The most ambitious exhibition of the British artist Lucian Freud (December 8, 1922, Berlin – July 20, 2011, London) has opened at the National Portrait Gallery

Fame follows Lucian Freud not only in museum halls: in May 2008, Freud’s painting “Social Warden Sleeping” was sold for a record price of 33.6 million dollars, and at the February 2009 Christie’s auction, his work was listed first in the list of the most significant works – and only then the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol.

Lucian Freud is the grandson of the famous psychiatrist, the founder of the practice of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. Being related to such a person already gives reason to suppose that Lucian Freud’s realism differs from what is usually understood by this word. And this is indeed so.

Lucian Freud was born on December 8, 1922 in Berlin. His father, the youngest son of Sigmund Freud, an architect by profession, married the daughter of a wealthy timber merchant and the family lived, if not in luxury, then in sufficient prosperity: an apartment in one of the best areas of Berlin, an estate near the city of Cottbus and summer holidays on the coast of the North Sea. When Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, the Freud family moved to England, to London.

When the war ended, Lucian Freud rented a studio in London and began the life of a free artist. It should be noted right away that the young artist decided to become a bohemian: his studio was in the poorest area of ​​the city. Apparently, this spoiled young man was attracted by poverty and neglect. And this was a kind of denial of bourgeois prosperity, a challenge to society.

Art critic John Russell wrote in the early 60s that Lucian Freud created in his portraits a new relationship between the artist and his model: the relationship of an investigator to an accused.

In the United States, a country of entrepreneurial optimism, the American critic Hilton Kramer, speaking in New York, titled his review as follows – “King Freud Turns Out Naked” (based on Andersen’s fairy tale). Over time, the attitude to Freud’s work changed for the better, although for many art lovers it somehow does not fit into the history of modern art.

From his biography we learn, however, that he was considered one of the most interesting people in London. He was married twice, in the first marriage to the granddaughter of the famous English sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, the second time – to an English aristocrat. Both marriages ended in divorce, but they left children, to which should be added the illegitimate children from the artist’s many affairs.

History will show what place Lucien Freud will have in contemporary art. The human psyche is closer to the beauty of the surrounding world, and not its slow decay. Sergey Lvovich Gollerbach, October 2011.