The Man Who Painted Skin Like Nobody Else

Standing infront of a Lucian Freud painting feels uncomfortable. Not in a bad way. More like someone is looking at you a little too long and your not sure what they seeing. Thats what his work does.

Born Berlin 1922, grandson of Sigmund Freud, he moved to London as a boy when the familly fled Nazi Germany. He painted their until a few weeks before he died in 2011. His last canvas was still unfinished on the easel.

What Makes His Style So Diferent

Early on the paintings were tight, almost surreal. Very controled, sharp outlines. Then late 1950s somthing shifted. He switched to thick hog hair brushes and never went back. The paint got heavy. The flesh got real.

The impasto on his nudes is almost sculptural. Ridges of paint folowing the curve of an arm or the sag of a stomach. Apollo Magazine noted his palette was earthy, restrained, totaly unsentimental. No glamour. Just skin as it actualy is.

The Way He Worked

He refused photographs completly. Every painting came from a real person sitting in the room, sometimes just a foot from his face, for months. He genuinly believed, as the Royal Academy put it, that the aura of a person is as much a part of them as there flesh. A photo just kills that.

The Paintings People Talk About

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping 1995 is probaly the most famous. A large woman, completly unposed, sold for $33.6 million in 2008. The Art Story called his Bowery nudes “flesh-toned rockeries.” Honestly the best description anyones written.

The Queen Elizabeth II portrait in 2001 caused alot of uproar. She looks old and tired and the tabloids where furious. He painted her the same way he painted everybody. With out mercy.

What the Critics Thought

Some critics found the nudes cold and clinical. Others thought they where the most honest paintings made in Britian in the 20th century. Apollo Magazine argued the realism was almost beside the point. What mattered was the slow buildup of layers. The person in the chair was almost an excuse.

His paintings dont really feel like portraits. They feel more like documents. Evidence that this person existed, in this body, in this room. And someone looked at them for a very long time and did’nt look away.