Original subtitles

I want to do shock and amaze and realistic as it sounds, I want each picture that

I'm working on to be the only picture that I'm working on.

To go a bit further, the only picture that I've ever worked on and to go even a bit further,

the only picture that anyone has ever done.

Freud's never shown in the Royal Academy. He's one of the great painters of the 20th century.

He's one of the great painters of the human figure. He's a great portraitist.

And he is fascinated by the idea of transformation, but Lucien is one of those rare artists

who's connected us to the old master tradition. To that extraordinary painterly tradition of

Titian and Rembrandt in particular is so obviously there, but he's also a visionary who pushes the

idea of what the human figure can be in art and what the self portrait can be in art.

Few painters certainly in my lifetime have scrutinized the human body, the human flesh,

not just what lies beneath it, but this scratchy surface with the same intensity that he does.

He's withholding as much as he's revealing and there are all sorts of accounts of the

interaction that he had with the sister. He's got an intimate two-way process. Of course,

he gambled. Of course, he yet well. Of course, he was a playboy. Of course,

he was out and about. Of course, he was very sophisticated from fairly early on in London, Paris and

but very few artists that I know of spend as much time in the studio as he did. That was his

world and that's the biography that's really revealed the most significant aspect of him.

There's never been an exhibition ever of Lucien Freud's self portraiture. The self portrait

in a way is the punctuation point through the career that he's so obviously a new way of looking at him.

Visitors will really engage with this opportunity to examine this discrete element of his practice

in what is possibly once in a lifetime opportunity. I think the extraordinary thing is that there are

a series of narratives that almost run parallel to each other during the course of the exhibition.

You really see this development of a person over a period of time in a way the Freud would never

have seen in his studio. On a kind of human scale, they're fascinating. There are elements of biography

that kind of seeps through for people to connect with. But really, the more interesting thing

for me is how they really show you how Freud developed as an artist, as a painter, as a draftman,

and how he really pitted his own self image against the challenges of his developing style.

Freud was photographed a lot, and actually is very, I think, photogenic. From, well,

some of the great photographers of the past have looked at him, but he had this amazingly piercing

stare, and even when he'd lost some of that youthful energy in edge, it was a really compelling stare.

And photography can be something of that. And the self portraiture, both in folks and

sometimes distances us from that. And I'm curious about the way he scrutinized himself,

because he certainly treats himself as ruthlessly as he does anyone. And in some ways,

there's a timelessness to Freud that is really interesting.

I think this exhibition will show you one man's life. He had the single-minded passion

of painting, and he never stopped. He painted himself throughout his life, and not many artists

have done that. There's a handful of Rembrandt or Picasso. But that's what, for me, is this life span

of one man's push.

Leeson felt very, very exposed when he had exhibitions on. It took a lot out of him, and I always

said that I, you know, one day I want to make a group of yourself, you know, an exhibition of yourself

portraits Leeson. You say, you do that when I'm not around, so it's rather poignant for me to

get his show now. He talked about everything being autobiographical. Everything is a self-portrait,

he said. But obviously, the actual self-portraits during this special category there, and

this is sent in the early ones that he's just fascinated by the image of himself. And

almost wondering what it can be, how plausible his image of himself can be as it as a work of art.

The way he wants to capture himself from different angles, and not just reflected in a mirror,

which so many self-portraits by necessity have to be. But really caught on the slice,

who's, you know, he talked about with his other portraits, not really caring about whether

people recognize them as the cousin of so and so or the sister of so and so, just about

their specific immediate presence at that time. That's what he cared about. And I think it was the

same with himself. Lucien Freud was born on the 8th December 1922 in Central Berlin.

His father was an architect and the youngest son of neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis

Sigmar Freud. Lucien was the middle of three sons. He was always the apple of his mother's eye,

and his brothers resented this in childhood, and Lucien would not lift a finger domestically.

He would be the prized son of the family. I think the extraordinary thing about Lucien is that

from the very word goes from the very earliest memories of him from the age of one and a half

two years old, he was the leader of the pack in families living around the tear garden in this

smart, calm, self-presessed suburb of Central Berlin. Lucien was not brought up to be a practicing

orthodox Jew, so they put the events of 1932-93 as they impinge where all the more shocking for that,

it was a complete total surprise to this child that suddenly he would be told off for a drawing

across the world. He was just a pretty pattern, and he'd be attacked in school or set apart

as being one to whom other things didn't relate, and the consciousness of being alien in Germany,

which impingeed pretty strongly, and from the summer of 1932 onwards, and certainly heavily

throughout 1933, there was feeling that he and that his family weren't wanted. Lucien

always drew and asked his brother, his brother sort of liked behind, and Lucien was the one who

had the best graphic ideas, and the most I think intense interest in doing it, and basically

otherwise he was just a mischievous, impudent, inquisitive little boy.

I have lived in Vienna now for many years. The name Freud comes out of the taps when you turn them

on here. I think it was at times a burden to him. I think at times it has encouraged a level

of interpretation of his work that he loathed, his grandfather's segment, traveled from Vienna

to Berlin quite frequently for treatment for his cancer of the jaw, and on every trip he would

bring a little souvenir reproduction print of one of the great artworks of Vienna, and give

it to Lucien as a present. So he grew up with our picture gallery in his bedroom, these wonderful

paintings by Brogel the seasons were some of the first artworks that he knew.

In the autumn of 1933, Lucien's parents decided to flee Nazi Germany and go to England.

