Winehouse back on top of British charts (AFP)

LONDON (AFP) – Fans of soul star Amy Winehouse on Sunday sent her back to the top of Britain's album chart, a week after the 27-year-old was found dead at her London home.

Grammy Award-winning album "Back to Black", which first hit the top spot in 2007, dislodged fellow soul diva Adele's 21 from the summit while Winehouse's debut release, "Frank", also recharted at number five.

The singer also occupied five spots on the singles chart top 40 with Back to Black placing at eight while a box set of Frank and Back to Black entered the album chart at number 10.

The five-time Grammy winner was found dead at her north London home last Saturday. A cause of death has yet to be established, although it is not being viewed as suspicious.

Friends and family attended Winehouse's Jewish funeral at Edgwarebury Cemetery in northwest London on Tuesday, where her father delivered a eulogy which ended with the words: "Goodnight, my angel."

The singer fought a well-publicised struggle with drugs and alcohol, famously singing about her refusal to seek treatment in her biggest-selling single "Rehab".

But she had to scrap a European comeback tour after stumbling through the opening performance in Belgrade on June 18.

Winehouse's family was set to meet with government officials on Monday to discuss the possibility of setting up a drug rehabilitation centre in her name, The Times reported Monday.

Mitch Winehouse, Amy's father, will meet crime minister James Brokenshire and Home Affairs Select Committee chairman Keith Vaz to discuss drugs policy and treatment.

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British artist Lucian Freud dies aged 88 (AFP)

LONDON (AFP) – Realist painter Lucian Freud, grandson of the inventor of modern psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and widely seen as Britain's top contemporary artist, has died in London aged 88, his lawyer said.

Freud was known for his signature nudes and self-portraits such as the powerful 1993 work of himself as a naked older man waving his brush like a weapon.

In recent years his paintings have sold for astronomical sums. His 1995 Portrait "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" fetched 33.6 million dollars at a Christie's auction in New York -- a world record for a living artist.

A statement released by his lawyer Diana Rawstron Thursday said the artist "died peacefully ... at his home in London".

His New York gallery, Acquavella Galleries, said Freud died Wednesday after a brief illness at his home in Notting Hill.

"In company he was exciting, humble, warm and witty. He lived to paint and painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world," said New York art dealer William Acquavella.

Born to architect Ernst Freud, Sigmund's youngest son, in Berlin in 1922, Lucian moved to England with his family aged 10 to escape Nazism and became a British citizen in 1933.

Freud, once described by art critic Robert Hughes as the greatest living realist painter, studied at London's Central School of Art and Goldsmiths College, but his career was interrupted when he served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941.

After an early flirtation with surrealism, Freud turned to portrait painting, particularly nudes, in the 1950s.

Former critic for the Observer newspaper William Feaver, who knew the painter for more than four decades, said he had "restored portraiture to its proper place" by painting figures from all walks of life.

"He said everything he did was autobiographical and a self portrait. He was a witty, impulsive artist but generous with it," he added.

His 2001 portrait of the queen under a heavy crown was dismissed by many of her fans as "ugly" and decried as "a travesty" by The Sun newspaper. The queen herself made no comment.

"I paint people," Freud once said. "Not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."

Art critic and presenter Tim Marlow called Freud a "very special man".

"He looked at the world was as if he was painting it but when you saw his paintings you saw how he really saw at it," he said Thursday.

"He was the sort of person who had a twinkle in his eye but he would also look at you in a daunting and scrutinising way.

"He was very funny and very dry. He never lost his sharpness."

The painter was notorious for subjecting his models to sittings lasting up to a year, and the intense relationship struck up between artist and subject provided the creative force for many of his works.

Nicholas Serota, director of London's Tate art gallery, said: "The vitality of his nudes, the intensity of the still life paintings and the presence of his portraits of family and friends guarantee Lucian Freud a unique place in the pantheon of late 20th century art.

"His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand comparison with the great figurative painters of any period."

Freud, who became increasingly reclusive in his advancing years, married twice and was rumoured to have fathered dozens of children.

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Leading British painter Lucian Freud dies aged 88 (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) – British figurative painter Lucian Freud, whose uncompromising, fleshy portraits made him one of the world's most revered and coveted artists, has died aged 88.

His long-time New York art dealer William Acquavella said the grandson of Sigmund Freud had died at his home in London on Wednesday night after an unspecified illness.

