Original subtitles

I wanted to shock and amaze, unrealistic 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 at 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 whose

connectedness 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.

A few painters, certainly in my lifetime, have scrutinised 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, it was quite an intimate two-way process.

Of course he gambled, of course he ate 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 so on.

But very few artists that I know of spent 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 it.

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 is 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 a 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 that 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 seep 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 draughtsman, 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 and edge,

it was a really compelling stare.

And photography conveys something of that, and the self-portraiture both evokes,

and sometimes distances us from that, and I'm curious about the way he scrutinised 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 this 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'd had exhibitions on.

It took a lot out of him, and I always said that I,

oh, you know, one day I want to make a group of your, you know, an exhibition of your self-portraits, Leeson.

He's like, yeah, you do that when I'm not around.

So it's rather poignant for me to get this show now.

He talked about everything being autobiographical, everything is a self-portrait, he said.

But obviously the actual self-portraits are in this special category there,

and there's a sense 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 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 sly.

So, you know, he talked about, with his other portraits,

not really caring about whether people recognised 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 of December 1922 in central Berlin.

His father was an architect, and the youngest son of neurologists,

and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund 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.

Well, I think the extraordinary thing about Lucien is that from the very word go,

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 Tiergarten,

in this smart, calm, self-possessed suburb of central Berlin.

Lucien was not brought up to be a practising Orthodox Jew,

so that what the events of 1932, 1933, as they impinged,

were all the more shocking for that.

It was a complete, total surprise for this child

that suddenly he'd be told off for drawing a swastika on a wall,

thinking it 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 a consciousness of being alien in Germany,

which impinged pretty strongly.

And from the summer of 1932 onwards,

and certainly heavily throughout 1933,

there was a feeling that he and his family weren't wanted.

Lucien always drew, as did his brothers,

but his brothers sort of lagged 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, Sigmund, 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 Bruegel, 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 recognized Lucien had talent and a free spirit,

and enrolled him in the progressive Dartington Hall school.

Lucien found it hard to settle.

And he was eventually asked to leave.

He was sent to another liberal school, Brunston, but again rebelled,

interested only in horses and art.

He was expelled from Brunston, essentially for dropping his trousers in Bournemouth High Street,

on a bet.

The school had enough of him, he'd had enough of school, he left, and his father managed to get him on the

strength of a stone sculpture he'd made of a horse into the Central School of Art in Charing Cross Road,

which was a fairly strict, certainly rigorous art school.

And again, rigor and strictness weren't for Lucien, although application and interest certainly were.

He lasted only a couple of terms.

So I went home and said to my parents, I said, you sent me the wrong art school.

There's only one art school in England.

That's the East England School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, Essex, run by Cedric Morris and his boyfriend, Arthur Lett Haines.

So they wrote, very nice of them, and I was taken on there, and then I apparently burnt the school down.

It was a sympathetic person, Cedric Morris, and there are a few portraits that Freud does in 1940,

1941, which are similar to what Cedric Morris is doing, but it's not a lasting influence by any means,

except for they both appreciated plants and, you know, they had some common interests.

But he is sort of combining, you know, a little bit of surrealism, a little bit of objects he acquires.

He starts buying things and does his whole life, not just sofas and furniture and pots and so forth.

Maurice 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 Maurice that Freud dedicates himself to becoming a painter.

When he left school and moved to London, he was going out to the Café Royal, various other cafés in Soho,

and 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 Maurice says, okay, if you're going to do this, you're going to do this seriously.

You need to at least put out a 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 a tonal color 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

Cedric 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 and the United States,

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

Returning to London, he shared a flat in St. 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.

In Man with a Feather, you can see, first of all, the shades of this still-composed, slightly furtive

person. And that person's himself, of course. It's a self-portrait of him in a rather poetical young

man mood, before he's actually encountered a proper girlfriend, as he got a year or so later. But at a

time when he was taking a serious interest in how does one get on sexually, how does one get on in

one's chosen career in painting, and how basically does one evade the war and get over it and make

things out of it instead. Deliberately mysterious, slightly surrealistic, all made up. The building

in the background is not any real building, it's one that he made up. And it was remarked on that he

did every brick in the walls of that house, great painstaking care, and backgrounds are just as important

as foregrounds. So he foregrounded his backgrounds, and that gave all his work throughout his life

its special intensity, I think. He and John Craxton painted in Architect's sample enamel paints,

and this shiny enamel paint, which they thought justified being used because Picasso used it,

they'd been told, very fine brushes, and Freud's early style, which is basically like

signboards. And that was something which she carried on with for the best part of nearly 10 years.

In 1943, Lucien left St John's Wood and moved to a new space in Delamere Terrace, Paddington.