They recognised Lucien had talent, and a free spirit, and enrolled him in the progressive

dartington Hall school. Lucien founded hard to settle, and he was eventually asked to leave.

He was into another liberal school, Bryson, but again rebelled, interested only in horses,

and art. It was expelled from Bryson, essentially for dropping his charges in

Bournemouth High Street on a bit. The school had enough of him, he had enough of school,

he left, and his father managed to get him on the strength of a stone sculpture he had made

of a horse into the central school of art in China across the road, which was a fairly strict

certainly rigorous art school, and again, rigorous and strictness went for Lucien, although application

and interest certainly were. He lasted that only a couple of terms.

So I went home and said to my parents, I said, you sent me the long-out school. There's only

one-out school in England. That's the same in school, painting and drawing in denim,

as explained by Cedric Boise and his boyfriend offered that hand. So they wrote, very nice of them,

and I was taken on there, and then I apparently burnt the school

time. It was a simple matter of person, Cedric Boise, and there are a few portraits

that Freud does in 1941, which are similar to what Cedric Boise is doing, but it's not a

lasting influence by any means except for both appreciated plants, you know, that's common interest,

but he is a combining, you know, a little bit of surrealism, a little bit of objects, he

started to find things and does his whole life, not just sofas and furniture and pots and so forth.

Morris really encouraged his students and Freud to really work from themselves, to develop their own

style and find their own interest, and it's really with Morris to Freud dedicates himself

to becoming a painter. When he left school and moved to London, he was going out, the cafe royal

other cafes and so, who are making a bit of a name for himself and presenting himself as a painter,

even though he really hadn't developed his practice yet at that point. And Morris says, okay,

if you're going to do this, you're going to do this series, you need to at least put out the painting

a day, you need to dedicate yourself, and at this moment in which Freud finds a mentor, finds a way

of painting a way into painting and dedicates himself to it, he decides to paint a self portrait.

He's focused in on the face quite tightly, it's sort of slightly flattened, but you can see this

kind of fascination with rendering the skin on his face, you see if tonal colour palette that

you feel you might recognize from work that develops later on, with still quite a strong emphasis

on drawing in terms of the way he outlines the shape of his eye and so on, clearly the reference

of someone like Sadrick Morris in the style that he chooses to adopt at that point.

Drawing is incredibly important for him, he develops his drawing skills, is commissioned to draw

several illustrations for publications, for magazines and so on.

In 1941, Freud joined the merchant navy in search of adventure. He sailed to Canada in the United

States, but fell ill and was discharged after serving only three months.

Returning to London, he shared a flat-ins in John's wood with another artist, John Craxton.

They became good friends, with Craxton introducing Freud to a new circle of influential people in London.

I remember the feather you can see on first of all the shades of this still composed, slightly

fertive person, and that person's himself, of course. It's the sub-portrait of him in a rather

poetical young man mood, and before he's actually encountered a proper girlfriend as he got

the artist a later. But as a time when he was taking a serious interest in how to

get on sexually, how to get on in one's chosen career in painting, and how basically it does

one evade the war and get over it and make things out of it instead.

Deliberately mysterious, slightly surrealistic, or made up the building in the background,

it's not any real building, it's one that he made it up, and it was a markedality that he did

brick in the walls of that house, great pain-staking care, and backgrounds are just as important

as foreground, so he foregrounded his backgrounds, and that gave all his work throughout his life

it's special intensity, I think. Here in John Craxton painted in architects sample,

a normal paint, and this shiny, a normal paint which they thought justified being used because

the castle used it, it's been told, very fine brushes, and Freud's early style, which is basically

I'm like signboards, and that was something that she carried on with for best part of,

well, nearly ten years.

In 1943, Lucien left some John's wood, and moved to a new space in Deliberately terrace

Paddington. This area along the Regents Canal was known for its poor living standards and criminal

activities, and the ongoing bombing of London had turned it into something of a wasteland,

but Freud loved the area and the people who lived there, with a new sense of freedom he settled

down to serious painting and drawing. In the late 40s Lucien discovered that women could

fall for him very, very easily, he had this very, very strong electric, slightly defenseless

but also by powerful presence, nervous looking people were sort of hypnotized by him, particularly girls,

only number of relationships were available at once, and this was a lifelong habit.

Once he established the idea that he could actually climb around English society and get

smart girls, but also make friends with the young aristocracy, broadly speaking, the people who

engaged with most of the people who painted. One of his early sit-as was Kitty Garm and

who became his first wife. She was very well placed in the artistic community, much better than

Lucien himself was. They married, but in almost entirely through his fault and devices,

was a failure because he wasn't impossible husband.

They wasn't like anybody else. Some people were comfortable with small talk and so forth,

but he kept his life extremely compartmentalized, so he had different relationship with almost

everybody who knew him well and he was charismatic, gorgeous, it was very difficult not to

be really struck by what he was like. You know, people described him as having an amoral sort of

his personality, and I'm sure that's true. If you emphasize that, it almost doesn't quite

capture the sensitivity that he had to people. He could be callous, he could be cruel with some

people. I never experienced that personally, but that's my understanding, but I think there's this

exaggerated idea of Lucien as a kind of reclusive sort of nospheratu in his notting hill home.

He wasn't like that at all. He was powerfully sociable and incredibly attracted by the company

about this and he had a very wide circle of friends and the people he knew throughout his life

him, and it's an amazing cast of characters. For me, it's a very significant point in his life.

