Lucian Freud

<p><strong>Lucian Freud (1922–2011)</strong> was interested in the telling of truths. Always operating outside the main currents of 20th-century art, the esteemed portrait painter observed his subjects with the regimen and precision of a laboratory scientist. He recorded not only the blotches, bruises, and swellings of the living body, but also, <strong>beneath the flaws and folds of flesh, the microscopic details of what lies within: the sensation, the emotion, the intelligence, the bloom, and the inevitable, unstoppable decay.</strong><br /><br /> Despite rejecting parallels between him and his renowned grandfather, the correlation between Lucian Freud’s sitting process for portraiture and <strong>Sigmund Freud’</strong><strong>s psychotherapy sessions</strong> is a fascinating element to this figurative oeuvre. Despite the thickness of the impasto surfaces, Freud’s portraits of subjects as varied as the <strong>Queen, Kate Moss, and an obese job center supervisor</strong> penetrate the physicality of the body with a direct and often disarming insight. The result is as much a <strong>psychological interrogation</strong> as it is an uneasy examination of the <strong>relationship between artist and model</strong>.<br /><br /> This book brings together some of Freud’s most outstanding and unapologetic portraits, to introduce an artist widely considered one of the finest masters of the human form.</p>