Lucian Freud: Press views

The exhibition has over 150 Freud paintings on display

Press reviews of the Lucian Freud exhibition, which is running at the Tate Britain in London until 22 September.

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The Independent

The big Freud retrospective is curated by William Feaver, and it is exemplary: in the choice and ordering of work; in the fact that - despite the Tate's addiction to interpretive verbiage, and despite all the biography lodged in Freud's work, bursting to be spelled out - there is not a label or caption in sight. It is pictures, 60 years of them, all through.

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The Guardian

In his illuminating and beautiful catalogue essay, William Feaver, curator of this show, suggests that Freud's subjects are eventually relieved of everything but what the artist has made of them. This is both the highest form of praise and the definition of a shortcoming.

Some of Freud's sitters are entirely resistant to his will, and that resistance registers as a vacuum in the paintings. Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether the brushmarks - increasingly thick, gritty and grouted - describe the model at all or belong instead to the artist's ever-changing vision of his painting.

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The Daily Telegraph

Somehow the show is not developing in the way we expect a big retrospective to unfold - with one masterpiece following another, and the flawed or failed pictures conveniently forgotten. Appropriately for an artist who is nothing if not unflinching in his honesty, in this exhibition we are allowed to watch as Freud succeeds, fails, starts all over, changes direction, and gets it wrong again.

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The Times

Although there are lots of reasons to appreciate and thank Lucian Freud, and a single painting often contains several at once, let us begin by noting and praising the absolute seriousness and purposefulness of his art. Freud's 60 working years of unceasing effort and unbending incorruptibility, traced with such inventive care by this Tate retrospective, are a cultural masterclass.