Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings

By Starr Figura

One of the foremost figurative artists working today, Lucian Freud has redefined portraiture and the nude through his unblinking scrutiny of the human form. Although he is best known as a painter, etching is integral to his practice. This volume accompanies a major Museum of Modern Art exhibition that will present the full scope of Freud's etchings, including some 75 works--from the rare early experiments of the 1940s to the increasingly complex compositions he has created since rediscovering the medium in the early 1980s. Written by exhibition curator Starr Figura, it also includes a selection of paintings and drawings that illuminate the crucial, cross-pollinating relationship between Freud's etchings and his works on canvas. Freud is not a traditional printmaker: Treating the etching plate like a canvas, he stands the copper upright on an easel. He also typically depicts the same sitters in etchings as in paintings, demarcating their forms through meticulous networks of finely etched lines. Freud's etchings may either precede or follow the execution of paintings, and they are sometimes as large as, or larger than, their related canvases. But with their figures dramatically cropped or isolated against empty backgrounds, they achieve a startling new sense of psychological tension and formal abstraction.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 087070706X
• ISBN13: 9780870707063
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Museum of Modern Art
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 9.4" x 12.1"

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Lucien Freud: The Painter's Etchings

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A welcome and critically important contribution

Lucian Freud is an artist whose work has redefined portraiture and the nude over the past twenty-five years. His ability to evoke psychological tension and formal abstraction with reference to the human form has been as seminal as it is influential in the modern American art world. "Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings" compiled and with commentary by Starr Figura showcases 128 illustrations which comprised The Museum of Modern' Art's major exhibition of Lucian's work and represent the breadth of his work with twenty-two paintings and seven drawings encompassing a diversity of themes involving the human form, portraitures, landscapes, dogs, and Lucien's unique multi-medium cross-pollinating diversity of mediums. Starr Figura is the exhibition organizer and the Assistant Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA whose informed and informative essay explores both the scope and significance of Lucien's work, and provides a welcome context for viewing the Lucian prints and his aesthetic values. "Lucian Freud" is a welcome and critically important contribution to personal and academic 20th Century American Art History reference collections and supplemental reading lists.