October 1, 2022
Flesh and Truth: Lucian Freud at 100
To mark his centenary, the National Gallery gathered decades of Lucian Freud's unflinching portraits in a major 2022 retrospective.
A hundred years after his birth, the National Gallery in London honoured Lucian Freud — grandson of Sigmund — with a sweeping survey of one of the most ruthless and revealing portraitists of the 20th century.
Freud painted flesh like no one else: piled thick, mottled, utterly human, his sitters laid bare over gruelling sessions that could last months. Friends, lovers, his own mother, even the Queen sat before his merciless eye.
Spanning seven decades, the centenary show confirmed his stature as a painter who chased not flattery but truth — however uncomfortable.
Image: “London - Westminster - The National Gallery (geograph 2546629)” — Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.