Lucian Freud [Hardcover]

William Feaver (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

Over six decades, Lucian Freud has built up a reputation as one of the most distinctive contemporary figurative artists. Freud's startling and disconcerting portraits and nudes have a haunting quality that makes them impossible to forget. This stunning book brings together key works from Freud's entire career, including over 140 paintings, drawings, and etchings, some new, and many never before exhibited.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Lucian Freud's figurative paintings are hard to forget-his distinctive brushwork, color combinations, and unique poses create a landscape of translucent skin that is alarming in its frankness yet beautiful in its presentation. This catalog, accompanying a show that will travel through London, Barcelona, and Los Angeles, features key works from each phase of his six-decade-long career, from 1939 to the present. More than 140 full-color illustrations of paintings, drawings, and etchings accompany an essay by Feaver, as well as an extensive bibliography and chronology. A curator, writer, and critic, Feaver provides a historical backdrop and analysis that helps the reader navigate across the decades of Freud's career. This work joins other catalogs (notably Robert Hughes's Lucian Freud: Paintings and Catherine Lampert's Lucian Freud: Recent Works) in exposing the artist and the evolution of his art, but it incorporates a much greater range of the still-productive artist's life and work. The result is well written, beautifully designed, and recommended for all academic, public, and museum libraries.
Kraig A. Binkowski, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Lucian Freud's figurative paintings are hard to forget...Well written, beautifully designed, and recommended..." -- Publisher's Weekly

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Tate (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810962675
• ISBN-13: 978-0810962675
• Product Dimensions: 12.1 x 10.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #965,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great pictures, confusing text, March 7, 2005

By 

Anthony Cuneo - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lucian Freud (Hardcover)

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.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An In-Depth Survey of This Important Painter, February 9, 2003

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lucian Freud (Hardcover)

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.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last ..., October 25, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Lucian Freud (Hardcover)

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.