The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968–2011 by William Feaver
The first half of this biography was published last year. It told a compulsive tale. As a painter, Lucian Freud laid the body bare to predatory inspection. Yet he guarded his privacy with obsessive insistence.
Yet thanks to diligent note-taking across almost four decades by the art critic William Feaver, his friend and faithful scribe, we were being invited, like punters inspecting the goods at some grand house-contents sale, to poke about in his defiantly unconventional, unscrupulously promiscuous, doggedly ambitious and tenaciously artistic life. What could be more riveting?
