Lucian Freud had a famously complex love life fathering children with many women but before all that there was a passionate, secret and enduring gay relationship involving two other young artists, a new exhibition reveals.
The writer and curator Julian Machin has pieced together a story the artist tried to suppress and one, he argues, which helps us better understand the art of Freud.
The story involves Freud, Adrian Ryan and John Minton who as young, handsome artists in their 20s had, Machin says, a closeness and sexual intimacy which is little known and unexplored.