Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Craxton and Freud were both from backgrounds that were highly unusual, in that the arts were seen as an integral part of everyday life. Elsewhere in London – and Britain – in the early 1940s, things were very different. To be an artist was a choice of career so rare as to be incomprehensible. According to Freud, ‘Being a painter in those days was not considered a serious occupation. When I told people at parties what I did, they would reply “I wasn’t asking about your hobbies”.’ At that time, he estimated, there were perhaps half a dozen painters in Britain making a living entirely from their work – Augustus John, Laura Knight, Matthew Smith and possibly one or two others. The big Edwardian portrait painters had done well for themselves, as the young Freud was aware: ‘Augustus John writes in his memoirs that William Orpen used to keep a plate of money in his hall for less fortunate artists to help themselves from – although when I asked John about it he explained, “They were coppers”.’ The meagreness of this largesse indicates the low levels of local artistic aspiration.

  The best of British artists instinctively looked to France for inspiration and fresh directions. Walter Sickert, who died in January 1942, just as Freud and Craxton were moving into Abercorn Place, was one of the most talented and serious painters at work in London in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet he always felt that the ‘genius of painting hovers over Paris, and must be wooed on the banks of the Seine’. Accordingly, he spent lengthy periods on the other side of the Channel. Essentially Sickert was correct. In the 1930s and 1940s, Frank Auerbach recalls, ‘people in Paris had the intellectual energy, the standards and the industry’. Artistically, London had long been a backwater, even before the war.

  If simply being a painter seemed strange to the people Freud met at parties, being a Modernist would have been doubly incomprehensible. Puzzlement and incredulity were certainly the reactions of the character played by George Formby in Much Too Shy, a film from 1942 in which the comedian and singer played an aspiring commercial illustrator. In one scene he stumbles into a ‘School of Modern Art’ where various students are producing work of a Surrealist nature. ‘Where’s his arms and legs?’ he exclaims in comic bewilderment on seeing one particular picture. ‘Oh,’ a painter played camply by Charles Hawtrey explains, ‘we abstract.’

  By a strange chance, Much Too Shy was one of a couple of films in which Freud got work as an extra, playing the part of an art student. Meanwhile, in real life, Peter Watson had sent the two young artists off to life-drawing classes at Goldsmiths’ College in South London to sharpen up their skills (Craxton felt his own drawing was ‘chaotic’ and Lucian’s, at that stage, just ‘very bad’). Freud, indeed, considered he had an ‘almost total lack of natural talent’. His early drawings, nonetheless, had energy and – what many artists never achieve – an individual line. He aimed to discipline this by observation and by drawing constantly. Graphic art, at this stage, seemed much more feasible than painting, which he felt he could not control at all.

  The classes Freud and Craxton attended were conducted on more traditional lines than those in the ‘School of Modern Art’ in Much Too Shy and their unconventional efforts attracted some critical attention, as recalled by Craxton:

  We both decided, probably because of Picasso, that we were just going to put one line down. The common way of drawing was to stroke the side of the nude with about twenty-five lines; your eye picked out the one that was the right one. We thought that was a cop-out, so we sat down to do absolutely one-line drawings of all the nudes. Shading was done with dots, so of course we got lots of remarks like, ‘How’s the measles?’

  *

  The social world that Freud and Craxton inhabited was intimate, in that almost everyone knew everybody else. It was crisscrossed by complex amorous relationships that took little account of gender or marital status. This was a district of London’s bohemia, which was – as David Hockney has noted – ‘a tolerant place’. Attitudes were prevalent there, in the mid-twentieth century, which did not reach the wider population for another fifty years. In its acceptance of idiosyncrasy and excess it was a microcosm of the future. Life in wartime London, Craxton remembered, was ‘like scrambling up a crevice – everything was narrowed down to practically nothing. Everyone went slightly mad with the bombs.’ He and Freud would bicycle down from Abercorn Place to Soho, where much of what remained of London’s literary and artistic population would gather, and every night there was a hectic, spontaneous party:

  Soho was very useful during the war if you wanted to have an existence; it had an element of danger, which was nice. It was where you ran into all your friends; there was a conspiracy to go drinking together. And they were all drinking hard – as you were yourself. All I can remember about Dylan Thomas is this swaying figure with pints of beer in his hand. But they were all swaying. Colquhoun and [Robert] MacBryde went on a sort of pub tour up into Fitzrovia. But on the whole, Lucian and Dylan and I stuck to Soho.