His way has an idea of what the kind of ambition and self-discipline and artist needs,

and I think a lot of that came when he went to Paris for the first time in 1946, and, you know,

met Picasso and Jacometti and Bultus, and other artists, it seemed to be having a pretty free life

with women and models and cafes, but actually they were really self-discipline too. There were

hours in studio where they excluded any other activities or thoughts and what they were doing.

That gave an idea of what he was going to have to do if he's going to actually get on as a

serious artist. In 1946, Freud goes to Greece with a friend of his John Crackston,

and while he's there, he executes a number of drawings, but in particular there are two

paintings of portraits that he paints on the island, still life with Green Lemon and Man with

a Thistle. I think there is something in his work from this period that does carry the sort of

sense of anxiety of is it some kind of existential unease. Instead, life with Green Lemon,

he depicts himself just from the very side, you just see the edge of his nose and one eye peering

out from the edge of the canvas, which is really taken up with this Green Lemon that is

in the title. In fact, interesting that even in the title he sort of deflects attention away

almost from this being a self-portrait, and sort of seems almost a slip himself in,

somewhat elucively and slightly, as it self-mockingly, I don't exactly know in the background of

painting. Kind of almost contained by the horizontal band of the table that the lemon is sitting

on, and the vertical band of the shutters that gives this compressed sense of space, even though

it's opening up onto a seascape beyond, there's really a sort of slight sense of claustrophobia

that pervades the painting, and that in man with a Thistle just acquires this kind of prickly

psychology, just by virtue of this almost sculptural, almost wooden-looking Thistle, and that

sits on the table in front of him that really infuses the atmosphere of the painting.

Again, applied with this very faint or very tightly painted brush stroke, you almost can't see

the brush strokes, but you do see this extraordinary detail. And then there's a period of quite

clean drawing, just pencil, maybe a little Conte, extraordinary drawings in the of himself like

startled man.

I marvel at this drawing. I saw it for the first time many years ago in London when it was

low into an exhibition, it's been one of my favorites forever. It is also a great connection

with Rembrandt, his own self portrait, where he catches himself almost by surprise.

He does a lot of things in this drawing that he doesn't technically need to do, but he's doing

them because he can. He's basically showing what he's capable of.

When Guillermo Polynar, the poet, invented the word surrealism, that it had a hyphen,

and what he and Picasso meant by surrealism was that the image is more real than the real,

the real thing exactly. And then Brechon took it and grabbed it, he took away the hyphen,

and surrealist became dream dreams, spirits, and all kinds of other things.

But the basic meaning of surrealism was making things, things objects or images,

more real, and it seems to me that is exactly what you're doing in those early paintings.

Yeah, that's what's so impressive about them is the reality of these things.

There are no surrealistic heightening, and they will just more real than the real thing.

Yeah, that's what I was trying for. And that's why they're so impressive, whether it's a face,

or what have you, they have this incredible intensity.

How do you have been interested or influenced by what people said?

But when they said my work had a German equality, I couldn't bear this.

Oh, that's interesting. What's wrong with having a German equality?

No, because I didn't like anything to do with all that.

Now I was really loved the early paintings. I was a huge fan of those. It was still out.

The paintings were so magical, and they pointed to a kind of London that you wanted to live in.

That seemed lower to me, and it was centered around in a West London and so, how.

The mythology around them, of course, was very enticing to young artists.

It always felt as if they were living life and an artistic life. There was no difference between

artistic life and their real lives, which is what all artists want.

You have to remember, most artists are quite low to talk of their influence.

You know, your influences are things you lock up in a safe and hopefully no one notices them.

State of hallucination in those early ones, you know,

there was paintings like the one of Francis Bacon, which I always loved in the take,

the one that Wayne walked about, and that incredible one which they still have,

the boy with the cigarette. I think the boy with the cigarette, it was that exactness,

you know, that thing of making things more and more real than real.

I think when you look at a lot of his works, they often do feel like butterflies

pinned to the to the table, you know, they are like looking at human animals.

And he caused them naked portraits, but they are very much of the skin. And the earlier ones,

they seemed to be telling story and there's such dominant personalities.

I wasn't working at any school with a group in connection with anyone.

I had a friend who helped me get a studio or warm Peter Watson every now and then,

but I wasn't in any way accepted or really acceptable. He introduced me to people who had galleries

who were interested in new art or whatever. It was called young painters. And,

comparatively speaking, I've sailed things to the take gallery John Newtonstein very early on.

I mean, I was 22 or something, which is very young for them.

You might have thought I made it up, the building at the back, like in man with a feather,

but I used what was there. The bed was big in the room, and I worked between the basin and the bed.

I used the beveled mirror in the door of the wardrobe. The whole thing is a portrait.

I don't think she liked posing much.

Hotel bedroom was painted in Paris, you know, hotel. But that stage, Lucy, was spending quite

lengthy periods of in Paris. He and his second wife, Lady Caroline, Blackwood, had quite a social

life in Paris, and moving in artistic circles in Paris. He painted the hotel bedroom picture

specifically to be shown in the British Pavilion at Venice. Caroline is posing in bed.

She told me that actually, because she found it so unbearably boring to pose for Lucy,

which is what she's been practically her entire married life posing for a series of pictures

that she insisted on reading. He's in the background observing her. And outside,

you can see this very typically prison street, the hotel and the streets still exist. They still

look like that. Apparently, to add the final touch to her discomfort, Lucy and eventually broke

hotel windows so as to get the light he wants into the room. So it must have been freezing cold.