"My family and I mourn Lucian Freud not only as one of the great painters of the 20th century but also as a very dear friend," the dealer said in a statement.

"As the foremost figurative artist of his generation he imbued both portraiture and landscape with profound insight, drama and energy.

"In company he was exciting, humble, warm and witty. He lived to paint and painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world."

Whatever he thought of the art world, and the celebrity status that often comes with it, Freud was very much its darling toward the end of his life.

His "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping," a 1995 portrait of a obese woman asleep in the nude on a sofa, fetched $33.6 million at Christie's in 2008, an auction record for a living artist.

The buyer was widely reported to be Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

Freud tended to paint people he knew -- family, friends and fellow artists, but was also famously commissioned to depict Queen Elizabeth in 2001.

The resulting portrait, an unflattering portrayal of a severe-looking monarch, divided opinion, with Arthur Edwards, photographer for the Sun tabloid, saying: "They should hang it in the kharzi (toilet)."

FLEEING THE NAZIS

Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 to a well-off German family who fled the Nazis for Britain in 1933 and became British citizens in 1939. He went to several schools but is said to have attended few classes.

"I was very solitary. I hardly spoke English. I was considered rather bad tempered, of which I was rather proud," he

once said.

Freud attended a string of art colleges and had a brief spell with the merchant navy before turning to art full time.

Until the 1950s, his paintings were relatively refined, explained by his use of pointed brushes.

But from around 1956, he began to loosen his style and employ stiffer hogshair brushes and thicker paint, resulting in works like "Woman Smiling" in 1959 which Tate Britain gallery in London described as a "landmark work."

Christie's auctioneers said the shift to a fleshier, looser tone was partly down to his friendship with painter Francis Bacon who made a deep impression.

Referring to Bacon's work, Freud was quoted as saying: "(It) impressed me, his personality affected me. He talked a great deal about the paint itself, carrying the form and imbuing the paint with this sort of life."

Freud also said of his own art: "As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does."

Freud's new style initially alienated many critics, some of whom described it as "shocking," "violent" and "affected." The starkly intimate nature of many of his portraits could also make viewers feel like voyeurs.

According to the New York Times, Freud's art remained unfashionable in the United States until 1987, when the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington exhibited his work in a "watershed event."

Art critic Robert Hughes proclaimed him "the greatest living realist painter" and a Freud cult developed.

Freud married twice and had several children, although he was widely believed to have fathered many more than he acknowledged.

(Additional reporting by Emma Thomasson)

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Lucian Freud, pre-eminent British painter, dead at 88 (AFP)

LONDON (AFP) – Lucian Freud, who died in London on Wednesday aged 88, was widely recognised as the greatest contemporary British artist in a career spanning seven decades.

The grandson of Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis who helped shape modern views about human behaviour, Lucian Freud also influenced the exploration of the subconscious through his art.

Born to architect Ernst Freud, Sigmund's youngest son, in Berlin in 1922, Lucian moved to England with his family aged 10 to escape Nazism and became a British citizen in 1933.

Freud will be remembered for his signature nudes -- showing off the plentiful body of male model Leigh Bowery for instance -- and self-portraits such as the powerful 1993 painting of Freud as a naked older man waving his brush like a weapon.

"My work is purely autobiographical," Freud said. "It is about myself and my surroundings. It is an attempt at a record."

Freud's subjects ranged from the powerful to the plain, and he has been known to shy away from professional models.

Like many monarchs before her, Queen Elizabeth II turned to a leading artist of her time when she asked Freud to paint her portrait in 2001, agreeing to several hours-long sittings.

The result was a small closeup portrait of the queen under a heavy crown that was dismissed by many of her fans as "ugly" and decried as "a travesty" by The Sun newspaper. The queen herself made no comment.

"I paint people," Freud once said. "Not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."

The painter was notorious for subjecting his models to sittings lasting up to a year, and the intense relationship struck up between artist and subject provided the creative force for many of his works.

Freud, once described by art critic Robert Hughes as the greatest living realist painter, studied at London's Central School of Art and Goldsmiths College, but his career was interrupted when he served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941.

After an early flirtation with surrealism, Freud turned to portrait painting, particularly nudes, in the 1950s.

Freud achieved global fame as a sought-after artist in the 1990s when his 1995 Portrait "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" fetched 33.6 million dollars at a Christie's auction in New York.

