Lucian Freud [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

While I spent hours enjoying the color plates in this book, I spent an equal amount of time frustrated with the text. The author is clearly familiar with Freud, knows him, and understands his world and his sources. One problem is that he assumes the reader has a similar kind of knowledge. He refers, for example, to Freud's early fascination with certain comic strips (some apparently dating from the mid-19th century)and how they affected Freud's development. These are illustrated with a very few marginal reproductions that do nothing to enlighten the reader about the nature of these influences. At another point, the author refers to one of Freud's early paintings (not reproduced in the book that I could find) which he argues was based on color plate III from a book on Egyptian art (which Freud owns), but the color plate is not reproduced either... so the reader is left to consider the influence of an unillustrated source on an unillustrated painting. Some of the paintings referred to in the text are reproduced in thumbnails in the margins of the book, which is extremely helpful when one is trying to follow the flow of the argument, but others are not. Plate references are given; unfortunately, the plates are not in numerical order (for example, illustration 63 may or may not be before 64, which might in turn be followed by 69 and then 65) which leaves you hunting around trying to match image with text. The author refers to many of the people who knew and interacted with Freud. Some of them are well known in their own right and require no identification. Many, though, were people I, at least, had never heard of --- a female English aristocrat who was evidently peeved that her daugher had not been invited to a coronation or wedding or some other royal function, a bewildering variety of people who (in a sentence or two) are described as marrying and divorcing before Freud married and/ or divorced (or maybe just bedded, it's never really made clear) the women in turn. People are identified as the sister or the in-law of another person previously unmentioned in the text, and so on. If you've ever been to a party with a group of people who have all known each other for a long time, with you a newcomer, you'll have some idea of the effect of this ... they're all talking about things that happened and people they knew years ago, and you have absolutely no idea what's going on. And, when all is said and done, the author actually writes relatively little about the paintings as paintings. He does provide some fascinating quotes from Freud which give you some grist for your intellectaul mill, but that's about it. Frankly, I gave up on the text and simply enjoyed the pictures, a good number of which I had not seen reproduced before.

LUCIEN FREUD is certainly one of the most talked about contemporary figurative artists around the world. Most people are familiar with his greater than life-sized portraits of corpulent male and female nudes and of his much talked about protraits of friends such as Francis Bacon and David Hockney. But few of us have been exposed to the gamut of this artist's output to the extent that this very fine book by William Feaver investigates the entire career of the grandson of Sigmund Freud.

The book is a catologue for the exhibition currently in Los Angeles, having opened in London and travelled to Barcelona. But to classify the scholarly and intensively detailed tome as an 'exhibition catalogue' simply does not do justice to the scope of this volume. The writing by Feaver is wise, witty, and thoroughly readable - the essay portion that opens the book is more a biography and an analysis of Freud's position in art history than a resume. The color reproductions are superb, spreading as they do across two pages for the very large paintings. As a catalogue the editors can be forgiven for not including sufficient 'detail views' that enhance understanding, but this is a minor point. The supporting data in the back of the book is as fine a catalogue raisonne as has been published to date.

Those of us fortunate enough to live in Los Angeles allowing multiple visits to this impressive exhibition can use Feaver's book as a Master Class on Lucien Freud. But the book stands alone in its mastery of the life and work of this exciting painter. Highly recommended.

The definitive book on one of the greatest figurative painters of our time. The format is large enough (double paged, at times), the repros rich enough, and the scope comprehensive enough to properly capture a life/work as important as Lucian's. A must have.

Look into the work of Phil Hale ("Goad" from grantbooks.com), Odd Nerdrum (nerdrum.com) and Jenny Saville (geocities.com/craigsjursen/index.html) if you enjoy this artist.