I don't know what the hotel thought about that. He felt her look, he felt her juvenile abandonment,

which was to smoke heavily and drink a lot, but no sooner than they married, then Lucy was

looking elsewhere. And really he wasn't the marrying kind. And that was pretty evident by the time

Caroline left him, which was only four years later than they met. Love life, the extra life,

the extra marital life, the running about town life, was basically connected with having people

to sit for him. Quite a catch although it never was a catch for women who wanted someone extremely

intelligent, extremely devoted, extremely unexpected and charismatic, all sorts of winning

combinations, which simply does not occur in the average stock broker. Lucy never attempted to be

a domestic person to expect to have children inheriting things never mind property and title.

And yet lots and lots of women friends and some writers, actors, artists, some just good friends,

and some were very close to him over 50 years, you know, right up to the end of his life.

You certainly always wanted to paint, and he also wanted complete freedom. If he was attracted to

somebody, he wanted to go to bed with him, and he didn't ever pretend to be faithful and have only

one person at a time. That was consistent over his lifetime, so that many expectations he would change.

I once asked him how many times you think you've been in love, and he said,

I think probably only twice, and I said really. And he said, yes, but I mean, if I love you mean

absolute involvement in another person to the point where you care about everything about them

and you're concerned about everything that they are and it's that absorbing. And I'm not sure

how true it was, because I think he cared deeply about a lot of people. I do think that he went through

difficult times, and I think it's probably true that he turned to self-portraits during those times.

I think that Freud wanted to also put himself at the center of the world. That's why we see

comments about him being a gambler, a Spencerift, a womanizer, you know, general bad boy.

I think there's an overall selfishness about the way he's controlling his relationships with

citizen's family. And I think within there, there's a tragedy somewhere.

And I think that makes the looking into this suite of self-portraits, really fascinating,

you know, he's the king pin, an artist who is obsessed and obsessed with himself.

Lisa's willpower was so strong that regrets don't come into it. It's about

the circumstance you find yourself in and you channel into your painting. And you know, in his

painting and his life was so intertwined, so close together. So if you were the sitter, then you

were his whole life at that time. And it was all about the painting that was the only thing that

took him. In his young life, he sort of had a wild life. But he always returned

back to the studio and made these very closed, complete paintings.

I think it is quite interesting to consider how Freud changes his practice around the late

1950s and early 1960s. And you get a sense of this looking at his self-portraits. There's a kind of

begins to enter his images. There's, for example, an extraordinary, very small self-portrait that

he painted on copper, actually on a boat in Jamaica, he was visiting Ian Fleming on, and his

estate a golden eye. And wasn't much enjoying the company on the boat and took himself off to the

bathroom and on this little piece of copper that he happened to have in his pocket. He painted and

left unfinished, this extraordinarily small self-portrait that really has the quality of a

quality, particularly around the nose and the mouth. And he depicts himself with a finger just in

his lips, just a sense of touch. You get it again in another larger, unfinished self-portrait in

1956, you get a sense of a finger pressing against flesh. It also leaves to a kind of shift in focus

in what he's interested in depicting, which is primarily really human flesh, in a way,

enabled and facilitated by his switch to coarser. Paintbrush has hogs hair rather than the

very fine-sable hair that he was using before. With these three extraordinary self-portraits from

1963, he paints in rapid succession one after the other. He's 41, so in kind of mid-life, and unlike

the earlier paintings and drawings where he is hiding from view in a way, he really just gives you

droid full-on, he's measuring himself completely against his newfound style. And he's also no

longer contained in this way by the horizontal and vertical bands. It's a completely different kind of

composition. Lucien's work underwent a slow but quite radical transformation. And that, I think,

was the one aspect of his work where he could say he was directly affected by France's bacon.

In other ways, although they saw a great deal of each other and were a very close friend for

quarter of a century, as artists, they were almost opposite. But Bacon worked very fast. He didn't

work from life. He worked in a sort of free, gestural way. He rather liked to paint flying around.

Bacon was saying to him that you could paint one brush stroke and use that one mark to express

all kinds of different things. And he thought that was a very exciting thought.

France is seen to have such marvelous technical ability, which I felt I had non.

But it's very hard to tell. It's very hard to tell. I used to go there and watch him work.

We'd go out and then he'd drink and everything and pause out and then I'd go back and work.

Wasn't very late, sometimes half past three or four in the afternoon. And then I'd work for a

long time. But I can't tell if I had must have affected me. But he didn't consciously,

because I hated that sort of thing. I mean, I hated things that look like other things.

Freud said that it was the difficulties that drove him on. And I understand that completely,

it's almost impossible. It's the impossible goals of trying to achieve what you want.

That is. It makes you come back in the next day. Freud isn't a natural painter,

but I wouldn't hold that against him because so many of the great painters are.

You look a vanguard, you know, you look at France's bacon. A number of paintings, it's actually

the overcoming of that, because they don't find it easy, because it is difficult.

Whenever he felt that he was mastering something, or he'd got to grips with something,

he'd trying to do something else. Makes him stand out from other artists. There's sort of

restless experimentation, this constant risk taking, and not just taking risks, but a total

commitment to those risks that he was taking. And all of his painting changes, but with it,

his self portraits. And they become bolder, more strident, almost more cubist. They're so

faceted that you almost feel that you could snip them apart and create a three-dimensional

head to them. So it's a fascinating journey that the viewer goes on attempting to reconstruct

these various developments and put them together, and also fill in the missing pieces,

because there were years where he doesn't paint himself for a while, and one asks oneself, why?

