Lucian Freud lived quite a few lives before dying at the age of eighty-eight last July. As a boy he fled Berlin with his family to escape the rise of Nazism. As a teenager he was expelled from school for dropping his trousers on a dare . And as an adult he married and divorced twice over , enjoyed many love affairs and fathered as least thirteen children (more than earning his “Byronic reputation as a rake” , as The NewyorkTimes put it in his obituary)
But more than anything, this grandson of Sigmund Freud is the man who redefined British art. His lush , almost tactile portraits , often of people lost in contemplation , even despair , feel more intimate than intimacy itself – in real life we are too of the-moment to drink it in the way his paintings allow . Freud spent countless hours with his subjects . scrutinizing them with unabashed clarity , and rendering what he saw in thick , fleshy layers of paint . Ultimately , each face is a moment frozen , still pulsing with emotion.
In February , more than one hundred of Freud`s portraits will be on exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery of London . Some have never been seen before : all deserve to be seen anew.
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