Lucian Michael Freud was born in 1922 in Berlin, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, and moved to England with his family in 1933, becoming a British citizen in 1939. He is widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of the second half of the twentieth century, an artist who spent his entire career painting the human body with an unsparing, almost clinical honesty that is both uncomfortable and profoundly moving.
Freud’s early work was precise and linear, influenced by Ingres and early German painting, but from the 1960s onward he developed the heavily impastoed, flesh-obsessed style for which he is best known. His nudes — painted over many sessions, often hundreds of hours — present the body in all its awkwardness, weight, and vulnerability: sagging breasts, distended bellies, mottled skin, bodies pressed into stained mattresses and battered furniture. Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), a monumental nude portrait of the large-bodied performance artist Sue Tilley, sold in 2008 for $33.6 million, then a record for a living artist.
Freud painted the same subjects repeatedly — his children, his lovers, his dogs, his studio — with a concentration that bordered on obsession. He worked every day, often on multiple paintings simultaneously, and refused to delegate any aspect of his art. His self-portraits, particularly the late works showing his aged body unflinchingly, are among the most honest self-examinations in art. He died in 2011, leaving behind a body of work that restored the human figure to the centre of contemporary painting.