This area along the Regent's 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 quite powerful presence, nervous-looking.

People were sort of hypnotized by him, particularly girls. Any 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 he engaged with most were the people he painted. One of his early sitters was

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

Lucien himself was. They married, but almost entirely through his fault and devices, was a failure because

he was an impossible husband.

It 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 a different relationship with almost everybody who knew him well.

And he was charismatic and gorgeous, and it was very difficult not to be really struck by what he was like.

You know, people describe him as having an amoral sort of side to 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 recluse,

sort of Nosferatu in his Notting Hill home. He wasn't like that at all. He was powerfully sociable

and incredibly attracted by the company of others, and he had a very wide circle of friends and the

people he knew throughout his life. I mean, it's an amazing cast of characters.

For me, a very significant point in his life is when he has an idea of what the kind of ambition and

self-discipline an 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 Giacometti and Balthus and other artists. Seemed to be having a

pretty free life with women and models and cafes, but actually they were really self-disciplined too.

There were hours in the studio where they excluded any other activities or thoughts in what they were

doing. That gave him 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 Craxton. And while he's there, he executes a

number of drawings. But in particular, there are two painted self-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 this sort of sense of anxiety of, is it some kind of existential

unease? In Still 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. And 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 to slip himself in,

somewhat elusively and slyly, is itself mockingly, I don't exactly know, in the background of the 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 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 of himself, like a startled man.

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

an exhibition. It's been one of my favourites 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 Guillaume Apollinaire, 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 thing.

Than the real thing, exactly.

And then Breton took it and corrupted it, took away the hyphen, and surrealists became dream,

dreams, spirits, and all kinds of other things. But the basic meaning of surrealism was

making things, objects or images more real. And it seems to me that is exactly what you're doing

in those early paintings. Well, that's what's so impressive about them, is the reality of these

things. There are no surrealistic heightening, they were just more real than the real thing.

Yeah, that's what I was trying for.

And that's why they're so impressive, is that whether it's a face or what have you,

they have this incredible intensity.

I've hardly ever been interested or influenced by what people said,

but when they said my work had a Germanic quality, I couldn't bear it.

Oh, that's interesting. What's wrong with having a Germanic quality?

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

Yeah.

I always really loved the early paintings. I was a huge fan of those. I still am.

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

that seemed bohemian, and was centred around, you know, West London and Soho.

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 life, which is what all artists want.

You have to remember, most artists are quite low to talk of their influences, you know.

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

The 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 went walk 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 real than real.

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

table, you know. They are like looking at human animals. He calls them naked portraits,

but they are very much of the skin. And the earlier ones, they seem to be telling

a story, and they're such dominant personalities.

I wasn't working at any school with a group in connection with anyone. I had a friend who'd

helped me get a studio or a room, 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 sold things to the Tate Gallery, John Rothenstein, very early on. I mean,

I was 22 or something, which was very young for, um, for then.

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 bevelled mirror in the door of the wardrobe. The whole thing is a portrait.

I don't think she liked posing much.

The hotel bedroom was painted in Paris, uh, in a hotel. At that stage, Lucien was spending quite

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

life in Paris. 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, she, she told me

that actually, because she found it so unbearably, uh, boring to pose for Lucien, which she spent

practically her entire married life posing for a series of pictures, that, uh, she insisted on reading.

He is in the background, observing her. And outside, you can see this, typically, Parisian street. The hotel

and the streets still exist. They still look like that. And apparently, uh, to add the final touch

to her discomfort, Lucien eventually broke the hotel windows so as to get the light he wanted

into the room. So it must have been freezing cold. I don't know what the hotel thought about that.

He fell for her look. He fell for her juvenile abandonment, which was to smoke heavily and drink a

lot. But no sooner were they married than Lucien was looking elsewhere. And really, he was not the

marrying kind. And that was pretty evident by the time that 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 just did not occur in the average stockbroker.

Lucien never attempted to be a domestic person, to expect to have children inheriting things, never

mind property and title. And he had lots and lots of women friends, and some were 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. He certainly always wanted to paint, and he also wanted

complete freedom. If he was attracted to somebody, he wanted to go to bed with them. And he didn't

ever pretend to be faithful and to have only one person at a time. That was consistent over his lifetime,

so there weren't that many expectations he would change. I once asked him, how many times do 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 by 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-portraiture 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 spendthrift, a womanizer, you know,

a general bad boy. I think there's an overall selfishness about the way he's controlling his

relationships with sitters, 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 kingpin, 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,

his painting and his life were 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 mattered to him. In his younger 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 emphasis on

touch or on the senses that begins to enter his images. It'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 at his estate at Goldeneye 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

Flemish painting in terms of the 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 leads 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 Corsair paintbrushes, 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 midlife. And unlike the earlier

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

Lucien's work underwent a slow but quite radical transformation. And that, I think, was the one aspect

of his work where you could say he was directly affected by Francis Bacon. In other ways, although they

saw a great deal of each other and were very close friends for a quarter of a century, as artists they

were almost opposite. Bacon worked very fast. He didn't work from life. He worked in a sort of free,

gestural way. He rather liked the paint flying around. Bacon was saying to him that you could paint

one brushstroke and use that one mark to express all kinds of different things. And he thought that was

a very exciting thought. Francis seemed to have such marvellous technical ability, which I felt I had none.

