Lucian Freud: New Perspectives exhibition National Gallery

‘What do I ask of a painting?’ Lucian Freud once said. ‘I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.’ Freud, who died in 2011, was a master of the modern portrait and a connoisseur of the portrait tradition. To mark 100 years since the artist’s birth, the National Gallery will stage a major survey of his works, drawing from major collections around the world.

Freud was born in Berlin, the son of an architect and grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to London in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism in Germany. Freud made London his home and became one of the London School, a group of loosely connected artists that included Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon.

Freud’s early work experimented with surrealism and realism, but his mature style was informed by the impasto use of oil paints favoured by his peers, combined with a realist bent that spoke to the grand tradition of European painting, from Rembrandt to Corot. But Freud’s hand added a distinctly 20th century sensibility to the portrait tradition; most of his subjects were sprawled naked in bare rooms, striped of the trappings of their lives. Under Freud’s brush, human flesh became textured and meat-like. A violence is done to the subject, who appears naked, rather than nude, made vulnerable but the unflinching eye of the artist.

This exhibition will include more than 60 loans from other galleries, but it is fitting that is should be housed in the National Gallery, where Freud took so much inspiration. 'I use the gallery as if it were a doctor,’ Freud told the journalist Michael Kimmelman. ‘I come for ideas and help – to look at situations within paintings, rather than whole paintings.’ This exhibition will be an unmissable one for fans of Freud's work and the ideal introduction to his oeuvre for those less familiar with this modern master.