Quite often he did his self portraits when there's a sort of breakdown in a relationship,

or in a friendship. Loosen self portraits, he found the toughest of all, but he also

felt, you know, that since he demanded so much of all his sitters, that he should put himself

in that position as well. But again, he approached his self portraits by undoing everything

he thinks he knows, and only trusting his instinct and his judgments from looking.

And I think it's tougher when you do that on yourself than when you're doing it on another person.

Art is a really hungry animal. Do you have to really feed it? You have to shove

tons of stuff in to get a little bit back. You have to look really hard

in order to throw it away or to change it into something else. Transformation is the key,

and that's what everyone is trying to achieve, that it's come about almost accidentally on purpose.

And you see that in great acting, and then dance, and you know, writing, it's that you wonder

remove the self from it, but you can only do that when you've looked and you've done all

that work beforehand. You want to be able to leave the room, and this thing that you leave

there to have a life of it, so. The self-portrait is very odd. I mean, from then he does

he's painting in a reflection, so he's looking just what's in the mirror, and it's almost as if

he's trying to make a copy of that and not too much grandeur or too much misery or too good

looking or too haggard, but they're only a handful of his self-portages that actually remind me of

Lucy and Freud. There's a small painting that's at the National Portrait Gallery,

it gets about 30 by 21 centimeters, so it's a little picture, but every facet is as if instead of

using a brush as almost uses finger. Freud was extremely interested in sculpture and, you know,

dig our bronzers, and I'm sure he wasn't touching his own face to find out where the bones were,

but he's certainly making it almost like a three-dimensional image of himself in that painting.

And there's a distinct difference between the way the head is painting the way the background is

painted, and that is something that continues right through to the end, actually it's quite an

important thing to have done. It's a total moving on from those first ones, which is so precise,

so beautiful and exquisite and very sort of illustration I think. Freud moves in with this smaller

work, this intimate work, which is still this sort of piercing look into the objectivity of the

head, but he's starting to use the paint and I think he's trying, in my opinion, to start to

make the paint tell the story, which I think was his life's work, really.

Rembrandt's probably the most famous self-portraitist. The atmosphere of the painting

is influenced by what he's wearing and the poses he takes and the lighting that he

poses and his relationship to paint, and the way that he paints himself over time is completely

exquisite, because he is manufacturing magic. You can see the challenge to Freud, I think.

Rembrandt becomes famous because he shows himself not warts and all, but with a big

bulbous nose. So he's the first artist really who becomes famous for what he looks like.

Certainly with Rembrandt, you get more of a sense of the self-portrait of something that tracks

the development of the artist technique. So Rembrandt goes from smooth painting to rough painting and

the aging of the artist. Individualism and a sense of personal identity, you can really see that

becoming central in the late Middle Ages. It does seem to begin with writers and autobiography,

but by the same token you find in the Middle Ages, painters of illuminated manuscripts,

putting themselves in miniature in the initials. They fit themselves into the margins of the

manuscript or into the first capital letter. I think Lucy was very aware of his place in art history,

not in any way of great pretension. One thing that I particularly like about his work is that

he's very consciously and deliberately working within a various established tradition.

Portraits, self-portraits, still lives. He asked himself what do I look for in a painting,

and then listed a range of emotions I want to be surprised, irritated, annoyed, amazed.

Their reactions that go in different directions, they're not all positive emotions. Some of

them are distractions. He wanted things that bothered him. He liked things with a little bit of poison

in them. Art does come out of art by the genuine interest on looking at other paintings.

Lucy, if you're struggling with his own work, he would very often just go down to the

help him. He famously said, it's like going to the doctors. Well, in a way it was, you know, he would,

you know, these great paintings that have lasted the centuries are great because people want to

look at them and they've got life in them still. He looked very much in 19th century French painting,

diga, anger, or be. People look at a lot of things, you know, he had a really deep understanding

of painting. When a great painting is made, there's some magic. You don't quite know how that's done.

I mean, when they extraordinarily things that Lucy did as an artist was, he made very small paintings,

but these very small paintings when you put them on a wall, they hold the whole room that

small little painting this size. You will notice it from, you know, 30 foot away from the other

end of the room. Do that with a photograph, hopeless. It was just a different language,

and that was one of the remarkable things that Lucy can do is make a small painting and it holds

the room. There's tiny painting that Freud painted of himself with a black eye that he acquired

in an argument with the taxi driver, and really his instinct is to go back to the studio and

to paint him. What he's interested in fascinated by obviously is this temporary change,

this bruising, not only his skin, but also his muscle and his senior, and I kind of desire

to put that down in paint. If Lucy didn't have a habit of it, we didn't like somebody just punch

them. Francis Bacon said to him, you know, darling, he shouldn't hit everyone. He should charm people.

