Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Chapter five

  GIRL WITH ROSES

  One wants to do this thing of just walking along the edge of the precipice.

  Francis Bacon, 1962

  Cyril Connolly, editor of the magazine Horizon, described life in the London of the early 1940s in terms that were both emotional and visual, focusing on ‘the dirt and weariness, the gradual draining away under war conditions of light and colour from the former capital of the world’. It sounds a little like a painting – perhaps an early work by Coldstream. So it’s not surprising that those painters who loved light and colour, longed – as the despondent Connolly did – to get across the Channel to France, or further, to places brimming with light and colour: the Mediterranean, even the Caribbean.

  John Craxton was one of these. In May 1946, he went to Greece and, on the advice of a new friend, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, eventually ended up on the island of Poros, where he lived with a Greek family. He was soon joined by his former housemate, Lucian Freud. ‘Lucian turned up and we painted like mad, both of us. Greece was lovely then, it was a marvellous moment.’ This stay in the Aegean had a lasting effect on Craxton, who spent much of the remainder of his life living in Greece. From then on, he frequently painted a Mediterranean idyll, refracted though a softened and sweetened version of Picasso’s style. These were pictures of a dream: not a violent and disquieting Surrealist fantasy, but a tranquil reverie about rustic life in foreign parts.

  JOHN CRAXTON Beach Scene, 1949

  The same could be said of the works that resulted from John Minton’s exotic excursions, beginning in August 1947, when – in company with the writer Alan Ross – he set out for Corsica with a commission from the publisher John Lehmann for an illustrated book about the island. Minton responded enthusiastically to what he saw. ‘Corsica is proving very exciting, full of Italianate romanticism,’ he wrote to a friend back in Britain. ‘The drawings pile up.’ Nonetheless, this remained tourist’s art, the product of a flying visit, charming but full of a romanticism that was not so much Italianate as second-hand – as hinted by the title of the book, published in 1948, Time was Away (a line taken from Louis MacNeice’s poem Meeting Point of 1940).

  Freud complained that the figures in Minton’s paintings and illustrations ‘have the air of all being of the same boy’. He preferred art to be much more specific: pictures of distinct individuals, seen in all their particularity, and absolutely clearly. As he grew older, and his temperament became more sharply defined, a clear distinction appeared between Freud and the ‘contemporary romantics’, such as Minton and Craxton, with whom he had previously socialized. Where they invented, he observed, and ever more closely.

  Although he enjoyed the stay on Poros, Freud was not greatly attracted to Greece. Partly, it was a political objection – he disliked the fact that the country was still being run by Fascists and that the King had been foisted on the Greeks. More crucially for his work, Freud was unsympathetic to classical Greek art, the style that had been elevated and idolized by generations of British artists even before Lord Elgin had brought the Parthenon Marbles to London. According to Craxton, ‘Lucian thought the Greek gods lacked charm and were very inhuman-looking or rather a-human-looking.’ Classical idealism – which homogenized individuals into a generalized idea – ran directly counter to Freud’s tastes. This was why he found Botticelli ‘sickening’ and didn’t think Raphael knew how to draw.

  Freud’s own abiding memories of the stay on Poros concerned the people he encountered, their psychology and the social economics of the place, and, as usual, he quickly found a lover. Looking back, he mused:

  The Greek word for stranger is the same as the word for guest – which is very sophisticated, don’t you think? They were always offering me things. ‘Take this sheep!’ But it was quite awkward, I was only living in a room. There was nowhere to keep a live sheep … I was with a Greek woman, quite a simple islander. One day she asked me how old my father was when he married my mother. It seemed to me to be a very strange question. I told her that I thought probably my mother was in her early twenties and my father a few years older. She seemed a little downcast at this, and finally I realized that in Greece men married when they had made or inherited their money, so the greater the gap, the greater the wealth. Getting married early was a sign of poverty.

  *

  Freud returned to Britain in February 1947 and, a little over a year later, was himself married, aged twenty-two. Thereafter, though he travelled from time to time and spent a brief spell in the Caribbean, he seldom worked away from London, which, paradoxically, he found rather romantic.

  Perhaps I don’t really want to go anywhere else because, having arrived here at the age of ten, I still feel like a visitor in the most exciting place I can imagine. Whenever I think of going somewhere else, I think it’s mad to think of travelling anywhere when there are parts of London I haven’t visited.

  By 1944, he had left the flat he shared with Craxton in Abercorn Place and had settled in Delamere Terrace, Paddington. This put some distance between his studio and affluent, middle-class St John’s Wood, where he and his family had lived since arriving in Britain in flight from Nazi Germany in 1932. The move to Paddington alarmed his parents and was, no doubt, intended to do so. The urge to get away, to ‘have some sort of life’ was strong in him.

  Delamere Terrace, overlooking the Regent’s Canal, though now in a prime part of Little Venice, was then known as ‘bug alley’, a zone of crumbling slum housing occupied by what the Victorians disapprovingly called the ‘undeserving poor’. Freud was delighted to observe their indifference to rules and laws, and gleefully described some of his neighbours as burglars and bank robbers. His social explorations, however, moved in both directions – up and down – from the educated bourgeoisie of North London. He became a close friend, though not, he insisted, lover, of Lady Rothermere, one of the most prominent society hostesses in London. She and some of the people he met through her were also soon to be his subjects. However, for the next couple of years, his most constant sitter was the young woman with whom he began an affair soon after his return from Greece, and later married: Kitty Garman.

