North York Body Contouring

World-renowned realist whose paintings startled and impressed

Lucian Freud: the original, confusing art project sponsored by Lucian Freud, who died aged 88, was a volunteer in his heart, anxious personality, driven by his intelligence and vigilance and distrust of the method, not wanting never at risk of doing the same thing twice.

The sexually charged, penetrating gaze was part of his arms, but his art touched people's lives, they are models of life and the fee, with the delicacy and troubling corporeality.

Freud had a reputation for pushing matters to extremes.But unlike American painters to emerge in the 1950s, his approach was in the Western tradition of working life and trained with painful slowness, rather than unbridled virtuosity. Photographs taken in the studio by his friend the wizard, model, and the good, the painter David Dawson, Freud shows that working from a form of coal roughly sketched, the paint is slowly spreading outward from head. Some paintings have been extended, while others left a fragment.

Portraits of his maturity drew comparisons with equally shocking works by Courbet, Titian and Picasso, the feelings exposed registering as both brash and profound. The recorded stages of Ria, Naked Portrait 2006–07  , his last large female nude, indicate the suspenseful build-up of pigment on her toe and the radiator; heavy incretions represent her curls and flushed face.

By 1987, the critic Robert Hughes nominated Freud as the greatest living realist painter, and after the death of Francis Bacon five years later, the sobriquet could be taken as a commendation, or it could imply an honour fit for an anachronistic “figurative” artist working in London.

Art critics since Freud’s first shows in the 1940s have had difficulties situating his achievement; the common solution has been to apply adjectives to the painted subjects in a way that reflects little more than personal taste, the writers telling readers whether the person portrayed was bored or intimidated, scrawny or obese, the paint slathered, crumbly or miraculously plastic.

Others, however, eschew this moralising tone and are prepared to be startled. Aidan Dunne, for example, reviewing the exhibition in Dublin in 2007, recognised how a single blond model, “unmistakably” herself, in 1966 led Freud to push the bounds of decorum in terms of mainstream depictions of the human body considered not as a generic type but as, to use his own term, a “naked portrait”.