Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist, by Geordie Greig – review

Frances Spalding on one of the most revealing accounts of Lucian Freud ever writtenGeordie Greig's book is an unapologetic mixture of intelligent perception and high gossip. It deepens the reader's understanding of Lucian Freud, as both man and artist, but it also connives with the kind of mythology that stultifies inquiry. It is both fascinating and appalling. Freud had a reputation for being a man with no boundaries. This book likewise heeds no conventional restraints, mixes genres, seeps into questionable places, and fills gaps with cumulatively repetitive and often mawkish interviews with Freud's models, or connective passages that might have come straight out of Who's Who – were they not entirely concerned with sexual history. And yet no person interested in Freud will ignore this book. It is, overall, more revealing than anything about him yet written.It begins benignly, in Clarke's, a light-filled upmarket restaurant, with starched white tablecloths, in Kensington Church Street. Here, for at least the last decade of his life, Freud breakfasted most days of the week. He would enter via the delicatessen next door, as breakfast is not normally served, and was usually accompanied by David Dawson, his assistant, who brought all the broadsheets and the Daily Mail, which they spread over the large circular table at the back of the room. Guests, too, might be invited, especially on Saturday mornings, when the gathering sometimes swelled to a small salon. One regular was... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2013-12-18 00:00:00 UTC ]

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