Lucian Freud was born in Berlin, but in 1933 his Jewish family fled to Britain to escape the Nazis; his grandfather, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, refused to leave Berlin until 1938, when he finally joined the rest of his family in London. After training in several schools, in the 1940s Lucian Freud emerged in the circle of Francis Bacon as a surrealist artist committed to representation. By the 1950s he had become a figurative painter with an uncompromising eye. His paintings of this period are tightly handled and evoke the almost miniaturist quality of early Netherlandish painting but with an unmistakable air of tension or malaise that betrays their origins in postwar Europe. He explored portraiture regularly but his sitters are often not named and instead are given generic titles, such as in this portrait where the young woman is scrutinized with an unsparing intensity and defined simply as a “girl in a dark dress.” Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016