  Known as ‘the two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde were Scottish alcoholic painters, who were effectively – though in those days, of course, not legally – married to each other and were accepted and revered despite behaviour that was, on occasion, wildly aggressive. MacBryde, on being introduced to the poet George Barker, held out his hand and crushed the glass that was in it into Barker’s palm. The poet, in response, punched MacBryde so hard on the head that he claimed he was deaf in one ear for days afterwards (the evening nonetheless ended very amicably). Craxton ‘found Colquhoun and MacBryde very good company at times, when they weren’t too drunk’. Colquhoun never hit him in the face, ‘though he did a lot of other people. They were always railing against the English, but I quite liked that, it was rather fun.’ Freud saw a more serious side to Colquhoun’s character. There was ‘something absolute’ about him, he thought. ‘He seemed very doomed and had a certain grandeur. He saw how tragic his situation was and also that it was irreversible.’

  Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, c. 1953. Photo by John Deakin

  The London art world was a small pool, and one that had shrunk even further since 1939. Some important figures had departed; the abstract painter Ben Nicholson and his wife, Barbara Hepworth, left with their young family for the safety of St Ives in Cornwall, never to return. Others, who will feature prominently in the pages to come, were in 1942 experiencing the varied fortunes of war. Roger Hilton, a significant figure in 1950s abstraction, was captured by the Germans during the Dieppe Raid in August 1942 and taken to prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII-B in Silesia. Victor Pasmore, then a Romantic landscape painter, had tried to register as a conscientious objector, been rejected and conscripted, then attempted to desert. He spent some time in prison before being released at a tribunal where Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, gave evidence in his favour, testifying with curious precision – and some justice – that Pasmore was ‘one of the six best painters in England’. Meanwhile, Pasmore’s friend William Coldstream had become an army officer and was engaged in painting camouflage, among other tasks.

  The remaining painters in London were those who, for one reason or another, had been rejected – or ejected – from the armed struggle. In 1942 John Minton – an aspiring artist whom we will meet often in the pages to come – was hopelessly miscast as a member of the Pioneer Corps. The following year he was commissioned, but was discharged shortly afterwards as psychologically unfit, having – according to one story – lain down on the parade ground and refused to get up. In the later years of the war, Minton was to become one of the most successful young artists in London, sharing that position with the inseparable duo of Colquhoun and MacBryde and the youthful Craxton and Freud. In retrospect, these artists look like a group – sometimes dubbed the ‘Neo-Romantics’. But, at the time, there was no manifesto, nor sense of a movement at work.

  There were, however, certain qualities they had in common. All of them, at this stage, were essentially makers of drawings, not paintings. Often their works were illustrations to books and maga
zines, so the imagery was intimately connected with literature. Their affiliations were as much to do with publishing as with visual style. The works of Minton, and his friends Keith Vaughan and Michael Ayrton, often appeared in Penguin New Writing and other books produced by John Lehmann. Freud, Craxton, Colquhoun and MacBryde gave their allegiance to Horizon, Peter Watson and his coterie. The editor was Cyril Connolly and he was assisted, early on, by the poet Stephen Spender, who was bisexual and at least a little in love with Freud, as was Watson. ‘Through his singular talent and personal magnetism’, Bruce Bernard noted, Freud had attracted the attention of ‘the important homosexual stratum in British cultural life’. Bernard pointed out that such figures – Watson and Spender among them – were almost the only people encouraging brilliant but unorthodox young painters. As a result of their enthusiasm, one of Freud’s drawings had been published in Horizon in 1940, when he was just seventeen.