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 pass out. And then I'd go back and work. It 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... It must have affected me, but it didn't consciously because I hated that sort of thing.

I mean, I hated things that looked 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, you know, the next day.

Freud isn't a natural painter, but I wouldn't hold that against him because so many of the great

painters aren't. You look at Van Gogh, you know, you look at Francis 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 try and do something else. It makes him stand out from other artists,

this 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 are years where he doesn't paint himself for a while, and one asks oneself why.

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

or in a friendship. Lucien's 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. 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 in dance, and, you know, writing.

It's that you want to remove, you know, 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 its own.

The self-portraits are very odd. I mean, for one thing he does, he's painting a reflection. So he's

looking just at 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-portraits that actually remind me of Lucian Freud.

There's a small painting that's at the National Portrait Gallery. I think it's about

30 by 21 centimeters. So it's a little picture. But every facet is as if, instead of using a brush,

he's almost used his finger. Freud was extremely interested in sculpture and, you know, lived with

Rodin bronzes and then later Degas bronzes. And I'm sure he wasn't touching his own face to find

out where the bones were. But he's, he's certainly making a, 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 are so precise,

so beautiful and exquisite and very sort of illustrational, 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 there, 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

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

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's technique. So Rembrandt goes from smooth painting to rough painting and the

ageing 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 Lucien 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 very 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.

They're 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.

Lucien, if he was struggling with his own work, he would very often just go down to the National Gallery

and go and look at a great painting, and it would help him. You know, 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 a 19th century French painting. Degas, Ingres,

Courbet. He'd 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, one of the extraordinary things that Lucien 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. There's a 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 Lucien can do is make a small painting and it holds the room. This tiny painting

that Freud painted of himself with a black eye that he acquired in an argument with a taxi driver. And

really his instinct is to go back to the studio and to paint it. What he's interested in, fascinated by,

obviously is this temporary change, this bruising in not only his skin, but also his muscle and his

sinew and a kind of desire to put that down in paint.

Because Lucien did have a habit of if he didn't like someone, he just punched them.

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

It was not temper. It's just his character. It's not, he doesn't, Lucien didn't hit people through

temper or anger. It's just, 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, it made the whole nation very, very placid. If someone really said

something rather stupid or hit them, kick them. But 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, I've 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.

Reflection with two children is an interesting one in, 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, 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,

there's 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 of story behind

the painting. I think that there's an 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 first him all by himself and secondly with two of his children,

Ali and Rose in the lower part in the foreground. It's a bit like you're hearing, you know,

some of the songs that Freud really liked, Bob Dylan and, you know, Johnny Cash. You're almost

seeing this kind of rake. You know, 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 that is, it isn't just a

solemn confessional picture. It's got a little bit of, he used the word poison in it and even poison

against himself. It's pretty, 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 a 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 in a mediated way because it's impossible to look at yourself directly. He was obliged to look

in a mirror and Lucien because he was ultra sensitive to nuances of light and the behaviour of 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. That moment,

that discipline, if you like, of looking at self is quite levelling.

The act of looking for a figurative painter is incredibly important. We look with two lenses,

our eyes adjust 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 Lucien 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 yet 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 his image, you know, in the dark looking glass. There's something very mesmeric

about both the darkness, the lightness, so the contrast draws you in and for me that's, it's 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 force into the

painting. I imagine for him the painting finished when he felt it coming back.

It's completely different to that sort of 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 cameras picked up and it's a very, it's a completely different thing. It's the bits

that are out of focus that gives it that hyper, you know, reality feel. Whereas Freud is doing it for

real. He's like looking every single bit, you know, with the same amount of interest, you know, and that throws the surface right up.

It's a very strange painting. Something feels slightly out of kilter. It has an incredible sense of

premonition and threat. It has something quite primitive about it, like a sort of, you know,

people have written about it being a satire in the forest. It has something almost 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 houseplant.

And there he is in the background.

I think Lucian just 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. That he wants to do something just so unexpected that it almost catches himself unawares with the

huge spreading houseplant. 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 fronds of this pot 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 obliqueness,

of trying to capture something from a funny kind of angle and increase our curiosity,

but without actually giving any kind of answers.

