Lucian Freud and his complicated relationship with Vienna

Freud's early drawings exhibit an incisive, nervous line that recalls Schiele, while the kind of "Psychological" portraiture pioneered by Kokoschka in Vienna before and during the first world war - considered at the time artless and ugly - is reflected in Freud's intense, close-up investigation of the language of the human face and body. Freud's father, Ernst, the youngest son of Sigmund Freud, was born in Vienna in 1892 in the family apartment at Berggasse 19. In May 1999, an article in The Art Newspaper entitled "A Lucian Freud Complex?" claimed that Freud was "Refusing to allow his paintings to be exhibited in Austria" and had withdrawn them from a show about to open at the Kunst Haus Wien. To complement the KHM exhibition, David Dawson, Lucian Freud's trusted assistant of 20 years, is showing his photographs of Freud in his studio at the Sigmund Freud Museum, formerly Sigmund Freud's consulting rooms and apartment at Berggasse 19.

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