Lucian Freud: Drawings: Selected by William Feaver

From his earliest years as a child prodigy, Lucian Freud prided himself on his virtuoso drawing skills. The interplay in his work between paper (for both drawing and etching) and canvas was a defining feature of his creative habits throughout his career, as Freud’s foremost scholar and curator, William Feaver, establishes with this masterful overview of Freud’s drawing output. The fruit of Feaver’s privileged access to Freud’s studio, Lucian Freud Drawings includes more than 100 drawings, around half of which have never been exhibited or published, from the 1940s up to the artist’s death in July 2011. Examined here are portraits of Freud’s mother and father, his children and close friends-among them the painter Francis Bacon and artist Leigh Bowery-as well as landscapes and studies of animals. Spanning more than seven decades, this beautifully produced volume illuminates the very foundations of this master draftsman’s oeuvre.
Lucian Freud was born in Germany in 1922, and permanently relocated to London in 1933 during the ascent of the Nazi regime. After seeing brief service during the Second World War, Freud had his first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery in London. Despite exhibiting only occasionally over the course of his career, Freud’s 1995 portrait “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” was sold at auction, at Christie’s New York in May 2008, for $33.6 million-setting a world record for sale value of a painting by a living artist. Freud died in London in 2011.