Art & Creativity Quote by Lucian Freud

Freud turns the model from muse to instrument, stripping away the romance that clings to portraiture. “Very private function” is the tell: he’s not describing a collaborative performance for an audience, but a psychological trigger inside the painter. The sitter’s job isn’t to “inspire” in some lofty sense; it’s to spark a kind of appetite. The phrase “starting point” also matters. It implies that whatever electricity the model provides is immediately transformed - worked, worried, revised - into something that no longer belongs to the sitter as a person. This is Freud asserting authorship as a bodily, almost predatory act: the painter looks, the painter takes, the painter converts.

That stance fits Freud’s whole cultural position: postwar Britain, suspicious of glamour, allergic to the heroic myths of Modernism, and hungry for a blunt realism that could admit desire, boredom, cruelty, tenderness. His portraits famously refuse flattery; they don’t “capture your soul,” they register your physical fact and the artist’s attention as a force pressing against it. Calling the function “private” quietly rebukes the contemporary expectation that art-making be ethically transparent or emotionally reciprocal. You can almost hear him defending the studio as a sealed room where aesthetics outrank social niceties.

There’s also an awkward honesty about dependency. The painter needs the model, but not as an equal partner - as a catalyst. Freud isn’t pretending otherwise, and the discomfort is part of the point.