There was not temper. It's just his character. He doesn't, he's not, he doesn't, he's

didn't hit people through temper or anger. It was just an instinctive reaction. When he was a

young man, everybody was out and about on the street and moving around, TV wasn't invented. He said

as soon as TV was invented and made the whole nation very, very placid. If someone really said

something rather stupid or hit them, kick them. It's not temper. It's not bad temper. It's

something else. It's more high spirited. Painting myself is more difficult than painting people

have found. The psychological element is more difficult, increasingly so. You're working in a mirror,

but in the end, when you've been staring extra hard, perhaps too hard. I've noticed I could see

the outside circumference of my own eye. Reflectual with two children is an interesting one. In

this kind of strange doubling and the different kind of space that the two elements occupy,

him on the one hand and his children on the other. They don't actually seem to sit in physical

relation to each other. That spatial dynamic is quite strange. That sort of looming presence over

his two children is lots of things that maybe people can read into it in terms of an imagined

relation there. He'd never discussed that certainly not a kind of biographical detail or any kind

story behind the painting. I think that there's almost cinematic or theatrical aspect about

the pictures. There are two versions. There's going to be the unfinished fragment version

of the picture, the square picture with him all by himself and secondly with two of his children

Alley and Rose in the lower part in foreground. It's a bit like you're hearing some of the songs

Freud really liked Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. You're almost seeing this kind of rake.

Here he is having one child after another by different women and then he's this kind of free agent.

It's a terrific picture but it doesn't just just solemn, confessional picture. It's got a little

bit of he's the word poison in it and even poison against himself. It's pretty shocking in a good way.

He seems closer in this picture to the two circular ceiling lights that are in his studio

and which provide this cold forensic illumination. The children are almost in a world of their own

and I think this is probably the only example in Freud's work where anyone is laughing

but he puts himself outside that world. The painter's obsession with his subject is all that

he needs to drive him to work. People driven towards making works of art not by familiarity with the

process by which it is done but by an necessity to communicate their feelings about the object

of their choice with such intensity that these feelings become infectious.

Since as a matter of policy he just about never used photographs. His own image was the one thing

he had to see a mediated way because it's impossible to look at yourself directly. He was obliged

to look in a mirror and loosing because he was ultra sensitive to nuances of light and the

images felt that the image you saw in a mirror was quite a different thing from looking at a

person who's just sitting in front of you or lying on a bed in front of you. Also a mirror

is strictly speaking an optical image so it's rather like a photograph. It's flattened

and almost all of them are actually entitled self portrait reflection.

That whole thing of working with a mirror is trying to accommodate everything that we know

from looking at someone else but we don't really know quite how people are seeing us but

moment that discipline if you like of looking at self is quite leveling. The act of looking

for a figurative painter is incredibly important. We look with two lenses. Our eyes are just

differently. It's not like looking through the single lens of a camera. That relationship

that intimacy, the one of looking and seeing actually you don't want that to be interrupted. It's a

golden moment, the moment of reflection. I mean obviously I make drawings that refer to me to my

physical features to my experience in the world. Are they about me? They're about me and they're

not about me. I think that again is one of the extraordinary things about all creative process.

Thinking about that very small painting of the hand mirror with listening Freud's reflection

in it. It's a really mesmerising modest painting. It talks about the incidental reflection that

you find in the studio when you have the mirrors which are the apparatus of painting so it talks

about the apparatus of looking. It feels casual and it's very well constructed. It's a tiny,

tiny painting and I think it's that relationship, the contrast of light and dark, the intensity of

image in the dark, looking glass. There's something very mesmeric about both the darkness,

the lightness, so the contrast draws you in for me. That's its magic.

Embarrassment is a big part making art. It's the willingness to be embarrassed and to make mistakes

and to fumble around. Somehow trying to get that life forcing to the painting. I imagine for him

the painting finished when he felt it coming back. It's completely different to that

photo realism when people copy photographs in their paintings because what they do then,

what makes them look realistic is that they paint the outer focus bits that the camera's picked

up. It's a completely different thing. It's the bits that are out of focus that gives it that

he's like looking at every single bit. You know the same amount of interest. You know that

froze the surface right up. It's a very strange painting. Something feels slightly out of

kilta. It has an incredible sense of premonition and threat. It has something quite primitive about it.

People have written about it being a satire in the forest. It has something that was

pagan about it. What is he doing? Who's he listening to? Who can't he hear? It opens 20

doors and doesn't attempt to close one of them, which I think is a fascinating aspect of the painting.

leaves everything up in the air. It's dominated by this jungle which is just an utterly

banal, classic kind of 70s house plant. And there he is in the background.

I think Lucy and his loved anything that was alive. And that sort of extended to the

botanical world. It certainly extended to animals. And that interplay, that tension between

what's alive and what's inanimate is there in all his work. I think he was always looking for

ways to mix things up. Did he want to do something just so unexpected that it almost

catches himself on a wares with the huge spreading house plant. And he's painted that with such

detail and care and attention. And the self portrait part of it is just this weird,

slightly mashed up reflection of himself, you know, between the the fronds of this pop plant.

I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. It's just that it speaks to this quality in all of

the self portraits of a bleak and a capture something from a funny kind of angle. And

increase our curiosity, but without actually giving any kind of answers.

Lucy and painting, because he's not deceived by outward appearances, I mean, he gets down

to the nitty gritty of the men and women and children he paints. They're facts, they're very

biological facts. When I've reached a certain stage or gone, I'm trying to do something that

belonged to the person that I've invented. Got to be in relation, in proportion, in rhythm,

and tune, a naked portrait is a person, a human animal with their clothes soft.

Freud has been fascinated like a lot of modern artists with the Velasque Las Maninas.