  There was also a mood shared by most of the artists listed above (apart from Freud): an uneasy combination of nostalgia and nightmare. Craxton’s ink and chalk drawing Dreamer in Landscape (1942) was one of the earliest – and most memorable – works he ever made. The sickle moon was borrowed from the nineteenth-century Romantic Samuel Palmer, whose work was enjoying a revival (Minton joked about how half-moons were ‘in’ during the war), while the menacingly spiky vegetation is closer to the world of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) than to a rustic idyll.

  Although the slumbering figure in Dreamer in Landscape was based on a German-Jewish refugee, Felix Braun, who was staying with the Craxton family, this is a work that essentially comes out of other art, as well as from Craxton’s imagination. According to his mentor, Graham Sutherland, the goal for an artist was to make pictures of a private, inner world of imagination:

  Sutherland said you’ve got to invent in painting so much, he was adamant about that. He’d take some elements of a landscape and put them together and invent, using the natural forms. He was only topographical when he was painting a face.

  This focus on the imagination was something that distinguished Craxton from Freud. These young men, sharing the same patrons and collectors and the same address, naturally struck many observers as a pair. Even in art-market terms, for some time at least, they were regarded as a unit, sharing exhibitions. But they were not a couple. Nor were they, as it slowly became clear, at all the same kind of artist. This was an advantage to their friendship, Craxton believed. ‘What kept us together, I think, was the fact that we were painting our own kind of painting’, he then added, a little maliciously, ‘Lucian of course, never invented. He finds it very hard to.’ In Craxton’s view, this was a deficiency. But this was not entirely correct. There was a good deal of fantasy to be seen in Freud’s early sketchbooks and paintings. In The Painter’s Room (1943–44), for example, the zebra’s head from Abercorn Place becomes gigantic and pokes in through the studio window. But, as the years went on, Freud became more and more wedded to actuality – what he saw in front of him – and increasingly averse to what Sutherland called invention: making subjects up.

  Goethe called his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit – poetry and truth. But, of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. Freud came to find his own idiosyncratic poetry in truth. Innumerable contrasts and combinations of visual truth and poetry were explored by painters in London over the years to come – abstraction and social realism; the discipline of geometry, richness of colour and the free-flowing expressiveness of the pigment itself; Pop art and optical truth.

  JOHN CRAXTON Dreamer in Landscape, 1942

  Some of these developments were connected to what had gone before – to Sickert, for example – but, with the end of the war, the little world of artists in London suddenly became much wider. No sooner had the peace in Europe been declared on 8 May 1945 than Craxton and Freud set off for the Continent, although initially they did not get very far. That summer they went to the Scilly Isles, which, after wartime conditions, seemed almost abroad. Then they tried, and failed, to get across the Channel on French fishing boats to see a Picasso exhibition in Paris (the coastguards spotted them and hauled them out). In 1946, they both finally made it to France. That year, however, they met someone who was to matter more to Freud, both as a person and a painter, than Picasso or anyone working in Paris: Francis Bacon.

  Chapter two

  POPE FRANCIS

  The arbiters of taste pointed upstage right and said, ‘Graham Sutherland’s going to be the next important artist’. Then downstage left, picking his nose, Francis sauntered on. And the whole scene was changed.

  Frank Auerbach, 2017

  Lucian Freud was at Graham Sutherland’s house in Kent one day when, ‘being young and extremely tactless’ – not, he reflected sixty years later, that that was any excuse – it came into his head to ask Sutherland a question: ‘Who do you think is the greatest painter in England?’ Of course, with the natural egotism of a major artist, Sutherland probably considered he was that person himself – and many would have agreed, including Kenneth Clark and John Craxton.

  However, Sutherland gave an unexpected answer: ‘Oh, someone you’ve never heard of. He’s like a cross between Vuillard and Picasso. He’s never shown and he has the most extraordinary life. If he ever does a painting he generally destroys it.’ His name was Francis Bacon, and he sounded so interesting that Freud quickly arranged to meet this mystery man.

