THE LIVES OF LUCIAN FREUD

The second installment in the noted critic’s intimate portrait of the idiosyncratic artist.

Feaver picks up his biography of Lucian Freud (1922-2011) where the award-winning first volume ended, in 1968. The author became a trusted friend of Freud’s in 1973 when his work wasn’t well known, and this gossipy, drawn-out biography of these “extraordinarily productive” years is greatly guided by Freud’s own words, “thousands of phone calls from him over more than thirty-five years,” and reminiscences from those who knew him. Primarily a portraitist, “realistic without being real,” as his “old friend and idol” Francis Bacon described them, Freud painted people he “felt like painting”—and those who could pay. As one sitter said, the “results are not flattering.” Feaver writes that Freud loved to gamble, and the “companionship of horses was more of an attraction than most human company.” Close to his mother, Freud did numerous paintings of Lucie, “arguably the longest time ever spent by any mother’s painter son on any painter son’s mother.” Fond of painting nudes, he told Feaver that when “I paint clothes I’m really painting naked people who are covered in clothes,” the “portraits are all personal and the nudes especially demand it.” Freud also fathered numerous illegitimate children. A “common grievance or understanding among Freud’s children was that he only saw them—and of them only the ones he recognized—when it suited him and sporadically at that.” In 2001, his reputation secure, he was able to get Queen Elizabeth II to sit for a small portrait. The Sun’s headline screamed: “travesty.” Feaver provides a full-throated chronicle of Freud’s life: discussions of more than 200 works; shows, dealers, and collectors; painting techniques; the artist’s many models, including his daughters, “there for what he could make of them;” frequent moves from one residence to another; love life, friends, and ongoing financial problems. Also, two of his favorite authors were Balzac and Raymond Chandler.

A knowledgeable yet overlong, extremely detailed biography that may overwhelm readers.