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Lucian Freud

Champagne on dirty floorboards

William Feaver
Rizzoli, 487pp, £65,

Jane Rye

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Jane Rye on William Feaver's biography of Lucien Freud

Lucian Freud describes his paintings as largely autobiographical, which seems to imply some sort of readiness to expose his private life to the public gaze; but he does so on his own terms and is notoriously reluctant to let anyone else poke about in it. At the end of Lawrence Gowing’s 1982 monograph the author quotes Freud as saying ‘there is another reason for not writing about my life. IT IS STILL GOING ON’. William Feaver, it appears, is his licensed Boswell: recording conversations, taking photograhs of the reluctant artist, staying on for lunch. But Freud, painting for dear life at 85 (he can still do three or four hours at a stretch we are told) is not ready to turn up his toes, and Feaver has not yet been let off the leash.

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