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“... balls for her daughters may have been her sole maternal pleasure.) Blackwood’s first husband, Lucian Freud, painted her; Walker Evans photographed her; she was the dedicatee of Lowell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dolphin. (Sample epithet for Blackwood: ‘baby killer whale’.) He was likely writing the poems while she was writing The ...”

“... established himself in places such as the French House and the Colony Room, and he became close to Lucian Freud, thirteen years his junior. Freud bought work from Bacon, including Two Figures (1953), a depiction of two naked men on a bed passionately engaged in sex, which Freud kept ...”

“... or for ‘drooling over fleshy naked women’ with a ‘quite shocking lack of abandon’ (Lucian Freud). This leaves us grateful that the critic makes no attempt to describe what he admires in Schnabel’s pictures. But it is important to note that he makes no attempt. You can’t promote a star in showbiz or sport without some discussion of his ...”

“... conventional dictum than he imagines. The same might be said of ‘everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says,’ which is also unfair to the painter, given that it sounds, out of context, like an absurd simplification of something his grandfather might have written. At its worst, this tendency becomes quite embarrassing, as when Ondaatje has Anna ...”

“... a little A-level-style box-ticking about the portrait, his focused look recalling ‘the elderly Lucian Freud’, his younger face changed by the years he spent working with Francis Crick in California in the 1960s by day and hanging out with Thom Gunn and his friends by night. This association of ideas, familiar from magazine profiles, is too neat to ...”

“... on Cole’) Only one piece, ‘The Artist as an Old Man’, describing a Lucian Freud self-portrait, seems more than throwaway. It ends:     He looks into his own eyes or it might be yours and his attack on the goods repeats the riddle or it might be answers it:      Out of the eater             came forth ...”

“... diptych, he stripped off completely and had himself depicted unsparingly, back and front, as if by Lucian Freud. ‘No one had ever done this before,’ Rublack writes. Schwarz’s youth was already receding; he needed to work on his tone. In the last image of all, made when ‘I was 631/2 years and 25 days old,’ he appears dressed for the funeral of ...”

“... of arty glamour in Fitzrovia. She was the Euston Road Venus to William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, Lucian Freud and other lovers who painted and adored her youth, her over-compensating fierceness of opinion, her looks and some mysterious sadness that she carried inside. She was an insecure, uneducated girl who glorified men who painted pictures and wrote ...”

“... is it Marías’s taste or Nevinson’s which is expressed in the phrase ‘that sordid artist Lucian Freud’, or in sharing the news that ‘nothing else’ Umberto Eco wrote was ‘as successful as The Name of the Rose’? The whole novel is full of statements that seem like a pastiche of the very idea of saying something, and at one point the ...”

“... take unexpected forms. Importunity about truth can be more shameless than a lie. The point about a Lucian Freud nude is not that a real Woman looks like that: it is that the artist masterfully insists that she does. A falseness, not so unlike Hemingway’s, is present in the transaction. Similarly, in the confessional mode of writing, or letting it all ...”

“... but gradually the balance shifted towards painters and writers (in the first instance, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Peter Quennell, who was known – someone had to be – as ‘Lady Rothermere’s fan’): Mr Amory cites this as evidence of her capacity to ‘develop’, and however off-putting a notion, it may be true. Rothermere with his ...”

“... very close to poverty [were] inextricably combined’. All four at some point shared a bed with Lucian Freud; at least three of them slept with Arthur Koestler; and two of them married Derek Jackson, who had previously been married to Pamela Mitford and would eventually tot up six marriages.Before I go on, I want to mention a paradox that I’d like ...”

“... would demand gifts from an artist whose work he was about to honour with a review – according to Lucian Freud, who knew Sylvester for decades, the expected rate was usually two pieces, which could be small as long as they were choice, for one article.’ This is all very shocking, the more so as it involves critics and curators at the top of their ...”

“... change of style from dry to wet, from small marks to big ones, is not unique or even unusual. Lucian Freud, for example, has changed from thin paint, small brushes and fine detail to thick paint broadly applied. There is a kind of release in this; finicky marks give way to bigger, firmer strokes and painterly paint. It is not necessarily easier, but ...”

“... is sometimes one of influence, more usually one of semi-private conversation across the centuries (Lucian Freud doing versions of Chardin, Hodgkin painting ‘After Corot’). But it also goes beyond that – beyond admiration, beyond style, homage, imitation. Van Gogh, even as he was violently wrenching himself towards a form of painting which still ...”