Lucian Freud, the greatest painter of our times, has passed on. In a profile of him in The Guardian a few years back, a writer compared him to the old masters, the likes of Titian or Velázquez, and noted:
The sensuality of Freud is of chilly underheated studios, dirty rags, London.
Exactly so. And that rawness, that appetite for reality, maybe explains why in an exhibit of Freud at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art a few years back, organized by Tate Britain, this (below) was the most beautiful of his paintings, because it was the simplest, the purest, the most elemental.
Kit Stolz 