Born in Berlin on December 8, 1922, Lucian Freud emerged as one of the most compelling painters of human nature, carrying with him the legacy of being the grandson of the renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. His piercing green eyes, always alert and intensely scrutinizing everything that opposed him, and his dynamic posture like an athlete ready to pounce, gave him the wild charm of a Heathcliff returning to Wuthering Heights to torment Emily Brontë's heroine Cathy from the 1847 novel. Even at 88 years old, during his exhibition "Lucian Freud. The Studio" at the Pompidou Center in spring 2010, Freud maintained all his magnificence and struck observers with the astonishing youthfulness of his person.
Freud's extraordinary childhood fills the 680 pages of the first volume of his remarkable biography by British art historian William Feaver, titled "The Lives of Lucian Freud. Youth, 1922-1968," published in 2019 by Bloomsbury and not yet translated. Within this wealth of details provided by an artist obsessed with secrecy, emerges a colorful character whose vitality and nervous energy would later define his entire artistic approach. After a comfortable childhood in Germany, he left the country at age 11 with his family for England, an odyssey that would profoundly shape his entire body of work.
This early displacement from Berlin to London became the foundational experience that would fuel all of Freud's nervous painting throughout his career. The trauma and upheaval of leaving his homeland as a child, combined with the weight of his family's intellectual legacy, created the psychological landscape that he would later explore through his unflinching portraits and nudes. His painting style, characterized by thick impasto and an almost surgical precision in depicting human flesh, can be traced back to this formative period of displacement and adaptation.
The artist who would become known for literally dissecting human nature through his paintings drew from this 20th-century odyssey of exile and reinvention. His work would go on to challenge conventional notions of portraiture, presenting his subjects with a raw honesty that revealed both physical and psychological truths. The intensity of his gaze, first developed as a child navigating between two worlds and two languages, would become his signature as he scrutinized his models with the same penetrating attention he had once used to understand his new English environment.
Freud's artistic development was inextricably linked to his childhood experience of cultural displacement, making him not just a painter of bodies, but a chronicler of the human condition shaped by the tumultuous events of the 20th century. His legacy as one of Britain's most significant painters stems from this unique combination of personal history, family intellectual tradition, and the artistic vision forged through his early journey from Berlin to London.