And I think it's important for him in the sense that here Velasque is presenting the artist's

studio as a microcosm as of the world. The royal family and courtiers from the court dwarfs

and the even the dog have gathered here to watch as Velasque paints the king and queen who are

Freud's reflection in the corner or a shadow. And this idea of the studio as a microcosm

is central to Freud's work. This is something that artists have done through the ages,

particularly in the Renaissance, smuggling themselves into portraits of others. And in the

past, it would have been used more as a symbol of the artist's status that they were valued enough

and society considered themselves of enough value that they should be taking their own place

in a painting alongside their patrons. This isn't what Freud is interested in. Again,

perhaps there's an element of that kind of sense of humour that comes into his work sometimes.

There are actually paintings that are ostensibly portraits of others. But he does insert his

figure in various, low-key ways, smuggles himself into them. You could say,

naked portrait reflection, you just see his, the bottom of his legs and his feet as he

leans forwards and paints into the canvas. Two Irish men, a painting of two figures, a father

and son in which you can see two unfinished self portraits lying on the floor of the studio in the

shadow of his head over the bed on which he lies. And Freddy's standing, which is a portrait of

his son, where you see half of Freud's body reflected in the side of his studio. That is because

that is what he observed. I find it also interesting that it sort of brings to the floor the relationship

between the artist and his sitter, which is at the core of his practice in general.

So you really get a sense of that very particular dynamic that has shaped through these months

and months or years occasionally during which sitters sit for him in the confines of this studio.

Lucien's studio was the most important place in his life. I would probably hedge a bet that he

spent more time in his studio than he did sleeping. We see the bottom of his easel in paintings.

We see the window frames. We see the sink where he would clean his brushes.

We see paint on the wall. We see the sheets, the rags with which he would clean his brushes,

the tops of his paint tubes. And I find it fascinating that from a certain moment I think in the

1960s onwards pretty much every painting is located in the studio. This was the arena within

which he worked, he played, he fought, he struggled. So it is a place of torment but also a

greater achievement for him.

By the mid 1960s, Friday to establish his unique approach to painting. He had early success in his

twenties and was noted in London artists' circles, but it wasn't until he was in his 50s

that his reputation as a major artist became established. Always working from life, his subjects

varied from animals, views from his window, vegetation, family and friends to a series of powerful

and provocative naked portraits. He worked on large-scale paintings about people and objects

he found interesting to paint.

I liked him very much, I really believed in what he was doing. And that moment when I walked into

his studio for the first time, it really meant something to me. I got what it was that he was

doing. When I first met him, he lived on the top floor of a one of the large villas in Holland

Park. So after he ran all the way up the stairs, five flats of stairs, each door to each

room was always closed. And the studio was had been two small rooms which he'd knocked into one,

he'd put a big skylight in. When I walked in there were these large paintings of Libarry being made

and it was this sense of purpose. There was a stillness in the room. It felt very concentrated.

It was human scale. It was a sort of living space. There were bare floorboards, essential pieces

of furniture needed for loosens. So there was a bed, there was a couple of chairs, there was a big

drawing plan chest, table tops, full of paint. For me it felt like the whole world was in that room.

With the brilliance of his paintings and the way his mind worked and it was for me a really exciting

moment. But what loosens was striving for more than anything was what the sitter makes the painting.

So it's the sitter that pushes the space around within the painting. The painting of me,

the blue scarf, was a night picture at which meant that one sat under this tremendously strong

halogen bowl dangling from the ceiling of Lucy and Studio. There was an iron division in Lucy and

work which people looking at the pictures might not realize between a day picture and a night picture

which was begun in daylight, had to continue in daylight. Picture which was begun in artificial light,

had to continue in artificial light and be done by night. For the painting I returned up at six

a clock, sharp. One of Lucy's fetishes was that he was very keen on punctuality. And as far

as the close it concerned, once they've been agreed, vital thing was that they didn't change at all.

I started off as once where quite quickly became twice a week and it was more and more than that

by the end because we were trying to get it finished. He didn't like discussing how far a picture

was from completion. I think that was one of the things he was slightly superstitious about.

What it meant was that for at least a year I saw as much of Lucy as I did in my wife and children

may be more in some ways because we spent a lot of time wanting to untalking. Because one of

his aims was to keep the sitter entertains in case the sitter stopped coming, which was one of

his big anxiety. And he was tremendously entertaining, interesting raccoon turf. Also very interested

anything the sitter had to say. He was very interested. It was a real conversation. It wasn't the

lot. Lucy was in no hurry with his paintings. He liked observing the model to the maximum extent.

He liked just popping around the studio with the model there in pose and looking at the model

from different angles. That was all part of his method I think. His way of painting, where he used

hand palette and he mixed the colours and he tried the colour on the canvas. He would then scrape

all that paint off, put it on the walls. He was constantly looking and he'd look at the sitter

and he'd look at the canvas. He was very agitated and nervous and yet exciting dynamic. But also

this very slow way of doing it, help Lucy and he was thinking the whole time as he was mixing

the paint. He used to wear the mark was going to go and the loaded result. It took out

self-expression. That was not what he was. He was not interested in expressionist painting.

Nervous, it sort of agitated, yet for him real truthful mark.

I think there are many different reasons for artists to portray themselves, firstly but to portray

themselves in a state of complete undress. I think there are moments certainly there's the

great self-portrait where he presents himself bare shoulder where you get the first sense of aging and

I think Lucy is basically sending out the message that he's still got it. He's still a strong,

living, breathing, red-blooded man. But I don't think it's exhibitionism. I think that's more about

certain internal question that he's answering. I think the full naked self-portrait.

