A Master of Elegy.(Lucian Freud)

For an artist who abhors glamour, Lucian Freud has painted an extraordinary array of well-known subjects. The likes of Jerry Hall and Kate Moss have prostrated themselves on the battered couch in his bare London studio. But Freud drew the line at Princess Diana, refusing to paint her before her death because, he said, he couldn't find the real character beneath the image.

Freud, who turns 80 this year, is a realist painter in an age of gloss and abstraction, accused by critics of emphasizing human ugliness, putrefying flesh and death in his brutally frank portraits. Late last month the Tate Britain opened the largest retrospective of Freud's work, displaying more than 180 paintings. Some, like a striking new self-portrait and a nude of his 27-year-old girlfriend, are so recent the paint is barely dry. Others, from private collections, have never before been exhibited and are unlikely to be seen in public again for decades. Works in progress, including the as-yet-unfinished portrait of a pregnant Kate Moss, may be added as they are completed. Two notable paintings are absent: his shockingly unflattering image of the queen remains at Buckingham Palace for the current Golden Jubilee celebrations, and a portrait of the artist Francis Bacon, who was part of the same Soho pub gatherings as Freud in the 1950s, was stolen from an exhibit in Berlin in 1988 and, despite the artist's personal pleas, has never been returned.

Freud revels in teasing out the physical evidence of a life richly lived: laughter lines, lumps of fat, sagging flesh. And he has persisted in deepening his ability to depict them at a time when gyms and Botox clinics are overflowing with clients eager to smooth out these insidious betrayals of their humanity. His fascination with mortality comes partly from his famous grandfather Sigmund, who joined the family in London in 1939 after they had all fled Nazi Germany. Sigmund, whom Lucian adored, had studied the culture of ancient Egypt, its death-centered faith and in particular the pharaoh Akhenaten, who broke with the formulaic tradition of Egyptian art to commission lifelike images of himself. Large, bulbous eyes and wide faces gaze from Freud's early portraits, echoing the death masks in his well- thumbed copy of a 1934 picture book, "Geschichte Aegyptens" ("History of the Egyptians"), to which he has turned for inspiration throughout his career.

Unlike Damien Hirst's maggot-soaked hunks of meat, Freud's work demonstrates that the ugly reality of decay can radiate a painfully complex beauty. After his father died in 1970, Freud cared for his profoundly depressed mother the only way he knew how: having run from her claustrophobic attentions during his adolescence, he asked her to sit for him, and she did. For hours daily he painted her, creating works that rival those of Whistler and Rembrandt. Sleepless, tear- filled nights and lost hope are visible in her slack, white flesh. He observed her grief intimately, creating a study of how ...