Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open

Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open

by Phoebe Hoban
Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open

Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open

by Phoebe Hoban

Audio MP3 on CD(MP3 on CD - Unabridged)

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Overview

Phoebe Hoban, author of definitive biographies of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alice Neel, now turns her attention to Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund and one of the greatest painters England has produced. Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the first biography to assess Freud’s work and life, showing how the two converge.

In Hoban’s dramatic and fast-paced narrative, we follow Freud from his birthplace in Berlin to London, where he fled with his family in the 1930s, and then to Paris, where he mixed with Picasso and Giacometti. He led a dissolute life in Soho after the war, gambling and womanizing with fierce energy. He painted his wives nude, his children nude, himself nude. He married twice, had an uncountable number of children, and kept working through it all, painting everyone from close friend and rival Francis Bacon to Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. He sometimes spent years on a single painting, which could require hundreds of hours of sittings. However various his subjects, his intent was always the same: to find and reveal the character hidden within by means of his intense visual imagination.

Along with its startling biographical revelations, the great thrill of Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the way Hoban deconstructs the art itself—its influences, models, and technique—to show how Freud reproduced reality on the canvas while breaking down the illusion that what we see is real.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781480570795
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Publication date: 04/15/2014
Series: Icons , #3
Edition description: Unabridged
Product dimensions: 5.25(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Phoebe Hoban is the author of the bestselling books Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art and Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty.

