The Master and the Gallerist
Lucian Freud, British realist painter and famed libertine, has died at age 88. In April, he and his New York dealer, William Acquavella, spoke to WSJ. Magazine about their 20-year friendship
By Tom Vanderbilt
On some cosmic palette of interpersonal relationships, they were an unlikely blend: William Acquavella, the self-effacing head of a tony Upper East Side gallery that specialized in secondary-market selling of masterworks by Picasso and Matisse, and Lucian Freud, the notoriously reclusive and irascible painter with a lively personal life (which inevitably invites mention of his grandfather Sigmund)—"a kind of slumming Faust," as one account put it, "who prowls lowlife pubs and eats woodcock for breakfast"—and whose work had just taken a dramatic turn toward monumental nudes of a corpulent performance...