British Artist Lucian Freud Dies at 88

Lucien Freud, 2005 (Photo: procsilas)

British Artist Lucian Freud Dies at 88
Thursday, 21 July 2011

British artist Lucian Freud, grandson of the founder of modern psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, has died. He was 88 years old.

The painter's New York art dealer, William Acquavella, says Freud passed away Wednesday night at his home in London after an unspecified illness.

Lucian Freud was famous for his dramatic self-portraits and paintings of nude women. He also was commissioned to paint a portrait of Britain's Queen Elizabeth.

In recent years, his paintings have sold for huge sums. In 2008, his portrait of a civil servant, entitled “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” fetched close to $34 million at Christie's auction house in New York. It was a record price paid for a painting by a living artist.

The buyer was later reported to be Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

Freud was born in 1922 in Berlin, and his family moved to Britain in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism in Germany. After a brief stint as a seaman in the British Navy in 1941, he devoted himself to art.

Known for such paintings as “The Painter's Room,” “Girl With a White Dog,” and “Self-Portrait With a Black Eye,” Freud is considered to be one of the most significant painters of his time.

American Artist Cy Twombly Dies at 83

Tuesday, 5 July 2011

Cy Twombly, an American painter, known for his giant scribbles and graffiti-styled art, has died at a hospital in Rome.

A spokesman for the Gagosian Gallery, which represented Twombly's work, said the artist died Tuesday at the age of 83. The spokesman did not specify a cause of death, but Twombly had suffered from cancer for several years.

Twombly, whose full name was Edwin Parker Twombly, was born in the eastern U.S. state of Virginia. His six-decade career spanned a number of artistic movements, but he was best known for a unique style that included oversize canvasses, abstract scribbles, incorporating words into his paintings and drawings, and his use of the color white,

Twombly had been living in Italy since the late 1950s.