William Feaver, a friend and collaborator of Freud’s for 30 years, gives us a Lucian who always resisted categorisation ... Having enjoyed almost unrivalled daily access to Freud, Feaver records with little editorial filtering the egotism, the sexual prowling and the remorseless urge to produce of these later years, allowing Freud to reveal himself in his own words on every page. It’s a mesmerising picture of a paintaholic who was incorrigibly on the make ... Feaver’s vastly detailed biography is the ideal companion to Freud’s work. It resembles nothing so much as a large Freud canvas: hypnotic, occasionally reiterative, quirkily dark in places, proceeding by a process of obsessive accretion.

... exemplary ... Along with the previous installment, Fame is everything an artist’s biography ought to be—illuminating, allergic to cant, personal, enormously picaresque—but so seldom is. Mr. Feaver’s Lives of Freud cannot be praised too highly ... Mr. Feaver does not do grandiose exegesis. Insights are gleaned from conversation and canny observation.

The critic Kenneth Tynan divided playwrights into two categories, 'smooth' and 'hairy,' and one could probably make a similar distinction among biographers. Smooth biographers offer clean narrative lines, well-underscored themes, and carrots, in the form of cliffhangers, to lure the reader onward. Their books are on best-seller lists. They’re good gifts for Dad. William Feaver, the author of The Lives of Lucian Freud — the second volume, Fame, 1968-2011, is out now — exists on the opposite extreme. There’s little smoothness in him at all. His biography is hairier than a bonobo. Feaver, a longtime art critic for The Observer in London, doesn’t provide a fixed portrait of Freud, the great realist painter, so much as he leads us into a studio filled with crusty brushes, scrapers, half-completed canvases, easels, dirty floorboards, mahlsticks and distilled turpentine, and lets us poke through the detritus as if to assemble a likeness for ourselves ... Can one pick up Volume Two of this biography if one hasn’t read Volume One? Feaver seems to suggest the answer is no. He doesn’t always bother to reintroduce people or topics ... Perhaps it doesn’t matter. There’s a sense one could skip three or four pages almost anywhere in these books and not miss anything crucial.

The sheer volume of material garnered and the liveliness of Freud’s speech and orbit mean that the whole project is less like traditional biography than extended reportage mixed with diary entries. This is an account of a life rather than a critical examination of one, and the art history is minimal; the paintings were Freud’s purpose so for Feaver their role is as props that framed his life rather than as objects for critical scrutiny in themselves ... Freud emerges, dab by dab, fully three-dimensional from Feaver’s vibrant recitation of dealers and models ... David Hockney, another sitter, described Freud’s portraits as being essentially 'an account of looking', and that’s just what Feaver’s book is too.

One theme in this remarkable biography, based on hundreds of hours of conversation between Feaver and Freud, is the painter’s dawning realisation that, even as he opens himself up, he absolutely doesn’t want his biography to be written after all… at least not until he is safely dead ... This intensity makes him a glorious subject for biography. In this second volume, taking the story from 1968 to 2011, Feaver lacks the jaw-dropping Hogarthian quality of the early life, with its cast of gangsters, stoned aristocrats and Soho bacchanals ... You wouldn’t have thought that any of this could possibly be as interesting as the hungry years. Yet Feaver has written a second great page-turner, one of the finest art biographies I know. Part of that comes about because of the artist’s authentic voice, meticulously recorded in all those conversations ... astonishing.

Lucian was the id unchecked, and Feaver leaves no characteristic or behavior to the imagination ... a staggering journey into depravity and artistic passion ... The pace of The Lives of Lucian Freud is fast, feverish, and frenetic. People, places, and portraits fairly dance off the page in an endless loop that simultaneously fascinates and repels ... Can the onlooker separate the mania and obsessions from the artistic product and the need for a muse and younger and younger companionship? Feaver skirts this question deftly. He stays with the descriptive and not the judgmental. It’s ultimately the art and not the process. Freud’s complexity and debauchery are secondary to the output. Feaver has created as much a diary as a biography, and, unfortunately there are too few illustrations of Freud’s art, but there are just enough pictures to convey that Freud was a master at conveying flesh and the human figure.

In this second volume, which covers the years from 1968 to Freud’s death in 2011 at the age of 88, Feaver himself becomes a significant character, always (it seems) at the artist’s elbow, inserting his own first-person recollections and opinions, quoting his own reviews and articles, retailing his own conversations and impressions. Not so much apostle and amanuensis: more like a permanent shadow ... These final years are a catalogue of shows, which Freud, now suffering from cancer, is usually too frail to attend, of deals and parties and chat — but the book slows up considerably. It’s the only point at which its huge bulk feels onerous. But if its length often seems indulgent, it’s surely appropriate to its expansive, brilliant subject and his lust for life. And if Feaver is sometimes too forgiving of Freud’s failings, in this magnificent book he is also adept at conveying the painter’s infectious joie de vivre.