Read an Excerpt

1

The Art of Looking

Imagine a young man walking across a high, slender, wooden beam, eyes tightly closed. It’s a striking image, but one Lucian Freud would never paint. As his cousin, Carola Zentner, recalled from a long-past summer in the Freuds’ country house, “There was an oak beam which went from one side of the barn to the other, twenty feet in length at least, and about nine inches wide. And I have a distinct memory of Lucian, about 15, walking in a rather languid way up the stairs, and then closing his eyes and walking across the beam. It was impressive.”
   Although such bravura abandon would characterize much of his later life, as an artist Lucian Freud never closed his eyes. His omnivorous scrutiny bordered on obsessive; his forensic curiosity was satisfied only through countless sittings, as if by minutely examining and recording the world in his studio, he could command it. His gaze has been called “cruel.” More accurately, it was insatiable.
   Where did Lucian learn to look at things the way he did? It would be easy to attribute his particular form of acute observation to genetics: his grandfather, after all, was Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. It is almost impossible to write about Lucian Freud without drawing a parallel between Sigmund’s repeated sessions with his patients and Lucian’s repeated sessions with his subjects. Both took place in a private room, with a recumbent figure being intently examined, although Sigmund’s focus was the unseen, and Lucian’s the seen.
   Indeed, Sigmund Freud’s study, which Lucian visited as a child at his grandfather’s house at Berggasse 19, in Vienna, and which was later recreated, objet d’art by objet d’art in 1938, in a townhouse in London at 20 Maresfield Gardens (now the Freud Museum), not only provided an influential working template; it was replete with key imagery that would resurface in Lucian Freud’s paintings: ceramic and bronze heads; horses (a deep and life-long love—one of his earliest works is a sandstone sculpture of a three-legged horse); and a rich array of Egyptian antiquities, including mummy portraits, whose flat aspect he later emulated. One of Lucian’s favorite books was J. H. Breasted’s Geschichte Aegyptens, which was given to him when he was sixteen. Freud even depicted it in several pieces: Still life with Book, 1993, The Egyptian book, 1994.
   The architect Richard Neutra, a friend of Lucian’s father, Ernst, recalled Sigmund Freud’s study in detail: “Pompeian frescoes . . . mummy fragments . . . many Egyptian bronzes . . . ceramics . . . antique vases, paintings . . . sculptures . . . Greek gold ornaments and these books . . . the erotic work. Terrific.”
   In a short film clip in the Freud Museum’s archives, Lucian, age 16, can be seen, as he stands side by side with his grandfather (who died the next year) near a goldfish pond at 39 Elsworth Place, where Sigmund stayed until the house at Maresfield Gardens was ready. Lucian was extremely fond of Sigmund—and later flamboyantly wore his grandfather’s fur-trimmed greatcoat around London. He refused to go to the funeral, causing a family scene. “Doing so would have been absolutely meaningless to me,” he told writer John Gruen in the 1970s.
   Even at that early age, Lucian was considered a wunderkind. “I met him first in the winter of 1938–39 and [he was] already spoken of as a boy wonder,” wrote one of his first chroniclers, Lawrence Gowing. “He was in a studio flat in Charlotte Street, round the corner from the house where Rimbaud and Verlaine took rooms, in company with a self-appointed Svengali who showed him off, whispering behind his hand, ‘Marvellous.’ ”
   And something else, less tangible. He was also, notes Gowing, “fly [sic], perceptive, lithe, and with a hint of menace,” characteristics which would remain lifelong traits. This slightly sinister quality was also observed by Stephen Spender, one of the first to reproduce Freud’s work, who thought of him as “totally alive, like something not entirely human, a leprechaun, a changeling child, or if there is a male opposite, a witch.”
   It was not only Lucian’s “extraordinary looks,” remarked on by the artist’s friend Bruce Bernard in his authoritative monograph on Freud, that made a striking impression, but what Gowing describes as “the pointed intensity apparent even in Freud’s juvenile vision.” That pointed intensity would be Freud’s lietmotif.
   Lucian Michael Freud was born in Berlin on December 8, 1922. (His middle name refers to an archangel, as do those of his two brothers, Stephen Gabriel and Clement Raphael.) His father was Sigmund’s youngest son and fourth child, Ernst, thought of by the family as a Gluckskind, or lucky child. Although Ernst had originally wanted to be an artist (at least so Sigmund told his famous patient, the “Wolf Man,” in a discussion of his son’s career), he decided on the more pragmatic profession of architecture. But he remained steeped in the arts. According to Gowing, who saw a series of his 1913 Alpine landscapes, Ernst was an accomplished watercolorist. And, like many German youths, he was an ardent fan of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, so much so that Sigmund wrote his dear friend Lou Andreas-Salome (famously Rilke’s lover and mentor) in the hope that his son might meet Rilke, who then not only returned the compliment, but wrote a dedication to Ernst in a book by his friend Regina Ulmann called Field Service. Ernst eventually did meet the poet in Vienna, in February of 1916, when the young soldier was at home on leave from the army.
   Lucian’s mother, after whom he was named, was Lucie Brasch, the daughter of a prosperous Berlin corn merchant, Joseph Brasch, and his wife Elise. Lucie studied classical philology in Munich, as well as art history with the famous Swiss art historian, Heinrich Wolfflin, for a year in Munich, after first reading German studies in Berlin. Zentner, the daughter of Lucie’s older sister, Gerda, describes Lucie as “tremendously vibrant and vivacious, an intellectual. She had done classics at university, which was fairly unusual when she was a young girl. She was very funny and very beautiful, with jet black hair.” As for her background, “Lucie’s father was the president of the Corn Exchange in those days. It was a Buddenbrooks sort of family.” (As Clement Freud put it in his memoir, Freud Ego, “My father’s family was distinguished, my mother’s was rich.”)
   Ernst first attended the Technical University (Technische Hochschule) in Vienna from 1912 to 1913, studying mathematics, engineering, and sketching after nature and the body, among other courses. In 1913, he left Vienna for Munich, where he studied architecture with Theodor Fischer at the Technical University (Technishe Hochschule) in Munich, and, according to Gowing, also took an art course. He volunteered to fight for the Austrian-Hungarian army in 1914. Although at first he was rejected for health reasons, he was eventually assigned to a gun unit at Doberdoplateau, which came under heavy attack, leaving him the only survivor. He was awarded a gold medal (he eventually earned three) and an architectural commission to commemorate five fallen fellow soldiers
   Freud had had not dropped out of university to join the army, and when the war was over, he returned to his studies in late 1918. He also met Lucie Brasch, who was at the time studying in Munich. Ernst passed his final exams in 1919, and his first job out of school was as an intern with the architect Fritz Landauer. But later that year he moved to Berlin to join Lucie, who had returned to her family’s home after finishing her s
tudies.
   The year 1920 did not begin well for Ernst. His sister, Sophie, died on January 25 from influenza, and Ernst consulted on the design of her gravestone. Around that time, he himself developed a lung ailment, and was prescribed a stay at a sanitarium in Arosa, Switzerland. He was well enough to marry Lucie in Berlin on May 18, 1920. However, he was forced to return to the sanitarium for three months from February through April, 1921. His son’s health was of some concern to Sigmund, who wrote to a friend that the sanitarium sojourn was “so short after one has married into a rich family . . . I only hope that the Braschs are too refined to suspect anything behind this.” But by then, Lucie was pregnant with her first son, Stephen Gabriel Freud, born that July.
   At the time, the couple was living in what was recalled as a “charming home” located on Regentstrasse, in the well-to-do Tiergarten quarter. When Lucian was two years old, a third son, Clement, was born, necessitating a move to a larger apartment, on the same street, Number 23 Regentstrasse. (Clement Freud refers to the neighborhood as the “best part of Berlin.”) The family lived there until Lucian was eight years old. Its interior and furnishings, designed by Ernst, merited a 1928 article and photograph in Die Pyramide magazine.

Table of Contents

1. The Art of Looking  1
2. Learning to Be Lucian  13
3. Women and Muses  24
4. London Days  32
5. Beautiful People  45
6. Letting Go  57
7. Carnal Knowledge  70
8. Channeling Courbet  83
9. Intimations of Mortality  89
10. Bypassing Decorum  95
11. New Views  106
12. The Way of All Flesh  112
13. Painting against Time  128
14. Not Going Gently  135
15. Leaving the Studio  144

Acknowledgements  153
Bibliography  155

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