Lucian Freud, the British painter of regular people in all their fleshy glory who stayed loyal to portraiture and realism even when modern art veered toward the abstract, has died.
He was 88. Freud died last night at his home in London after a brief illness, said William Acquavella, owner of Acquavella Galleries in New York, which is Freud's worldwide dealer.
A grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud preferred to use friends and family members, including his mother, as subjects of his portraits, using thick gobs of paint to reveal the human body's curves, folds and imperfections.
He preferred the term "naked" rather than "nude".
Starting in the 1980s he graduated to larger and larger canvases. "I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be," he said.
Bloomberg News critic Jorg von Uthmann, in a review of a 2010 show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, called Freud's work "unashamedly traditional, stubbornly figurative and realistic to the point of being brutal."
Born in Germany, Freud moved to the UK at 11 and later became a naturalised citizen. His longtime studio was at a home in the London neighborhood of Holland Park. In 2000 and 2001, Queen Elizabeth II sat for a portrait that provided fodder for Freud's fans and critics alike. He painted model Kate Moss in 2002, while she was pregnant.
Freud generally needed as much as a year's worth of regular sittings to complete a portrait. In 2008, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, his portrait of a 280-pound civil servant named Sue, sold for £20.6 million - the highest price ever for a work by a living artist - in an auction at Christie's International in New York.
The purchase, later reported to be by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, culminated a surge of interest in Freud's work. The 1998 sale in London of his Naked Portrait with Reflection for £2.8 million set a record for the most expensive contemporary work sold in Europe.
The portrait, from 1980, depicts a voluptuous woman reclining on a sofa in the nude. It was sold again in 2008, for £11.8 million pounds. Also in 1998, his Large Interior W11, which shows two of his children and three friends in a rundown London interior, sold for $5.8 million.
His work continued to draw high prices. In February 2010, at Sotheby's in London, a 1978 Freud self-portrait showing him with a black eye after a fight with a London taxi driver sold for 2.8 million pounds. At a June 2011 auction at Christie's in London, Woman Smiling, a 1958-1959 Freud portrait of his lover, Suzy Boyt, sold for £4.7 million .
The art critic Robert Hughes, writing in Time magazine in 1993, called Freud "the best realist painter alive."
Among his many relationships with women, two led to marriage, and then divorce. In 1948, he married Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and they had two daughters. In 1953, he married Lady Caroline Blackwood.
He had multiple children from later relationships, including novelists Esther Freud, Susie Boyt and Rose Boyt, and fashion designer Bella Freud. Other of his progeny dealt with being called the "Forgotten Freuds," the Daily Telegraph reported in a 2011 profile of Lucy Freud, one of his four children with the artist Katherine McAdam.
Bloomberg