  Kitty was a child of bohemia. She was the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman, who had been Epstein’s favourite mistress. Epstein was himself a person whom Freud scrutinized closely, though not as a subject for his painting. In this case, the roles were reversed and Freud posed for his father-in-law for a portrait bust. Even so, he was absorbed and amused by the great man’s quirks:

  He was full of rivalry and jealousy of other sculptors – particularly Henry Moore – and painters. I remember him once looking through old copies of the Illustrated London News and exclaiming ‘Augustus John is getting a lot of attention!’ He hadn’t noticed that they were old copies from the time of the First World War! Epstein lived in an enormous house on Hyde Park Gate, and his studio was on the ground floor and bedroom on the first. On the way out I asked him what went on on the second floor. He replied, ‘How should I know? I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  Epstein’s s wife, Margaret, was unable to have children and tolerated most of his lovers, except for the one who meant the most to him, Kathleen Garman, whom Margaret shot with a pearl-handled revolver (fortunately not fatally). Kitty frequently described this event, which she imagined to have taken place while her mother was pregnant with her, although in fact it occurred several years earlier. It added further complexity to the relationship between Kitty and Freud that her aunt, Lorna Wishart, had been the first great love of his life. Their romance had only recently ended. Given all this, it was not surprising if Kitty was a little anxious. Cressida Connolly recalled her as giving ‘an impression of great fragility and delicacy, with her soft, rather tremulous voice and slender, elegant hands, but there was also a hint of steeliness’.

  Freud once mused on how many of the women in his life had so often been nervous. Nervous – even tremulous – girls were in fact his type, and K
itty’s watchful unease was the common factor in all the pictures he did of her over the next few years. In Girl with Roses (1947–48) she grips the stem of the flower hard as her eyes dart sideways. She seems to vibrate with anxiety.

  Freud’s early drawings and paintings had been a mixture of observation and quirky imagination. By 1947 this had changed. His pictures of Kitty Garman are obviously done in her presence, and from extremely close up. In Girl with Roses every hair on her head and each eyelash has been counted, the patterns within the iris of her eyes carefully set down. Yet there is still a strange discrepancy in relative scales: her eyes are too big for her face, which in turn is too big for her head, and her head is disproportionate to the rest of her body. As time went on, Freud’s pictures of Kitty steadily increased in visual information – detailed data about her appearance – and also in tension. In the spring of 1948 she and the artist got married; in July she gave birth to a child, their daughter Annie. At the time of the sittings she was newly pregnant, and about to take the step of marrying this man, so unsuited to the role of husband.

  Photographs of Kitty show someone recognizably similar to the girl in Freud’s paintings, but slightly different. It was a subtle matter. Cressida Connolly was ‘taken aback’ when she met Kitty to discover her eyes really were as big as they looked in a later painting, Girl with a White Dog (1950–51). They weren’t, though, quite as enormous as the eyes of Girl with Roses; no human being’s are.

  The point is not that the lens reveals what she truly looked like – a photograph, as everyone is well aware in the epoch of Photoshop, can often lie, and even before digitization it always could. But, crucially, though they were increasingly detailed, naturalistic and based on examination of the subject in the most searching manner, Freud’s pictures were not photographically realistic.

  Unlike Coldstream, for example, who had an uneasy sense that photography produced the ultimately accurate picture of reality, Freud wasn’t much interested in it as a source for, or rival to, painting at all. ‘A photograph’, he said, ‘contains a great deal of information about the fall of light, and not much about anything else.’ He was more interested in what went on inside his sitters’ heads. What he wanted to register in his painting were all the other aspects of Kitty, apart from the way the light fell – his feelings about her, hers about him, her tremulousness and inner steel, the way her presence affected his perceptions of her surroundings. (He observed that ‘The effect in space of two different human individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and an electric light bulb.’) Since all painters had had to find a way of co-existing with photography since its invention in 1839, Freud – like his heroes Van Gogh and Cézanne – did so largely by ignoring it.

  LUCIAN FREUD Girl with Roses, 1947–48

  He did not, however, choose to explain what he was doing. His first statement about his approach to art did not come until 1954, and there was not much more for almost thirty years, until Lawrence Gowing published a book about him. Even to close friends, such as Frank Auerbach, Freud only occasionally talked about what he did, and why.

  Lucian was concerned, I think, with guarding his instinct and not making too many pronouncements, but when he did say something about painting it was very well worth listening to. You realized that there’s a great machinery underneath that he’s not going to expose. Sickert said something which seems to me as I’ve got older to be not untrue: he defines genius as ‘self-preservation in a talent’. I think Lucian had a very strong sense of the self-preservation of his talent.

