Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
Stadhouderslaan 41
Den Haag
31-(0)70-3381111
Lucian Freud
February 16, 2008-June 8, 2008

German-born British painter Lucian Freud (b. 1922) is famous around the world for his intimate and revealing portraits and nudes. With his keen eye and highly personal approach, he lays bare the hidden feelings and thoughts of his subjects. The aim is not to achieve any superficial or flattering likeness, but to reveal the essence of the subject’s inner being. The results are impressive and extremely private portraits of vulnerable individuals. The first ever Dutch retrospective of this extraordinary and unconventional artist opens on 16 February at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. It runs until 8 June 2008.

Freud, grandson of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, was born in Berlin in 1922. He moved with his parents to London in the 1930s and in 1939 acquired British nationality. Following his training in London and East Anglia, he quickly became friends with Francis Bacon, with whom he was to be one of the founders of the "London School." In 1954, together with Bacon and Ben Nicholson, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. Ever since then, he has been regarded as one of Britain’s greatest living artists.

Through into the 1950s, Freud worked in a flat, schematic style that seemed to leave little room for personal interpretation. In the late 1950s, however, he abandoned his precious sable brushes in favour of broader hog’s hair ones and started to work on his feet rather than sitting down. The change had a major impact on his style: his work became looser, with a heavier impasto, more voluptuous models and more use of light and shadow. He uses this highly distinctive new style to depict his models in merciless detail. His view of the world leaves no room for sentimentality or embarrassment. Sagging bellies, wrinkles, bags under the eyes, double chins and folds — nothing about his models escapes him. Yet his pictures are by no means a mechanical reproduction of what he sees before him; they are autonomous works of art created not with the aim of achieving a mere likeness, but rather to create a portrait of what the subject actually is. And Freud is merciless not just to other people, but also to himself. When he heard that two of his incisors would have to go, he immediately started planning a "self portrait without front teeth."

Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London then, with greater success, at Cedric Morris's East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, and also at Goldsmiths College — University of London from 1942-3. Thereafter, he served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942. Freud's first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, featured the now-celebrated The Painter's Room. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Italy for several months. Since then he has lived and worked in London.

Freud's early paintings are often associated with surrealism and depict people and plants in unusual juxtapositions. These works are usually painted with quite thin paint, but from the 1950s he began to paint portraits, often nudes, to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, and began to use a thicker impasto. With this technique he would often clean his brush after each stroke. The colours in these paintings are typically muted. Often Freud's portraits just depict the sitter, sometimes sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed, but sometimes the sitter is juxtaposed with something else, as in Girl With a White Dog and Naked Man With Rat. Freud's subjects are often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. To quote the artist: "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really."

"I paint people," Freud has said, "not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be." Freud has painted a number of fellow artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. He produced a series of portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery, and also painted Henrietta Moraes, a muse to many Soho artists.

Freud is one of the best known British artists working in a traditional representational style, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989. According to the Sunday Telegraph of September 1, 2002, he is rumoured to have up to 40 illegitimate children, acknowledging them when they have become adults. After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry her niece Kitty (daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman) in 1948, but the marriage ended after four years when he began an affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood, a society girl and writer. They married in 1957. He has children by Jacquetta Lampson, daughter of the first Baron Killearn, and by Bernardine Coverley (fashion designer Bella Freud and writer Esther Freud), Suzy Boyt (5 children: Ali, Rose Boyt, Isobel, and Susie Boyt), and Katherine Margaret McAdam (4 children).

His painting After Cezanne, which is notable because of its unusual shape, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $7.4 million. The top left section of this painting has been 'grafted' on to the main section below, and closer inspection reveals a horizontal line where these two sections were joined.

Lucian Freud served as a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art (1949-54), University College, London.

Although internationally acknowledged as one of the most important artists working today, there have been few opportunities to see Lucian Freud's paintings and etchings in Britain. In 1996, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted a major exhibition of 27 paintings and thirteen etchings, covering the whole period of Freud's working life to date. This was followed most notably by a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002. During a period from May 2000 to December 2001, Freud painted Queen Elizabeth II. He was criticised by leading newspapers like The Sun for painting the Queen in an unflattering manner.

Lucian Freud asks a great deal of his models. They have to pose many times, at frequent intervals and for long periods. Because he believes that the subject influences the whole world around them, they have to be present and in the right pose even when Freud is working on a completely different part of the canvas. His subjects are often people close to him: friends, family, fellow-artists, children or lovers. As a result, his portraits and nudes possess an extraordinary intensity. For example, Night Portrait, Face Down, painted in 1999/2000, is an intense depiction of a naked woman slumped on her belly across a bed. She lies with her eyes closed, entirely at the mercy of the artist’s gaze.

At a time when abstraction and minimalism reigned supreme, Freud remained faithful to his realistic manner of painting, in which both form and subject were rooted deeply in the classical tradition. His heroes were masters of the past like Chardin, Constable and Frans Hals. It was not until the 1980s, with the revival of interest in figurative painting, that his work began to be internationally appreciated. Around that time, his paintings tended to be increasingly large and therefore monumental. His 1994 portrait Leigh under the Skylight shows a corpulent man seen from a low angle — a classical nude, but big, rough and impressive. The memorable female nude Standing by the Rags, painted in 1988/89 and on loan from the Tate Gallery, will also be on show at the Gemeentemuseum.

The exhibition has been put together by guest curator Catherine Lampert and is being held in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. It will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue (price: € 29.95).