Lucian Freud

By the early 1970s, despite being one of the UK’s best known and most respected artists, Lucian Freud had not yet received a comprehensive showing of his paintings and drawings.

The Hayward Gallery staged his first retrospective in 1974, when the artist was 50 years old.

The exhibition, which featured more than 120 works, covered his entire career, from his early works in 1937, through to his portraits and still-life paintings and drawings of the late 1940s, and the larger than life-sized works Freud began in the late 1950s.

More than 90,000 people attended the Lucian Freud exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, which ran concurrently with an exhibition of work by Edvard Munch. Many more encountered the exhibition during its tour of venues in Bristol, Birmingham and Leeds.

Private view card for Lucian Freud retrospective.

Writing of the exhibition in the Sunday Telegraph, Michael Shepherd stated that ‘The artistic quality of Freud’s show is so high that it’s one of those occasions when one just wants to say "There are 142 works here, and every one of them exists in its own right and should be looked at; go and enjoy them”’.