Some of my friends, but also some of our visitors, asked me why Lucian Freud was not even mentioned on the Art of Love, wasn’t it time to write about one of the most remarkable figurative painters of the past century? A painter that is famous for his large oeuvre of confronting nudes. And I know, they are right, Lucian Freud can hardly be left out on a website that’s dedicated to the nude in art.
At the same time, and that’s the main reason for not including Freud’s art on the Art of Love before, I do not consider his work to be erotic. His nudes are painted with such an objective eye, they are so ‘real’, his painted skin just feels as the weak flesh it is. I said to one of my friends, you can nearly smell the naked people in his work.
The work of Lucian Freud stands rather alone, he does not fit very well in any of the modernistic styles or style periods. You could say he’s a realist, but if you consider him an expressionist your right as well. Freud followed his own creative path, in a world full of abstract art, he continued to paint his figurative nudes and portraits. Some of the other art outsiders maybe influenced his work at that time, like Francis bacon and Otto Dix, but his inspiration mainly came from the people around him. People he painted, as they were, not as they should have been. ‘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’.
More information about Lucian Freud
