Lucian Freud

In Lucian Freud, the first biography on this remarkable artist, we follow Freud from his birthplace in Berlin to London, where he fled with his family in the 1930s, and then to Paris, where he mixed with Picasso and Giacometti. He led a dissolute life in Soho after the war, gambling and womanizing with fierce energy (he married twice and had an uncountable number of children), but kept working through it all. He painted everyone from Kate Moss to Queen Elizabeth, including his close friend and rival (and perhaps lover) Francis Bacon, a mountainously obese clerk, and an anonymous Irishman. He painted his wives nude, his children nude, himself nude. He sometimes spent years on a single painting, which could require hundreds of hours of sittings. His last work, left unfinished when he died, was of his disciple, David Dawson, and his beloved whippet, Eli. However various his subjects, his intent was always the same: to find and reveal the character hidden within by means of his intense visual imagination.

In addition to its startling biographical revelations, the great thrill of Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is its description of the art itself—its influences, models, and tech¬nique—and the exploration of how Freud reproduced reality while breaking down the illusion that what we see is real. This was the source of his genius, deconstructed here with verve and erudition.