New York Times, 12/7/2007

LUCIAN FREUD by William Feaver (Rizzoli, 488 pages; $135). The most famous living painter in Britain now has a substantial volume to match his spectacularly ponderous subjects. With more than 400 reproductions and an essay and interviews by the British critic William Feaver, the book takes the full measure of Mr. Freud's career, from his early still-lifes to his mature self-portraits. In Mr. Feaver's wry prose, one portrait exudes "lustrous fleshiness and squiffy malevolence," another "breathes the snoring exhaustion of full-term pregnancy." In his conversations with the author, the artist reminisces about his muses (Leigh Bowery), influences (Constable, Courbet) and contemporaries (Pinter, Bacon), circling back to the maniacally intense commitment and robust "inner life" he has consistently demanded from his sitters. KAREN ROSENBERG

This volume, with more than 400 reproductions, will be the most comprehensive publication to date on Lucian Freud, covering a span of seventy years and including many works not previously reproduced. The result is a corpus of great works that reveal him to be the premier heir today of Rembrandt, Courbet, and Cézanne. The book includes not only Freud’s paintings but also his sketches, woodcuts, and powerful etchings. While the bulk of his paintings are female nudes, his cityscapes, plant studies, and interiors, executed in his distinctive muted palette and visible brushwork, are all included. Freud, who has lived in London ever since his family left Berlin in 1933 when he was ten, has achieved preeminence through his ruthless perception of the human form. His importance has long been recognized in England, but his present super-celebrity status dates from a retrospective at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., in 1987. William Feaver, painter and for many years art critic for The Observer, provides a unique account of Freud’s preoccupations and achievement. Startling, moving, profoundly entertaining, the book lives up to Freud’s advice to students when getting them to paint self-portraits: “To try and make it the most revealing, telling, and believable object. Something really shameless, you know.”