Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939 - 1954
I am inclined to agree that their volume is 'among the most revealing, illuminating, and entertaining collections of artist’s letters in existence.' Love Lucian is beautifully presented, and contextualized with wit and an expert’s discernment. It doesn’t hurt that Freud was one of the century’s great talkers, rogues, and talents ... Love Lucian keeps the whole always in view.
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Effervescent ... A handsome quarto volume, cloth-bound and embossed, whose contents are a model of intelligent design ... These quirky communications are set, like rhinestones on a velvet cloak, within an elegant rolling narrative that explains, elucidates and connects them ... We are thereby spared the clunky scaffolding of footnotes (though the text is fully sourced), and we’re in for a roller-coaster ride ... Breathless, flirting, teasing letters went out daily to a posse of girlfriends, or would-be amours, full of wild anecdotes, in-jokes and cartoons ... The raw spontaneity and energy of each illustrated page conveys Freud’s moods and preoccupations in a way that no biographer can match. Yet the narrative is necessarily patchy, following those letters that survive, thanks to the vagaries of fortune, where others have perished or disappeared. But the calm clarity of the commentary spins it all together ... In editing this volume, Martin Gayford...and Freud’s longtime assistant David Dawson never intrude. Yet their closeness to the painter, allied with keen research, throw light on frequent obscurity.
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Handsome and enthralling ... Love Lucian is unique, a sort of biographical tapestry woven around a set of missives reproduced in facsimile that are at once skimpy, slapdash, funny and, in many cases, idiosyncratically but beautifully illustrated ... Readers eager for artistic insights or extended ruminations such as those found in, for instance, Van Gogh’s letters, will be disappointed by this volume ... The style in which [Freud] writes to his friends and lovers is rambunctious, irreverent, sometimes facetious and almost always funny ... Beautifully made.
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