The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968-2011
by: William Feaver

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 557 pages, b&w and color illustrations. In this brilliant second and final volume of the definitive biography of Lucian Freud--one of the most influential, enigmatic and secretive artists of the twentieth century--William Feaver, the noted art critic, draws on years of daily conversations with Freud, on his private papers and letters and on interviews with his friends and family to explore the intimate life of Freud, from age forty-five to his death in 2011 at the age of eighty-nine. The final forty years of Freud's life were a period of increasing recognition and fame, and of prodigious output. He was obsessed with his art, and with the idea of producing paintings that "astonish, disturb, seduce, convince." He was equally energetic and ambitious in his private life. This book opens with his dramatic affair with Jacquetta Eliot, which led to some of his most intimate portraits and to the start of two important, lifelong friendships, with Jane Willoughby and Susanna Chancellor. Freud talks about his art at all stages, how it changed in the seventies and his first retrospective in London in 1974. Small remainder dot on bottom edge otherwise clean.