Lucien Freud

Girl with a kitten, 1947

Fascinating art work from the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His paintings beg to be laid out on a couch and analyzed, don't they?

"At the outset there is always a mystery. We cannot know what a painter brought to painting or what drew him to it.'

Two plants, 1977/80

"Yet everything he paints throughout his life adds to our understanding of one or both these things."'

Reflection (self portrait), 1985

"When his last picture is painted in that predestined way in which, one cannot help believing, an artist's work, and therefore art, unfolds when the last predestined picture is finished and the trajectory of his meaning completes its curve then we know all there is to be known about these first riddles and understand what can't be known, what remains unknowable about the sources and the resources of a painter."'

[Text quotes: Lawrence Gowing, "Lucian Freud"]

[Images via Mark Harden's Artchive]