Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Henrietta was attracted to everyone: young and old, straight and queer, no matter what nationality. She was an exhibitionist and liked to go with couples so it didn’t matter to her whether someone had a boyfriend or a girlfriend. You don’t necessarily mind that sort of thing if you like someone. She was very greedy for people and for drink.

  Moraes’s way of life fitted well into Bacon’s own ‘gilded gutter’ existence as he liked to describe it. Perhaps those sixteen pictures were so many surrogate self-portraits; after all, he was a man who routinely reversed gender pronouns and would refer to himself as ‘she’. At all events, in his paintings of her, Bacon foreshadowed one of Freud’s greatest themes in the years to come: the female naked portrait.

  FRANCIS BACON Study for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1964

  *

  In the wake of his grand retrospective at the Tate, which had travelled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, Bacon had ascended to the pinnacle of art world fame. In marked contrast, Freud’s reputation at that time was much lower than it had been a decade before. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, his work had been highly fashionable. But by the early 1960s, according to the gallerist Kasmin, ‘Lucian Freud was no longer a big name. He was a famous character, and really admired for the early portrait of Francis Bacon – and also talked about a great deal for his priapism.’ But there was little interest in his recent painting.

  Around this time Freud realized that he had no income. ‘I had a dealer, but he wasn’t really selling my pictures.’ James Kirkman, then a junior employee at Marlborough Fine Art, Freud’s gallery, confirms this was true. ‘His paintings would stay in the racks, unloved. Nobody would ask to see them. They’d be there for years, priced at a few thousand pounds. Nobody wanted them.’ This discouraging situation continued for well over a decade. It was a period that Freud later described as ‘when I was completely forgotten’. With courage, or what some might consider reckless insouciance, Freud carried on regardless, working very slowly, indulging his passion for gambling for high stakes on horse races and in private clubs (including one run by the Kray twins). Meanwhile, he lived on money he didn’t have. ‘The feeling of being in debt made me feel padded or insulated against the world, despite the horrible people I owed money to and who tried to get it back from me. I felt I was living on a private income.’

  Kirkman saw Freud’s gravity-free finances rather differently:

  It was my job to go to the directors and say, ‘We need another advance for Lucian Freud.’ I’d say, ‘He’s promised he’ll have another picture finished in three months’ time.’ Finally, we’d get another £500 or maybe £250. Part of Lucian’s problem was that he always wanted a show of work that had already been sold, mostly sold by him at no profit to the gallery, so it wasn’t surprising that he wasn’t very popular. His catalogues were the skimpiest.

  The artist later claimed he found this oblivion entirely congenial: ‘there was something exhilarating in being forgotten, almost working underground. I’ve never wanted attention so I didn’t find it in the least unnerving. His dealer James Kirkman’s memory of the situation is different: ‘He was keen as mustard at that stage to see critics and be written about, to be picked.’

  Freud had only three exhibitions with Marlborough – in 1958, 1963 and 1968. They charted not so much a steady progression as the work of an artist repeatedly searching for a solution to a problem he had not yet completely solved. In place of the meticulous, almost microscopic precision of his work of a decade before, Freud’s pictures of the early 1960s – though still very slow to execute – sometimes looked as if they had been done in a matter of hours. The boldest were constructed of big scoops and whorls of pigment, the bristles of the hog’s hair brushes still clearly visible in the paint.

  In retrospect, it is not hard to see that he was looking for ways to make paint create a sense of solid, three-dimensional form. The freedom of Bacon’s brushwork, he admitted, made him feel more ‘daring’. Simultaneously, he was working out how to get paint to do something he often talked about later, to ‘act like flesh’, so that it didn’t just imitate the model, it seemed to embody them. He was trying but, as yet, he wasn’t reliably succeeding. Few people paid much attention to his efforts. As Bacon’s star rose, Freud’s continued to sink.

  *

  John Deakin staggered into the French House pub at lunchtime one day in 1963 ‘ashen-faced’, not – for once – as the result of a severe hangover, but because he had just received bad news. ‘It’s that bloody portrait,’ he moaned to Daniel Farson. ‘Lucian has just decided it isn’t going right and wants to start again.’ Deakin had already been posing for Freud for a long time, and if they really were to begin again, he would have perhaps another six months of sitting ahead of him. During all this time, according to Farson, Deakin was collected from his flat in Soho at dawn and driven to Freud’s studio in Paddington, ‘where he was force-drunk with retsina to keep him still’.

  LUCIAN FREUD John Deakin, 1963–64

  The dates of the Deakin portrait, 1963–64, tell their own story. Yet it looks as if it might have been polished off in a session or two, so loose and free had Freud’s brushwork become in comparison with the precision of his portrait of Bacon of a decade earlier. By the time he came to paint Deakin, his brushstrokes had become visible swirls and arcs of pigment that reconstitute the sitter’s broken veins and purple drinker’s nose, his clown’s ears and spaniel eyes. What has not altered is the intensity of the painter’s scrutiny.