For me, it goes back to a certain timelessness. I think of that great self-portrait by Dura,

it goes back to the beginnings of everything, complete exposure, nothing to hide and I think it's

fascinating that Lucy and does this for the first time at the back end of his life where he has

more aging to represent than he's ever had to, and yet there's a certain defiance that comes with

taking one's own clothes off. For me, painter working reflection of 1993, is the single greatest

work in this entire exhibition. It's almost a parody of him. He's wearing actually boots. He

is very proud of these timberland boots. He's just bought in there. Other young people were buying.

He actually has a beautiful physique for somebody who's around 70. I mean, it's a great experiment,

and nobody will ever forget it. It was wet when it arrived at the White Chaplain in 1993,

and it was emanated power and excitement. There's a sort of mock heroic quality to it. He's

standing there completely naked, but for a pair of boots, he's holding a power. He's just fascinated

by this idea of occupying this body that he's been born with and has lived with for all these

years, and it's changing all the time. He wants to give you a sense of what it's like to occupy

that body, the physical reality of it, and absolutely brilliant. I mean, I don't know any self portrait

like it. It's got more kind of honesty and begilement and intensity than I think anything that he painted.

I think Lucina was suspicious of any kind of sentimentalising narrative, and that would have

included the idea of their being wisdom in old age. This idea that we become wiser as we get older,

and he would have probably said, well, there's no fool like an old fool, and you know, you

notice that a lot of those really late self portraits, the eyes aren't even really painted in at all.

I mean, they're sort of obscured with slightly smeared paint and thwarted,

aspect to the image, as if it had trouble sort of coming into being.

There's one where he has his hand touching a scarf, and Lucina Freud's greatest fear was

losing his mind, and not having the sharpness and self-critical sense as he worked. And you see

him kind of projecting a certain fear with this kind of these features, it's like a destroyed

and clutching, and he had certain gestures like they always wore a scarf, but it wasn't about vanity,

it's about an anxiety of a mental failing, and so in that sense they can be very exposing

and very honest pictures. I don't like mystification. I work from work slowly, as you know,

from a small number of people, and that's about it. And since I'm very

spoke for my own way in selfish, I'm just trying to do what I want to do, like many

and other, no doubt. I work from the people that interest me, and I like working over again from them.

When people ask me what I did, like when you're a young man, you at art school or wherever,

you don't like to say, at least most people don't. I'm a student, or I'm trying to find out,

they'd say, what you do, and I said, I'm an artist. By the beginning of the new century,

his position in the canon of great modern artists had been well and truly established

with his work widely collected and exhibited around the world. In 2008, his painting

benefits supervisor sleeping, sold at auction for 33.6 million dollars, the highest ever paid

for a painting by a living artist. Freud continued to work non-stop, day and night, often producing

several paintings and actions at the same time until his death, on the 20th of July, 2011.

He was aged 88. Lucy was incredibly intelligent, and I think what really struck me, I mean,

I met him when I was just 29 and he was already 79. So that's worth keeping in mind, but you know,

he would run to the telephone when I rang in his socks and sort of slide, slide up to the

I saw him sort of leap up the stairs to at a time. I mean, he was incredibly active for a man of

that age. I remember hearing someone say that being with him was like sort of being plugged into

the national grid for an hour, you know, and it really did feel like that. I mean, not in an intense

scary way at all, but just you just never knew what was going to come out of his mouth. He was so

hilariously funny. But the thing that I really noticed and just loved about him was his

sensitivity. I mean, he had this incredible sort of ability to tune into what you were saying

and to just perceive, you felt like he was perceiving things on this sort of slightly urgent and

intensified level, and it made his company intoxicating. We can say that Freud is without that,

one of the greatest British painters of the 20th century, but actually, I'd just say that

he really is, is one of the great European painters of the last 500 years. He's in that kind of

tradition. Of course, he's not as great as juror or Titian or Rembrandt's heroes, but that's the

tradition he's in. And in some ways, there's a timelessness to Freud that is really interesting.

So the early work, yep, you can see an artist trying to find voice and technique. You can see a

but actually, in his own late work, there is a timelessness dealing with the frailty of human

flesh, the ravages of time, mortality and defiance against mortality. They're not pictures of

victim or it's a man standing there in his boots to protect his feet from the splinters on the floor,

with a pallet and a pallet knife in his hand. Completely naked at the age of 70, saying,

this is who I am. And in that sense, we still don't quite know. And we won't know for a hundred

years or 200 years, quite where he sits in the grand scheme of things, which I know is evasive,

but he's one of those big figures across the Western tradition, rather than a figure specifically,

part of a moment, and a particular movement. Traditioners become a dirty word. I love tradition

when artists are aware of traditions they're working in, but challenge those traditions,

which Lucien did constantly. And I think Lucien's introduction into a list, which goes back

to Diorer, Kranak, Holbeian, Rembrandt, Titian, his introduction into that list. For me,

gives that list of names, a little shuffle, and makes us look at Rembrandt, a little bit

differently, makes us look at Titian a little bit differently through his eyes, through his work.

That, in itself, is a remarkable achievement. A moment of complete happiness never occurs in

the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation, but disappears

towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a

picture he is painting. Until then, he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life.

I wanted to shock and amaze.