Phoebe Hoban, author of definitive biographies of Jean-Michel Basquiat
and Alice Neel, now turns her attention to Lucian Freud, the grandson of
Sigmund and one of the greatest painters England has produced. Lucian
Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the first biography to assess Freud's work and
life, showing how the two converge.
In Hoban's dramatic and fast-paced narrative, we follow Freud from his
birthplace in Berlin to London, where he fled with his family in the
1930s, and then to Paris, where he mixed with Picasso and Giacometti. He
led a dissolute life in Soho after the war, gambling and womanizing with
fierce energy. He painted his wives nude, his children nude, himself
nude. He married twice, had an uncountable number of children, and kept
working through it all, painting everyone from close friend and rival
Francis Bacon to Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. He sometimes spent years
on a single painting, which could require hundreds of hours of sittings.
However various his subjects, his intent was always the same: to find
and reveal the character hidden within by means of his intense visual
imagination.
Along with its startling biographical revelations, the great thrill of
Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the way Hoban deconstructs the art
itself--its influences, models, and technique--to show how Freud
reproduced reality on the canvas while breaking down the illusion that
what we see is real.
