who dreamed of making art, Freud carried a complex personality and a turbulent life beyond the confines of domestic norms. Over the years, he would acknowledge substantial growth in his practice, while often avoiding the simple, tidy narrative of his life.

The exhibition gathers many of Freud’s best known paintings and contrasts them with pieces that had not been publicly shown for years. The curators frame the show with the idea of unveiling fresh perspectives, challenging the myth that sometimes overshadows Freud’s work. The painter is remembered not only for his sexual energy and ferocious appetites but for his influence on a generation that includes Francis Bacon, who cut his teeth in the Soho nightlife, gambling dens, and social circles that crossed both aristocracy and the underworld.

Freud’s paintings remain deeply biographical, speaking through the people and moments he chose to depict. For more than seventy years, the models were drawn from his circle of family, lovers, associates, and even pets. Self-portraits recur with unflinching honesty, and the artist’s approach to the human body is uncompromising in its insistence on truth. In one late piece from 1993, Freud stands in a bare, empty space, his figure bright against the dim workshop that has rarely left him in his later years, his gaze fixed on an unseen canvas that occupies his attention. The work is stark, a direct confrontation with mortality and the act of painting itself.

Freud’s nude portraits are a defining thread, often stark and forceful. In a 1979–80 study titled Nude Portrait, an unidentified model lies asleep, her forms exposed in a way that can feel clinical and intimate at once. The artist’s eye appears surgical, a precise instrument trained to reveal a truth that can unsettle viewers. Freud spoke of an attraction to the animal aspects of people, a theme that sometimes emerges in his depictions of desire and vulnerability. He painted his young lover, the designer Bernadine Coverley, while she was pregnant with their first child. Other muses appear in the show, including Bella, who appears nude in one room and clothed in another, sometimes posed beside her sister Esther. The curator notes that Freud was a master at portraying intimacy, a skill that makes his portraits both provocative and deeply human.

Across the exhibition, Freud also depicted figures of power, from bankers to industrial barons, and even members of royalty. The portrait of Jacob Rotchschild stands alongside others that reveal the complexity of his relationships with wealth and status. The baron Hans Henrik Thyssen-Bornemisza is represented, with the show highlighting the way high society interacted with a painter who pursued honest, unglossed depictions of his subjects. It is said that even Queen Elizabeth II sat for Freud, sharing discussions about horses and a mutual interest that sometimes surfaced in the painterly dialogue. The resulting small oil paintings hint at discomfort with a royal gaze, a moment where the brush captures more than a portrait; it records a shaky, almost fragile dynamic between sitter and artist.

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