How Lucian Freud Painted Himself by Painting Others

“Nobody is representing anything,” Lucian Freud once said of all art, including his own. “Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s a chair.” Elsewhere, the grandson of Sigmund Freud announced that “My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings. It is an attempt at a record.” When Lucian Freud died in July 2011, the current National Portrait Gallery, London, England, exhibition Lucian Freud Portraits was already in the works. Along with the exhibition catalog and a smaller companion book, art historians are now trying to discern what Freud recorded about his inner self as he recorded the outward appearance of friends and family over the course of seven decades. Some felt that the portraiture as a relevant modern genre died with Freud, but this exhibition and these books make the case that the true value of these paintings—for him then and us today—lives on. Please come over to Picture This at  Big Think to read more of "How Lucian Freud Painted Himself by PaintingOthers."

[Image: Lucian Freud. Reflection (Self-portrait), 1985 (detail). Copyright: Private Collection, Ireland, The Lucian Freud Archive. Photo: Courtesy Lucian Freud Archive.]

 
[Many thanks to the National Portrait Gallery, London, England, for the image above and other press materials from the exhibition Lucian Freud Portraits, which runs through May 27, 2012. Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with review copies of Lucian Freud Portraits by Sarah Howgate with Michael Auping and John Richardson and Lucian Freud Painting People, introduction by Martin Gayford, appreciation by David Hockney, and foreword by Sarah Howgate.]