For reasons that most probably include the fact that people have a tendency to write off his impastoed figurations as indications that he belongs to a previous generation and is already dead, Lucian Freud has never previously made it onto this list. However, in a year when art has become as much about money as about anything else, Freud, whose painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) fetched a ridiculous $33.6 million at auction this year, a record auction price for a work by a living artist (and almost double Damien Hirst’s personal best), is less easy to ignore.