Artist Lucian Freud died on Wednesday night at his home in London after a brief illness, according to The New York Times. The 88-year-old Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, "recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art," according to his Times obituary. "In paintings like "Girl With Roses" (1947-48) and "Girl With a White Dog" (1951-52)," the paper continues, "he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter's social facade. Ordinary people--many of them his friends and intimates--stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist's ruthless inspection." Reuters offers us a couple examples of Freud's work, including "Pluto and the Bateman Sisters" and a portrait of his daughter Bella:

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Uri Friedman