The Lives of Lucian Freud by William Feaver

The Lives of Lucian Freud: The Restless Years, 1922-1968
By William Feaver
Knopf, 2019

Famed art critic William Feaver follows up his acclaimed volume about the youth of artist Lucian Freud with this big, fiercely detailed book on the zenith years of his subject’s career. A cast of thousands troops through these antic pages, filling out both the professional side of Freud’s life, a steady rise in renown for long stretches stubbornly unaccompanied by a commensurate rise in income, and the personal side, filled with women who were often simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the artist (the book’s Cecil Beaton cover photo, showing the tousle-haired artist standing heroically and a haunted-eyed young woman in the background, sitting in the fireplace, is ominously predictive).

Nobody alive today is in a better position to write an enormous, definitive biography of this artist. Feaver talked with Freud ind-depth on a wide range of topics for decades, he’s infinitely knowledgeable about Freud’s life and associates, and, as his frequent digressions demonstrate, he’s a richly rewarding thinker on Freud’s art:

Was he a throwback? In “Meditations on a Hobby Horse,” an essay for Aspects of Form, a symposium published to coincide with the ICA exhibition, “Growth and Form,” E. H. Gombrich quoted Sir Joshua Reynolds: “A history-painter paints man in general; a portrait-painter a particular man, and therefore a defective model.” Freud was with Reynolds there, being all for particulars and indeed defects. Particulars give the lie to nostrums and platitudes; particulars defined and informed; particulars led one on. 

Because of Feaver’s intimate connection with Freud, the book is positively suffused with the artist’s voice, commenting wryly on everything, all the time. This makes for singularly absorbing reading regardless of what any reader might personally make of Freud’s art itself. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.