Lucian Freud
20Availability: February 8, 2025Lucian Freud
20Unflinching truth
Portraits which scrutinized beneath the skin
Despite rejecting parallels between him and his renowned grandfather, the correlation between Lucian Freud’s sitting process for portraiture and Sigmund Freud’s psychotherapy sessions is a fascinating element to this figurative oeuvre. Despite the thickness of the impasto surfaces, Freud’s portraits of subjects as varied as the Queen, Kate Moss, and an obese job center supervisor penetrate the physicality of the body with a direct and often disarming insight. The result is as much a psychological interrogation as it is an uneasy examination of the relationship between artist and model.
This book brings together some of Freud’s most outstanding and unapologetic portraits, to introduce an artist widely considered one of the finest masters of the human form.
The author
Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic at The Washington Globe. He has contributed essays to several books on Lucian Freud, and his articles have been published in The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Spectator.
Lucian Freud
Hardcover, 21 x 26 cm, 0.63 kg, 96 pagesISBN 978-3-8365-6061-0
Edition: SpanishISBN 978-3-8365-6062-7
Edition: FrenchISBN 978-3-8365-6063-4
Edition: EnglishBorn back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series features:
• a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
• a concise biography
• approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions
5