The Lives of Lucian Freud: FAME 1968 – 2011

Author William Feaver
Narrator Jonathan Keeble
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 19 hours and 55 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Biography: arts and entertainment, Biography: general, Portraits and self-portraiture in art, The Arts.

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What to expect

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, MAIL ON SUNDAY, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, SPECTATOR
THE SUNDAY TIMES ART BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020

‘A dazzling tour de force’ THE TIMES

‘Does justice to Freud’s pitiless genius as an artist’ DAILY MAIL

‘You can hear Freud’s voice on the page’ OBSERVER

‘Mesmerising … the ideal companion to Freud’s work’ GUARDIAN

William Feaver, Lucian Freud’s collaborator, curator and close friend, knew the unknowable artist better than most. Over many years, Freud narrated to him the story of his life, ‘our novel’.

Fame follows Freud at the height of his powers, painting the most iconic works of his career in a constant and dissatisfied pursuit of perfection, just outrunning his gambling debts and tailor’s bills. Whether tattooing swallows at the base of Kate Moss’s back or exacting a strange and horrible revenge on Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger, Freud’s adventures were always perfectly characteristic. An enfant terrible till the end, even as he was commissioned to paint the Queen and attended his own retrospectives, what emerges is an artist wilfully oblivious to the glitter of the world around – and focussed instead on painting first and last.

Critics Review

The concluding volume of Feaver’s unmissable biography sees the great painter evolving from enfant terrible into Old Devil – although really was a man ever so uncompromisingly himself from cradle to grave? As a life it’s both a horrible warning and a shining example, and Feaver does it justice
Daily Telegraph
Freud was a wonderful painter – a genius – but a frequently awful human being. His endless feuds and fights, his numerous sexual partners, his extraordinary work and his eccentricities are all vividly chronicled in this, the second volume of Fever’s monumental biography
Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year
Lucian Freud wanted William Feaver’s biography of him to be ‘the first funny art book’ … [this is] certainly that, with laughs galore. But it’s also much more, not least a wonderfully vivid chronicle of the interlocking worlds of money, art and bohemia
Observer, Best Books of 2020
Freud’s voice rings out on every page, offering opinions on everything from the poutiness of some of his less-acknowledged children … to the sublimity of Titian’s Diana and Callisto. There’s plenty of celebrity juice here too
Guardian, Best Art Books of 2020
Huge, gossipy and sometimes shocking … no less breezy and eye-popping than the first
The Times and Sunday Times Best Books of 2020
Feaver has collected some fabulous stories
Daily Telegraph, The Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2020
William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud also comes in two parts. I read the second part, Fame: 1968-2011 (Bloomsbury) this year and found it as engrossing and well informed as the first, and as judicious and well written
New Statesman, Books of the Year
[One of] the best things I read this year … crammed with enough jaw-dropping, buttocks-clenching revelations to keep a whole Soho pub entertained for days
Spectator, Books of the Year
Explosively enjoyable, bursting with life and art, and all focused on a central figure as wild and beguiling as any character in literature, real or fictitious … Feaver is wonderfully deft at interweaving the art and the life in an unshowy manner. Throughout the two volumes he manages to convey Freud’s personal magnetism, and the way he was simultaneously controlled and controlling and out of control. And, rare for a biographer, he shows what it was like to be with his subject from day to day
Mail on Sunday
Magnificent … Reads like the last days of Rome … Feaver shares his subject’s style and timing. His clipped prose is running commentary and ironic aside; the sentences, bone-dry, have dramatic entrances
Times Literary Supplement
If Freud’s pictures are at heart all about palpable reality, the same is true of Feaver’s daunting enterprise … David Hockney described Freud’s portraits as being essentially “an account of looking”, and that’s just what Feaver’s book is too
Sunday Times
Does justice to Freud’s pitiless genius as an artist
Daily Mail
An extremely juicy biography … You can hear Freud’s voice on the page, which is thrilling …Bulges with gossipy stuff … He was more vivid than other people … and Feaver’s great and generous achievement in his book is to enable us to imagine this. Its last lines – Freud tells him, that he’s always liked lipstick on the teeth – are so perfect. Somehow, they say it all. Dress up, go out, get laid. And then try to get it all down in your work: “Tell people you’ve been alive”
Observer
A biography that is as generous and unsparing as Freud’s own best work. At once personally intimate and critically detached, perceptive on the art … but never trying to compete with it, Feaver’s biographical portrait is an unforgettable achievement
Prospect
Superb and eye-opening … A figure who was driven by strong appetites, told the truth when it was uncomfortable or unwanted, and used paint to play a complicated game in which self-revelation was strangely mixed up with self-disguise.
Prospect
A mesmerising picture of a paintaholic who was incorrigibly on the make … Feaver’s vastly detailed biography is the ideal companion to Freud’s work. It resembles nothing so much as a large Freud canvas: hypnotic, occasionally reiterative, quirkily dark in places, proceeding by a process of obsessive accretion
Guardian
Diverting … Freud played the mischievous bar-room raconteur, chuckling over bygone stunts and scrapes, and sticking the knife into old foes with venomous relish
Sunday Telegraph
The latest instalment of the epic biography of Lucian Freud finds him at the height of his fame
The Times
Absorbing in all its darkness and light, a dazzling tour de force … Remarkable … we have to be grateful that his Boswell was there to make a record
Literary Review
The first volume of Feaver’s biography of the artist was highly acclaimed. This second one covers his most productive years
Sunday Times
PRAISE FOR THE LIVES OF LUCIAN FREUD: YOUTH: ‘William Feaver has done a brilliant job
Daily Telegraph
Freud emerges, dab by dab, fully three-dimensional from Feaver’s vibrant recitation of dealers and models, works in progress and gambling … David Hockney, another sitter, described Freud’s portraits as being essentially “an account of looking”, and that’s just what Feaver’s book is too
SUNDAY TIMES
Freud and Feaver seize you by the elbows, bundle you into a Bentley, haul you round the nightclubs, feed you oysters, Guinness and amphetamines and order you Russian tea and eggs the next morning. I didn’t know whether I’d been roughed up or ravished
The Times
This is a tremendous read. Anyone interested in British art needs it … An extraordinary book
New Statesman
A biography that is as entertaining, and full of twists and turns, as a picaresque novel … It has amazing zip and gusto, and leaves you wanting more
Mail on Sunday
Sparkling … An extraordinary tranche of anecdote and apercu … Feaver’s wonderful biography comes close to Freud’s own definition of his art: “A picture should be a recreation of an event rather than an illustration of an object”
Sunday Times
Superlative … Every page of this volume affirms his distinction … This is Lucian Freudian biography, packed with stories
Guardian
Lucian Freud was unique; unique in intensity, in affection, in interest and in fun. This brilliant and compendious biography has the same qualities. It does justice to Lucian
Frank Auerbach
Feaver has filled his book to the brim with the excitement and strangeness of Freud’s life
London Review of Books
Mesmerising, almost surreal in its headlong layering of detail, memory and gossip. Propelled by Freud’s sardonic recollections, and lit throughout by William Feaver’s impeccable, penetrating analysis of the work, this is a monstrously brilliant portrait
Jenny Uglow
In William Feaver’s The Lives of Lucian Freud, based upon decades of conversation with the painter, we hear Freud’s remarkable voice on almost every page. The result is a vivid, intimate biography of one of the 20th century’s most storied artists
Annalyn Swann and Mark Stevens, Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of de Kooning: An American Master
Here, Freud gets to tell his version of events with panache
Spectator
The painter emerges as fully three-dimensional in this second part of Feaver’s biography
THE TIMES, Best paperbacks of 2022

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