• Lucian Freud Shivering Flesh

The Freud Museum in London explores, enters and weaves connections between the extended family of the famous Austrian psychoanalyst through portraits, photographs, drawings and illustrations by his grandson and renowned painter,

Lucian Freud

.

It is the first exhibition that the institution dedicates to the crude inquisitor of the naked body and the event marks two anniversaries: the centenary of the artist's birth, on December 8, and ten years since his death, this July 20, at the age of 88. .

Lucian Freud returns to his grandfather's last home.

His most intimate and rarely exhibited works of his - from

children's drawings to illustrated letters and family portraits

- are brought together for the first time in the house museum of Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna, a pioneer in child psychology.

The painting of a palm tree, painted in pastel, chalk and ink in 1944, links the artist with his psychoanalyst aunt in a loop of closeness, absence, disdain and estrangement that would be repeated with other members of the family.

Anna bought the drawing at

her nephew's first solo exhibition, in London

.

The work hangs next to the fireplace in the old living room of the brick house and cozy garden, which the painter stopped visiting after the death of his grandfather in 1939.

Lucian made and unmade friends, and his aunt took him mania

.

One of his many sons, Alexander (Ali) Boyt, recalls his father's comment on Dalí: "Dalí is obsessed with my grandfather and I have learned not to have any interest in Sigmund," he told him about his apparent lack of interest in analyzing the subconscious.

Posing was the best and even only way to meet and establish a relationship with the painter, who worked slowly.

In

Ali's Head

she portrays the eldest of his recognized sons as he battled drugs

.

His sister Rose remembers how she incorporated figures into the composition of

The Pearse Family

as the months passed and nature followed her life course.

In

Esther and Albie

she plays her daughter and her novelist breastfeeding her baby.

"She was a wonderful storyteller," Boyt said at the show's opening.

With his father he shares, as Boyt admits, an addictive and womanizing instinct.

"

He was an inveterate gambler

. He lost a frame at the races and had to borrow money to get back home. He would take me to the bookies and the Colony Room [a private club in Soho] and

give me money to put into the machines

", he recalls.

He got hooked on drugs and spent time in jail, but never felt "ignored" by his absent father.

"He had many children with different women and he did not live with almost any of us. He was not a family man nor did he like to live in a family unit. But he was not allergic to being a father either," he notes.

Freud mentioned 10 children in his will, who shared an inheritance estimated at around 50 million euros.

Shortly before, he refused to acknowledge the four descendants he had with Katherine McAdam, although

they looked like "my own reflection in the mirror"

, Boyt admits.

"I was lost in a cloud of drugs for a long time and when I came out of the fog, my father had already rejected them. It was hard for them," admits the now rehabilitation program adviser.

Boyt does not blame his father, whom he calls "selfish, motivated" and an artist who "put his work before everything else."

"He was with Picasso after the Second World War and the idea was forged that

he should devote himself to painting if he wanted to be good

", he evokes.

Freud flirted with surrealism in his early years, but soon turned to realism and became one of Britain's best and crudest figurative painters.

He portrayed family, friends and acquaintances - even Queen Elizabeth - and was masterful in compositions of animals and the plant environment.

Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family

will be open to the public until January 2023.

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