The Lives of Lucian Freud does not read like a novel, but nor does it read like a traditional biography. Feaver seems unaware of the genre’s obligation to be dull, or prurient, or both, or the biographer’s obligation to draw a moral lesson from his subject’s life ... The Lives of Lucian Freud is therefore, like psycho–analysis itself, concerned with the art of listening as much as it is with looking ... nter Feaver, and it is with the appearance of Freud’s Boswell in 1973 that Fame takes on its added dimension ... Feaver shares his subject’s style and timing. His clipped prose is running commentary and ironic aside; the sentences, bone-dry, have dramatic entrances ... Feaver’s refusal to provide a psychopathology of Freud’s everyday life – the artist’s need to push every situation to its extreme, his refusal to let something go before it becomes 'disconcerting' – means that a charge is kept below the surface of his narrative, much as the unspoken relation between Freud and his sitters charges his portraits.

A rich, gamey biography, then. With some extremely interesting technical information about, for instance, etching, and Freud’s use of Cremnitz white (a banned substance he bought in bulk when it was made illegal) ... pungent and involving ... It would have helped had Feaver included an appendix-supplement of brief biographical sketches — as in the ongoing edition of T.S. Eliot’s collected letters. There are lovely Freudian quips here ... But now and again, faced with this Knausgaardian compulsive inclusion, this epic of gossip, the artist’s complete asides, you wonder whether certain inclusions have earned their place in the story ... In this biography of revelations, some things remain opaque.

When the second volume of William Feaver’s fat and extremely juicy biography of Lucian Freud begins, the artist is middle-aged ... Ahead of him lie another 40 years in the studio ... Feaver’s narrative, peppy and mostly nimble, is based in part on the near daily phone calls and many encounters the two men had over several decades ... you can hear Freud’s voice on the page, which is thrilling when he’s talking about art ... Yes, the book bulges with gossipy stuff. Jerry Hall, Kate Moss and the Queen all have walk-on parts ... he was more vivid than other people – more nervous, more simple, more honest and Feaver’s great and generous achievement in his book is to enable us to imagine this.

This volume will appeal to those readers more fascinated by the artistic than the social life; who want a behind-the-scenes account of Freud’s succession of gallerists (and his rows and fallings out with them), of the critical opinions of his work (and why they were wrong), of the staging of progressively more significant exhibitions ... although you will sometimes be offered behind-the-scenes glimpses [...] more often you will be left with an overflow of never posed and so never answered questions ... having finally got to the end of 1,000 pages, I suspect it will not prove the definitive biography. There’s more to come.

This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by Lucian Freud ... The second volume of the resulting kaleidoscope ... the first published last year, come to over 1,100 pages – is a mesmerising, entertaining account of Freud’s life and art. Freud’s own comments on other artists, his own paintings, and art in general, its purposes and his own aesthetic, are intelligent, enlightening and absorbing. Feaver’s narrative is shaped by the artist himself, who is rumoured to have paid his interlocutor off with a goodly sum to make sure the result was a posthumous publication. The result is the opposite of a critical, analytical and evaluating biography, so Freud had nothing to fear if this was really the picture he wished to leave of himself. Feaver supplies the connective tissue between the remarks and observations of the artist ... an exhaustive, obsessively detailed narrative of a figurative painter who was a leading figure in the continuing vitality of representational art. It is also a picture of a particular part of the London art world: a portrait of the period in which London took a role in the world of art for the first time. But at half the length, this biography would have been twice the book.

There are echoes here of the first volume of Feaver’s biography, which was packed with good stories about Freud’s rackety private life and rollicking friendships with fellow artists like Francis Bacon. The same elements are also present in this second volume ... The main difference is that here these stories are little more than bits of highlighting, like the patch of shiny skin in Reflection. Instead the focus throughout this volume is on Freud’s daily routine in his studio ... If Feaver’s first volume was a portrait of the artist playing around, here the main focus is Freud at work.

Lucian Freud declared that the purpose of his art was to 'astonish, disturb, seduce, and convince,' traits also abundant in art critic Feaver’s gleaming second and final biographical volume ... An extremely complicated man, artist, and icon, Freud requires a holistic portrayal, which Feaver, who knew the artist well, powerfully achieves.