In the years right after World War II, when Abstract Expressionism exploded, everybody knew that British painting, mired in what was assumed to be an increasingly obsolete realism, could not hope to produce a major figure again. Everybody was wrong. Six decades later, there are at least three: Francis Bacon, David Hockney--and Lucian Freud, who was 88 when he died on July 20. As a portraitist, Freud was an acute psychologist, shrewd and unsparing, a fitting descendant of his grandfather Sigmund Freud. In his early work, he used a sharp, tight line that he'd discovered in the painters of the Northern...
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