"The most beautiful art book of the year." —Sunday Times
With more than 480 illustrations, this is the most comprehensive publication to date on one of the greatest painters of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Lucian Freud.
Lucian Freud was one of the most significant artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and Phaidon is honoured to publish the most complete retrospective of his career to date.
This sumptuous, definitive set is the result of an extraordinary collaboration between David Dawson – Director of the Lucian Freud Archive and for two decades Freud’s assistant, model, and friend – author Martin Gayford, and editor Mark Holborn.
Lucian Freud was a ruthless artist: his unflinching gaze, his analytic scrutiny of anatomy and psychology, and his 'purely autobiographical' approach to portraiture have earned him a callous reputation and worldwide recognition. One of the most pioneering artists of the twentieth century, Freud carved a new path for figurative painting and figurative portraiture.
Two beautifully produced, cloth-bound hardcover volumes, presented in an elegant slipcase "Stark and revealing... Recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art." —New York Times
During his lifetime Freud painted a prolific number of portraits, but only a select handful of sitters: friends, family, wives, mistresses and the artist himself grace his canvases. His portraits are unforgiving. His portrayal of aging is uncomfortable. He penetrates the souls of his sitters, and lays their flaws, their crevices and their rolls of flesh bare. The psychic intensity of his portraits engulfs you. But stare for long enough, and voyeur you become. As the art critic Martin Gayford once said: 'each portrait reflects both the personality of the subject as much as Freud's personality, capturing something unique seen by someone unique'.
"A massive, two-volume monograph... shin[es] a spotlight on his early work... [and] includes work from Freud's entire career." —Bloomberg "The original, unnerving, sustained artistic achievement of Lucian Freud... had at its heart a wilful, restless personality, fired by his intelligence and attentiveness and his suspicion of method, never wanting to risk doing the same thing twice." —Guardian "Hundreds of rarely seen works in two massive volumes... Excellent." —Departures