Sabastian Smee and Michael Auping discuss artist Lucian Freud with Tyler Green.

Asked how American's might relate to Freud's work, Auping comments: "Freud doesn't follow a modernist narrative. American art really was the great tail end of the modernist narrative… Freud doesn't fit that narrative at all. He's working in a genre that's the most ancient genre, portraiture, and the Egyptians did portraits. So when Williem de Kooning is painting his Woman I and then moving from Woman I into abstract landscapes, Freud is looking at a book of Egyptian face paintings and carvings and then he's beginning to make these very realistic portraits of heads that partly come out of his interest in Egyptian portraiture, but also an intense interest in Durer, and Durer's sense of detail… So there's this odd combination of minimalism and intense realism…"

Lucian Freud: Portraits is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas through October 28, 2012.