From child émigré to young artist: refugee family dynamics and art in the Lucian Freud Archive

Lamle, Elizabeth (2026). From child émigré to young artist: refugee family dynamics and art in the Lucian Freud Archive. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Lucian Freud was one of Britain’s foremost painters in the twentieth century. While his later career is typically defined in terms of British figurative painting and London cultural circles, this thesis situates the development of his visual language and artistic self-fashioning within the complex and nuanced spectrum of refugeedom; not as a simple binary question of voluntary migrant versus anticipatory refugee, but as a positionality that holds multivarious perspectives, as members of the Freud family related to, or distanced themselves from, the use of this label. In 1933, as a young German-Jewish family, the Freuds migrated from Nazi Germany to Britain in order to escape the rising tide of antisemitism. Material produced during this process is now held at the Lucian Freud Archive at the National Portrait Gallery, which this thesis examines with two key questions: what does this archive reveal to us about familial migration amongst refugees from Nazism generally, and with the Freud family in particular? And how can this archive shape a different perspective of Lucian Freud’s artistic practice and career? Together, these questions shape an interdisciplinary thesis, positioned within the overlapping fields of art history and exile studies.

The archive’s extensive collection of family correspondence and the artist’s early artworks reveal how the Freud family’s experience of migration was collective, yet fractured. Despite sharing pathways of integration, individuals were shaped by this experience in distinctly different ways, leading to differing (sometimes competing) intergenerational perspectives of migration within one family. This thesis establishes how the migratory journey of the Freud family was simultaneously a characteristic case within the broader study of Nazi refugees, as well as one that was distinctly atypical; they faced the same ‘choiceless choice’ and socio-political challenges that other German-Jewish refugees faced, but with the assistance of an elite network and social support structures (such as Princess Marie Bonaparte and Dartington Hall) that helped them overcome key challenges to acculturation and long-term stability in Britain. On the sliding scale of refugeedom, the Freud family’s exceptionality was enabled by privilege, personal networks, and fortuitous timing. What emerges from this research is new perspectives and personal histories of German-Jewish interwar familial migration, and a definitive case on how we can reframe the study of the artist Lucian Freud through his particular navigation of the refugee experience, and his networked émigré and familial dynamics.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):