  So it was not until 1982, when he was interviewed by Gowing, that Freud revealed his insouciance when it came to that fetish of Coldstream’s and the Euston Road School – viewing the subject from a fixed position. Coldstream, on the one hand, was prepared to turn himself into a measuring instrument, a sort of human sextant. But, characteristically, Freud would not be pinned down:

  I take readings from a number of positions because I don’t want to miss anything that could be of use to me. I often put in what is round the corner from where I see it, in case it is of use to me. It soon disappears if it is not. Towards the end I am trying to get rid of absolutely everything I can do without. Ears have disappeared, before now.

  Intuitively, he had found a way to reconcile two apparently opposing ways to paint: he made observations as assiduously as Coldstream did, yet also incorporated his feelings and thoughts within a picture severely restricted to what he actually saw.

  The art dealer E. L. T. Mesens, who showed Freud and Craxton’s work at his London Gallery, tried to persuade Freud that he was at heart a Surrealist. The artist denied this – although as Mesens’s then assistant and jazz singer-to-be George Melly felt, this denial was ‘suspect’ because Freud’s work of the mid-1940s, ‘dead birds, hares and monkeys; the intensity of the early portraits, all displayed, whether he liked it or not, a surreal sensibility’.

  Melly had a point. There is indeed a ‘Surrealist flavour’, as he put it, in Freud’s early work. But it is not so much surreal – beyond reality – as more than real. That is, there is more reality in the picture than we would normally see, and it is refracted though a remarkable sensibility. Freud himself felt he was moving in the opposite direction to Salvador Dalí or René Magritte: ‘I wanted things to look possible, rather than irrational, if anything, eliminating the Surrealist look.’ Bit by bit, a feeling of strangeness seeped into his images of reality. After all, he asked, ‘what is more surreal than a nose between two eyes?’

  It is as if the intensity of the artist’s attention acted like a magnifying glass: the more he scrutinized an area, the more it grew. The sense of human complexity, which in his grandfather Sigmund had led to a revolutionary theory of how the psyche works, in Lucian’s case all went into his pictures. Unlike a true Surrealist, he disliked the idea of painting anything that wasn’t actually there – that was only in the mind. Where a Surrealist might find inspiration in dreams or the visions induced by opium, he found them a distraction:

  I tried it [opium] once or twice in Paris with friends of [Jean] Cocteau’s in the forties, and it was very pleasant. But the problem is that you have to keep increasing the dose to get the same effect. And people say things such as ‘It makes you see the most marvellous colours.’ That to me is a horrible idea. My whole effort is to see the same colours all the time. Then they say that they are taken out of this world, but I don’t want to be out of this world, I want to be absolutely in it, all of the time.

  Freud found Stanley Spencer’s fantasy pictures, the ones not painted from life, ‘immensely boring, like someone telling you about their dreams’ – a judgment both startling and funny, coming from the grandson of the man who spent an illustrious career listening to patients describe their dreams. But Lucian, though he greatly loved and admired his grandfather, was almost programmatically indifferent to psychology per se, including – or especially – his own. This was partly a defence against a persisting tendency to assume he was trading on a famous name. In Paris, Jean Cocteau used to refer to him, dismissively, as ‘le petit Freud’ (the little Freud). Lucian would often insist that he was ‘not at all introspective’; on the other hand, he was immensely intuitive, a quality that he noted and admired in Picasso.

  Freud’s pictures of Kitty were his first great works, achieved when he was in his mid-twenties. His next exhibition, at the end of 1948, suggested that he was no longer just a promising artist, but that he had arrived. On 27 November 1948 William Townsend noted in his journal that he had ‘visited some of the galleries’. That day he was much struck by one picture in particular, at the London Gallery: a pastel portrait of Kitty by Freud entitled Girl with Leaves (1948). This, he felt, despite the artist’s ‘painstaking exactness and neatness’ had ‘a large rhythm, a sense of the whole thing in each part like an early Florentine portrait’.

  This was a perceptive analysis, and Townsend’s enthusiasm was shared by one of the great arbiters of taste in twentieth-century art. On his fir
st buying trip to London after the Second World War, Alfred H. Barr, of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, spotted the drawing of Kitty behind fig leaves while he was going through the London Gallery’s stock. There was no hesitation; as soon as he saw it, Mesens told Melly, Barr ‘pointed at it and said, “Wang, Wang, Wang!”’ (Barr didn’t really say that, Melly explained, that was just the way Mesens always imitated an American accent). It was on this same visit that Barr bought Francis Bacon’s Painting 1946 from the dealer Erica Brausen for MoMA’s collection.

  *

  Time was Away, the title of Minton and Ross’s book about Corsica, would have been a fitting way to describe Francis Bacon’s life in the late 1940s. No sooner had Brausen paid him the £200 for Painting 1946 than he was off. He spent most of the next two years on an extended holiday, gambling in Monte Carlo – and usually losing – living on the Riviera, eating, drinking and ostensibly having fun. This was extraordinary behaviour for a major artist – a type of individual normally driven by talent and, thus, by the urge to work. What, then, was the reason for it? Partly, at least, it must have been because Bacon was once more stuck. His painting block had returned. Having achieved a masterpiece with Painting 1946, he was not sure what to do next.