Lucian Freud's Reflection (Self-Portrait)

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• purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings. It is an attempt at a record. I work with people that interest me, and that I care about and think about, in rooms that I live in and know

• leading realist painter of the last century

• 8-year-old German Jew, Lucian learned of discrimination when he was told he was not eligible for the Hitler Youth

• Ernst Freud moved his family to London, England. Lucian was 11 years old at the time of the move and had to make the difficult transition to a new country and to a new language

• his daughter Anna was interrogated by the Gestapo that Freud reluctantly agreed to leave Vienna for London with his wife and daughter. Lucian visited with his grandfather in London and was photographed with him in the last year of Sigmund Freud's life

• his art emphasized man's animal nature

• focus on nakedness in both male and female models is antithetical to the aesthetically beautiful “nude” in art

• “to be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition

• the notion of an ideal abstracted from the reality that we confront in our everyday lives.5 He wrote that, in art, “[w]e do not wish to imitate; we wish to perfect.

• painted naked people; he did not paint nudes

• work remained controversial

• document his fascination with flesh and its contours. As his work matured, he incorporated broader strokes and used a more restricted palette of colors that emphasized thickly applied white and deep red colors

• Because Freud stood when he painted, his figures often appear foreshortened

• not to use professional models as his subjects. Instead, his models were people from all walks of life whom he knew

• The viewer has the sense of his bony weight. His gaze is no longer focused outward as before but now seems inward and unfocused. Perhaps he is deep in thought or uncertain. The self-portrait is painted in bright light, with his head casting a deep shadow over his chest. The flesh of his face and chest are seemingly constructed from contrasting shadows, olive green against the pale pink of his skin with dramatic highlights. One ear is in shadow, and the other in light. His head seems to come forward, apparently moving off the canvas and into the viewer's personal space. The play of warm and cool coloring draws the viewer into this moment of self-reflection