His portrait of a pregnant Kate Moss sold for 10 million dollars in 2004 but a 1978 self-portrait of Freud nursing a black eye fetched a disappointing 3.2 million euros at a London auction held just last month.

Little is known about Lucian's relationship with his grandfather, and some experts have suggested that the artist managed to escape growing up in the shadow of psychoanalysis.

"He does talk about his grandfather, he is very fond of him," said Freud's assistant of 19 years, David Dawson. "His teenage years were spent with his grandfather."

After mostly ignoring his work for decades, Paris earlier this year gave Freud top billing in a show at the Pompidou Centre.

"Lucian Freud - The Studio" featured 47 paintings, the first showing of his work in Paris since 1987, with many pieces coming out of private collections for the fist time in years.

Freud, who became increasingly reclusive in his later years, was rumoured to have fathered dozens of children.

Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate gallery, paid tribute on Thursday.

"The vitality of (Freud's) nudes, the intensity of the still life paintings and the presence of his portraits of family and friends guarantee Lucian Freud a unique place in the pantheon of late 20th Century art," he said.

"His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand comparison with the great figurative painters of any period."

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'Hacked off' celebrities lead war on British tabloids (AFP)

LONDON (AFP) – It took the hacking of a murdered girl's phone to make the News of the World scandal explode, but British celebrities have wasted no time in using the row to press their own agenda against the tabloids.

Actor Hugh Grant has led the charge by becoming an investigative reporter himself for a day -- one newspaper joked that it was his best role yet -- and taping a former News of the World journalist saying the practice was widespread.

The recent launch of a "Hacked Off" campaign calling for greater press regulation meanwhile attracted figures including socialite Jemima Khan and former world motorsport chief Max Mosley, himself the victim of a tabloid sting.

Grant "has been eloquent, he has been able to talk about it in such a way that people have been interested and taken notice," Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust and coordinator of the Hacked Off group, told AFP.

The petition now has more than 8,300 signatures.

Yet there was little real outcry in Britain about phone hacking until July 4 when it was reported that Rupert Murdoch's News of the World had hacked and deleted the messages of Milly Dowler, a murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl.

The paper has since shut down.

Before that, the jailing of two people in 2007 over the hacking of British royals, and various lawsuits by celebrities including British actors Jude Law and Sienna Miller, attracted relatively little interest from the public.

"Their attitude is, 'Max Clifford and Sienna Miller use the media and do very well from it, so I won't lose too much sleep over it,'" publicist Max Clifford told the BBC.

Since the Dowler hacking emerged, however, showbiz figures have found the scandal a useful stick with which to beat their tabloid foes.

Grant, who starred in the 1994 film "Four Weddings and a Funeral", has toured the TV studios in the past fortnight telling how he secretly recorded a conversation with Paul McMullan, a former News of the World journalist.

During the encounter -- which Grant wrote about in the New Statesman magazine in April with relatively little fanfare -- he said McMullan admitted "industrial scale phone-hacking" at the paper.

On talk shows Grant has since had colourful exchanges with McMullen and other journalists, at one point denying he was bitter about the press after the coverage he received during his 1995 arrest with a Hollywood prostitute.

"If you don't want to get in the paper keep it in your trousers," said John Gaunt, a British radio talk show presenter, referring to the incident.

"Cheap and pathetic," Grant replied.

Another vocal celebrity has been comedian Steve Coogan, who plays the inept chat-show host Alan Partridge on television and has starred in Hollywood movies including "Around the World in 80 Days."

A victim of phone hacking himself, he also appeared on a television panel show with McMullan, angrily accusing him of being "morally bankrupt".

McMullan hit back by noting that Coogan had received money for appearing in films including "Night at the Museum" made by 20th Century Fox, owned by Murdoch's News Corp.

Meanwhile Khan, who is Grant's former girlfriend, wrote a lengthy account in The Independent newspaper describing the "long, painful process of trying to find out the truth" about how she was hacked.

"The press, police and Parliament have all colluded on the issue of phone hacking," Khan wrote.

Moore, of the Hacked Off campaign, says he wants "transparency" in the press and a change in the culture of tabloid newsrooms to one that "doesn't encourage hacking."

Meanwhile new celebrity lawsuits are coming in. Jude Law on Friday sued The Sun, what is thought to be the first such legal action against Rupert Murdoch's best-selling daily tabloid.

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