Unusual artist, unusual letters …

… Love Lucian by David Dawson and Martin Gayford review | Art and design books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Freud was not a letter writer in the sense of two cases the editors mention, Van Gogh and Michelangelo. He was not as driven as the former, or as self-absorbed as the latter. He took his work, but not himself, seriously. Which is not to say that he was unaware of his own worth as an artist, or shy about proclaiming it. Dawson and Gayford suggest, and surely they are right, that the flippancy and raucous humour of the letters, like the hectic private and public doings of the man who wrote them, were a release and a relief from the rigours of a life dedicated to the making of art.