  *

  This was in the mid-1940s. It is a little surprising that Freud had not come across the work – or even the name – of Bacon before. In retrospect, the postwar era in British painting seems to begin with a group exhibition in April 1945 at London’s Lefevre Gallery, in which Bacon had shown two works, one of which was a triptych entitled Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944), now in the Tate.

  Visitors to the exhibition were stunned by Bacon’s paintings. In the words of John Russell, they caused ‘total consternation’. The central figure, anatomically like a dis-feathered ostrich, had a human mouth, heavily bandaged, set at the end of its long, thick tubular neck. Like its companions on either side, it seemed both cornered and on the attack, ‘only waiting for the chance to drag the observer down to its own level’. Here were ‘images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them’. This was art that might put the spectator into shock, but was hard to ignore. The nightmare was not just lurking unseen in a landscape, as it did in the works of the Neo-Romantics: it was here, huge and horrible, coming at you.

  Even so, at this point, Bacon had a certain amount in common with Sutherland and several other British artists of his generation. His primary influence, as he freely admitted, was Picasso, in which he was hardly alone. The same could be said of the sculptor Henry Moore, another, better-known British artist also included in the Lefevre show. Moore’s point of departure was the monumental classicism of Picasso’s women of the early 1920s and the strange nudes, like primitive sea creatures, that he produced a little later. Moore, however, characteristically transformed these into something calmer and duller. David Hockney summarized it by saying that ‘Henry Moore comes out of about a couple of weeks of drawings by Picasso.’ Sutherland also owed a debt to the great Spaniard. Indeed, virtually every artist in Britain – and Europe – who was not a descendant of Victorian salon painting borrowed freely from him.

  Poor Duncan Grant, the favoured painter of the Bloomsbury Group, failed hopelessly in his efforts to follow the Picasso of the pre-1914 era, except when it came to interior decoration. Ben Nicholson did better, taking Picasso’s late Cubist still-life paintings, removing all their power and energy and replacing them with charm and wit (a very British exchange). Nicholson was typical of his fellow Britons in removing the aggression, the sexual violence and the sheer ferocity that were the emotional dynamo of Picasso’s art. The unusual thing about Bacon was that he did not tone these qualities down; if anything, he increased them. Picasso, he said, was ‘nearer to what I feel about the psyche of our t
ime’ than any other artist.

  FRANCIS BACON Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, c. 1944

  An encounter with Picasso’s work, he later claimed, had helped to transform him into an artist. At the age of sixteen, Bacon was a drifting teenager with no sense of direction, little education and no apparent talents except the ability to attract and exploit older male lovers. But then, he reflected much later, if you don’t drift when you are young, you may never find your real self and true direction. Having been thrown out of his family house in Ireland after a furious row with his father, Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon – who caught him wearing his mother’s underwear – he took to wandering around Europe. In France in 1927, he started looking at art. Nicolas Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1628) in the Musée Condé at Chantilly – an image of terrible cruelty distilled into epigrammatically classical form – stayed in his mind. An exhibition of Picasso drawings he saw in Paris made, if anything, an even stronger impact. He seems to have resolved – if not then, a year or two later (much about Bacon’s early life is vague) – to become an artist.

  Most professional artists begin as children who love to paint and draw (this was true of Freud, for example, and David Hockney). At school Bacon had taken little interest in art or, according to his contemporaries, anything much else. The epiphany that made him a painter came from experience of painting at the highest level, and this eventually led him to take two audacious decisions. The first was to try – with no prior training, or even much sign of aptitude – to do everything himself. Secondly, he felt that there was little point in painting unless one aimed to rival the very greatest, to aim at the standard of Poussin and Picasso. Being quite a good painter was not good enough. Paradoxically it was the seriousness with which he took the task of painting that made Bacon – who at a casual glance might have seemed a dilettante who spent much of his time drinking champagne and gambling – distinct from many other British artists of his generation.