The finest fine art of the season

After Knopf devoted a luxurious book last year to 84-year-old Lucian Freud's prodigious output of paintings since 1996, little remained to do but show us what no other art book has: Freud at Work, photographs by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson (253 pages; $65). Freud reputedly calibrates his distance from people as ruthlessly as did his grandfather, the founder of psychoanalysis, doubtless for different reasons. In portraits and nudes, the painter ruminates obsessively on the degrees of intimacy or recoil that scrutiny can promise or preclude. As a portraitist, he aptly describes himself to interviewer Sebastian Smee in the book as "a biologist." "Freud at Work" offers intriguing -- though frequently uninviting -- glimpses of the painter and his models at work in his dingy studio, of unfinished canvases on the easel and of the painter himself colluding in creating a photographic record to rival those that help keep aflame the renown of Picasso (1881-1973), Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966).

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