Art & Creativity Quote by Lucian Freud

Freud’s line is a quiet manifesto against the flattering lie of portraiture. He’s not interested in painting the person you think you are, or the person your friends would recognize at a cocktail party. He’s after the version of you that leaks out when self-presentation loses its grip: the slump of a shoulder, the defensive curl of a hand, the face caught between expressions. “Not because of what they are like” rejects typecasting and easy psychology. “Not exactly in spite of what they are like” refuses the avant-garde posture of contempt, the artist who paints to expose or punish. The pivot is the last clause: “how they happen to be” turns identity into circumstance - contingent, physical, time-stamped.

That phrasing matters. “Happen” suggests accident and arrival, not essence; “be” keeps it stubbornly present-tense. Freud’s portraits, dense with flesh and fatigue, don’t argue that a sitter has a soul so much as a body that occupies space, bears history, and can’t be airbrushed into an idea. The intent is realism, but not the camera’s realism; it’s a moral realism, where attention itself becomes the ethic.

Context sharpens the point. Postwar Britain was full of new mythologies - celebrity, psychoanalysis, consumer polish - each offering a ready-made story about who someone “is.” Freud’s refusal is to let the sitter stay a story. He paints the human as an event: someone, today, in this light, with this weight, caught mid-existence.