British figurative painter Lucian Freud, whose uncompromising, fleshy portraits made him one of the world’s most revered and coveted artists, has died aged 88, his long-time New York art dealer William Acquavella told.
The grandson of Sigmund Freud died at his home in London on Wednesday night after an unspecified illness. Freud tended to paint people he knew — family, friends and fellow artists, but was also famously commissioned to depict Queen Elizabeth in 2001.
Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 to a well-off German family who fled the Nazis for Britain in 1933 and became British citizen in 1939. He went to several schools but is said to have attended few classes. Freud attended a string of art colleges and had a brief spell with the merchant navy before turning to art full time. Until the 1950s, his paintings were relatively refined, explained by his use of pointed brushes.
But from around 1956, he began to loosen his style and employ stiffer hogshair brushes and thicker paint, resulting in works like “Woman Smiling” in 1959 which Tate Britain gallery in London described as a “landmark work.” His “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” a 1995 portrait of an obese nude woman sleeping on a sofa, fetched $33.6 million at Christie’s in 2008, an auction record for a living artist. Freud married twice and had several children, although he was widely believed to have fathered many more than he acknowledged.