Lucian's paintings, 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.

As it were, biological facts. When I've reached a certain stage or gone,

I'm trying to do something that will belong 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 off.

So, Freud has been fascinated like a lot of modern artists with Velázquez's Las Meninas. And I think

it's important for him in the sense that here Velázquez is presenting the artist's studio as a microcosm of the world.

The royal family and courtiers from the court dwarfs and even the dog have gathered here to watch as

Velázquez paints the king and queen who are reflected in the mirror behind.

We often see 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 in society and 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. They're actually paintings that are ostensibly portraits of

others. But he does insert his figure in them 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 Irishmen, 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 background.

Flora with blue toenails in which you can see the shadow of his head over the bed on which she lies.

And Freddy 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 in that it

sort of brings to the fore 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 that very particular dynamic that is shaped through

these months and months or years occasionally during which sitters sit for him in the confines of the 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 was a place of torment but also great achievement for him.

By the mid-1960s, Freud had established his unique approach to painting.

He had early success in his 20s and was noted in London artistic 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 one of the large villas in Holland Park. So after he'd run

all the way up the stairs, five flights 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 Lee Barry being made. And it was this sense of purpose.

There was a stillness in the room. It was, 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 Lucien. 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 his,

the way his mind worked. And it was, it was a, for me, a really exciting moment.

But what, what Lucien was striving for more than anything was what the, the sitter makes the painting.

So it's the sitter that pushes the space around within the painting.

The painting of me, Man with the Blue Scarf, was a night picture, which meant that one sat under this

tremendously strong halogen bulb dangling from the ceiling of Lucien's studio. There was an iron

division in Lucien's work, which people looking at the pictures might not realise, between a day

picture and a night picture. And a picture which was begun in daylight, had to continue in daylight,

a picture which was begun in artificial light, had to continue in artificial light and be done by night.

For the painting, I would turn up at six o'clock, sharp. One of Lucien's fetishes was that he was

very keen on punctuality. And as far as the clothes were concerned, once they'd been agreed,

vital thing was that they didn't change at all.

It started off as once we quite quickly became twice a week, and it was 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 Lucien as I did of my wife and children, and maybe more in some ways,

because we spent a lot of time one-to-one talking. Because one of his aims was to keep the sitter

entertained, in case the sitter stopped coming, which was one of his big anxieties. And he was

tremendously entertaining and interesting raconteur. Also, very interested in anything the sitter had to

say. He was very interested. It was a real conversation. It wasn't a monologue. Lucien was in no hurry with his

paintings. He liked observing the model to the maximum extent. He liked just pottering 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 a hand palette and he'd mix the colours and he'd try the colour on

the canvas. He would then scrape all that paint off, put it on the walls. And he was constantly

looking and he'd look at the sitter and he'd look at the canvas. It was very agitated and nervous and yet

exciting, dynamic. But also this very slow way of doing it helped Lucien. He was thinking the whole time,

as he was mixing the paint, just where 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 an expressionist painting.

Nervous, 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-shouldered, where you get the first

sense of aging. And I think Lucien 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 a 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 Dürer.

It goes back to the beginnings of everything. Complete exposure, nothing to hide. And I think it's

fascinating that Lucien 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, paint a 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 was very proud

of, these Timberland boots he'd just bought, and there were other young people were buying. He actually

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

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

and it 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 pallet. He's just fascinated by this idea,

your sense 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. And 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 beguilement and intensity than I think anything that he painted.

I think Lucien was suspicious of any kind of, you know, sentimentalizing narrative. And that would

have included the idea of there 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.

And there's one where he has his hand clutching his scarf. And Lucien 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, slightly destroyed and clutching. And

he had certain gestures like that. He always wore a scarf, but it wasn't about vanity. It's about a

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 spoiled for my own way and selfish, I'm just trying to do what

I want to do, like many another, 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, or 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 do 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, Benefit Supervisor Sleeping, sold at auction for $33.6 million,

the highest ever paid for a painting by a living artist.

Freud continued to work nonstop, day and night,

often producing several paintings and etchings at the same time, until his death on the 20th of July,

2011. He was aged 88.

Lucin 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 it rang in his socks and sort of slide, slide up to the phone. I saw him sort of leap up the

stairs two 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 it 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 doubt one of the greatest British painters of the 20th century,

but actually, I'd just say that what 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 Dürer or Titian or Rembrandt,

his 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 connectedness with a kind of late form of English surrealism. 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 victimhood.

It's a man standing there in his boots to protect his feet from the splinters on the floor with 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 100 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.

Tradition has 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 Dürer, Cranach, Holbein, 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.