Lucian Freud at the NPG - Finishes May 27th

The Lucian Freud Portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery finishes this weekend. Freud was born in Germany in 1922 but came to England in 1933 when his family fled the Nazis.

He enlisted with the merchant navy during the Second World War but was discharged after illness. After the war it was a trio of paintings of his first wife Kitty Garman that first established him.

Kitty Garman

The early paintings see Freud developing his style and the subjects seem to have larger-than-life eyes (rather like those stylised large-eyed portraits of  children in the 1960s and those by Margaret Keane).

'Small naked portrait' at the Ashmolean

Remarkably quickly, however, Freud found his realist style and subsequent pictures appear stylistically very consistent, with their trademark reds and greens giving a livid appearance to the flesh. Freud spent hundreds of hours on each of his pictures and photos of his studio show it quite spartan apart from the splodges of paint where he removed the excess from his brushes and the sheets that he used to wipe them.

The Freud studio with model, picture and dog

Painting Leigh Bowery

The exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was being planned when he died at the age of 88 in July 2011 and is essential viewing for anyone interested in figurative portraiture in the late 20th century.

After painting David Hockney

The gallery space at the NPG is bit cramped, especially given the number of people trying to see the works, and it does not flow particularly well, but the works themselves are a revelation for anyone who has only seen reproductions or the occasional Freud elsewhere (such as that at the Ashmolean).

His last (unfinished) painting

There are some links to the exhibition (video etc) here in my previous post about it. You can also access a 'proper' recent review of the exhibition at the A kick up the arts blog here.

Lucian Freud 1922 - 2011

You have until Sunday if you want to see this exhibition (although it may already theoretically be 'sold out').

Oxford, the Ashmolean and Lucian Freud

At the weekend we visited Oxford with friends.

We did quite a bit of eating & drinking and spent some time rowing and punting on the Isis. Towards the end of the day we managed to fit in a brief visit to the Ashmolean Museum.

This was my first visit and I wasn't disappointed. While outside it retains its traditional classical look, inside the museum has been extensively renovated in recent years. The museum's full name is the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeaology and its contents are wide-ranging. As we had less than an hour we focused on only a small part - the museum's collection of 19th to 21st century art.

Brazen Nose College - JMW Turner

This includes a couple of galleries devoted to Sickert and Pisarro, a 19th century gallery - which includes several Turners - and a Pre-Raphaelite gallery. Each of these has some fine examples and they are displayed in a relaxed user-friendly way (no trip wires to prevent you getting a good look at the paintings).

Cows at Cookham - Stanley Spencer

There is also a lone Modern Art gallery. Inevitably this is pretty selective but it includes good things, including a picture by Roger Hilton, a large piece of sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, a typical Cookham pastoral by Stanley Spencer and a perfect small nude by Lucian Freud.

Small naked portrait - Lucian Freud

Which gives me an excuse to write about Freud's recent death at the age of 88 ... Freud was described succinctly by the BBC as one of Britain's most distinguished and highly regarded artists - However, he was more than that.

As a refugee from the Nazis, his framework of experience is unimaginable for us baby-boomers and later generations, and this inevitably influenced his work. He was intensely private, eccentric and charismatic. His nude portraits, for which he was famous, were detailed and unforgiving. His best known paintings have been auctioned for serious money, rivalling the likes of Damien Hirst.

The following clip from ITN gives a flavour of his life and his art:

Here are some links to a selection of posts following his death:  Is Lucian Freud’s Death the End of Figurative Painting? from Bob Duggan;  some personal thoughts from indigoalison; an obit from the Independent; and a further obit from the Telegraph. Wherever he is now, I doubt that he is just resting in peace ...

Details of the 2012 exhibtion at the National Portrait Gallery are shown here.