LUCIAN FREUD

Explore Lucian Freud's Treatment of Nude with Respect to his Comment “Paint to Act like Flesh”

Explore Lucian Freud's Treatment of Nude with Respect to his Comment “Paint to Act like Flesh”

Introduction

"I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does” (Saville, 2005, p.22)

Nudes have remained the idealised patterns for humanity all through the history of art, with smooth skin, tidy breasts and rippling muscles. However, for Lucian Freud, nude was something far more real and far more naked. His work was often unsettling and confrontational whether it is a portrait of a local thief or the Her Majesty Queen of England (with her clothes on). This visible and perceptible mercilessness is what makes Lucian Freud's art complicated, though also spellbinding. Hardly ever is the human form painted in all its openness and vulnerability, in common with all of its imperfections. Freud's contribution to art was to exposing the nude so as to explore the attractiveness in the grotesque devoid of appearing unaffectionate (Feaver, 2007, p.235).

Discussion

The Background

One of most influential artists of all times, Lucian Freud was born in Germany in 1922, as the grandson of renowned psychologist Sigmund Freud. In 1931, Lucian's family shifted to London. He worked in the British Navy during the Second World War, and from then started working as a full time artist. Freud has accrued a terrifying repute as one of the most influential contemporary painters of faces, portraits and nudes. His is a fearless pragmatism characterized by powerful forms and impressive detail, made with rich full of life and vibrant brushwork (Lampert & Kendall, 2007, p.211).

Freud's style of dealing with his subjects is intense as well as subjective, putting him in the Expressionist practice. Whether in single figures or groups, there is at all times an emotional stress in the work, and the relationship of Freud to the subjects is multifaceted. Favourite models, friends and family models all make a participation in the human play of his studio.

Lucian Freud's Work - Paint as Flesh

The innovative, sustained and unnerving artistic success of Lucian Freud, who passed away at the age of 88, was a restless, wilful personality, shoot by his attentiveness and intelligence and his suspicion of means, who by no means ever wanted to risk attempting the same thing more than once. The sexually burdened, penetrating stare was element of his artillery, however his art dealt with the lives of people, whether royalty or life models, with disturbing and delicacy corporeality.

Freud had a status for driving his subjects to the farthest. However contrasting the American painters to come forward in the 1950s, his style was in the working from life western tradition and resulted in with meticulous slowness, more willingly than unleashed ability. Cold and cruel they may have been, however his ability to ...