  Freud was not formally interviewed by a critic until 1977, but in the early 1960s he agreed to talk with Michael Peppiatt, then a student at Cambridge University. The conversation did not go well but, according to Peppiatt’s much later memory, Freud’s theme was that, in the present situation, the only thing for painters to do was to search for ‘a certain truth’. A decade later Freud told John Russell, ‘I am never inhibited by working from life. On the contrary, I feel more free; and I can take liberties which the tyranny of memory would not allow.’ His stance was the exact opposite of Bacon’s. Where Bacon felt more inhibited in the presence of a model, Freud felt it liberated him. The goal, however, was similar: a truth that was not banal or predigested; as Freud put it, ‘I would wish my work to appear factual not literal.’ Talking about how his work was in part – but only in part – a ‘truth-telling’ exercise, Freud recalled a moment from the Deakin sittings: ‘I remember that when I was painting John Deakin one day, his mouth went in very well. But it was not the way his mouth really was, so I wiped it out and did it again.’

  *

  While other painters working at the same time, such as Allen Jones, David Hockney and Richard Smith, were in love with the glamour and freedom of the United States, Freud located his studios in a small area of West London. It was, in urban terms, the opposite of New York or Los Angeles. If LA stood for the speed and energy of the future, the slums of Paddington represented the nineteenth century, dark and decaying. When Freud first moved there, the district had reminded him of Gustave Doré’s views of London in the 1870s.

  The force moving Freud from crumbling address to crumbling address was, in a way, modernity. The streets in which he settled, and much of the working-class area of run-down Georgian houses, were successively bought up by the local authorities and pulled down. As a solitary artist, a person with no evident economic or social value, Freud tended to be allocated condemned buildings. ‘The council warned me that I was not a unit – a unit being a family with young children, or an old retired person. So I was put in buildings that were scheduled to be demolished, which suited me fine.’ Clarendon Crescent, to which he moved in 1962, was already disappearing and its inhabitants being relocated outside London to places like Slough and Crawley.

  Clarendon Crescent, Paddington, under demolition

  When Lord Snowdon photographed Freud standing pensively beside his Bentley on 17 June 1963, the street – as beautiful as a terrace in Bath – looked deserted.
Other images, however, reveal that the district was still lively, full of working-class people who, as Freud recalled approvingly, were not servants or employed in menial capacities, but worked for themselves, often on the borders of legality – or beyond. Quite a few were criminals, according to Freud, among them one ‘really clever bank robber’. The painter too was leading a wild life, beyond the margins of respectability. ‘At Clarendon Crescent,’ Freud recalled, ‘I was painting from 4 a.m. to lunch, then off gambling. Lots of playing, night and day, horses and dogs. I was completely broke.’

  Bit by bit, however, the wrecking crews came closer. Eventually, Frank Auerbach remembers:

  Lucian was the only inhabitant except for squatters and people clambering over the roof. But he stayed there with remarkable stoicism. It’s amazing that so few pictures have disappeared because they were in such perilous situations. It was a heroic life.

  Freud, too, spoke about that precarious time. ‘The demolition men got closer and closer. I was working on a painting in the studio. In the end I passed down some whisky bottles and they agreed to let me have another couple of days. It seemed important at the time.’ Indeed, it would have been crucial. For Freud, the conditions in which a picture was made had to remain constant. Once it had begun, the times – and hence lighting conditions – at which it was painted had to be adhered to. The sittings for an evening picture, by electric light, had to be after dark, and the reverse for a work painted in natural light. Equally, the sitter’s clothes could not change and the space in which the sessions took place had to be kept exactly the same. Consequently, if the wrecking ball had come through the wall of his studio before that picture was finished, months – maybe years – of effort would have been wasted.

  During those years Freud made a crucial transition. This was the point at which, viewed retrospectively, what one might call ‘late Freud’ began; in his fortieth year, the middle of his life. This was the time when he really found ways to make thick, substantial paint ‘work as flesh’. His brushstrokes became more like those of artists he admired – Gustave Courbet, Titian or Frans Hals – rather than the smooth, miniaturist effect of his early work. During those years, as always, his subjects were few and all people in his life. The most significant development was that he began to paint some of his subjects entirely without clothes. It might seem surprising that Freud, who by the end of his life came to be seen as one of the supreme exponents of this subject, did not attempt it until he was in middle age.

  The few exceptions in the 1950s and early 1960s are pictures of women, semi-naked, bare-breasted, that now look somewhat tentative. Then, in 1966, Freud produced one of the most extreme pictures in his career, in its utter exposure, its complete lack of any vestige of idealism. It shows a blond girl lying on a bed. Its title, Naked Girl (1966), is important. She is naked, not nude, a distinction that Freud insisted upon. In so doing, he preferred to speak of a category new to art history, the ‘naked portrait’.

  I think of the people in my own pictures as more naked than nude. The notion of the ‘nude’ has in a way a self-conscious artistic feeling and ‘naked’ is more to do with how the people are actually made. When I’m painting someone without clothes I think more of portraiture, of the form being specific to the person.

  In a celebrated book, Freud’s erstwhile mentor Kenneth Clark (who had abandoned his support when the painter changed his style) had made just this distinction between the nude and the naked figure. The former, according to Clark, was an invention of classical Greek artists, a blend of anatomy and geometry. It was not how any real human being actually looked, but how they should look assuming the universe was in accordance with Plato’s ideal forms. Instinctively, Freud had always had an aversion to the classical tradition. That was why he loved French art more than Italian, because it had a greater sense of the physical substantiality of bodies (consequently, he made his beloved Titian an honorary Frenchman).

  The pictures he now began to create were among the most radically unclassical ever seen. Somehow, in that doomed space on Clarendon Crescent, he managed to purge his mind and eyes of every received way of depicting the human form. His new paintings seemed to take a journey to the surface of each new body, looking at it as if he had never seen such a thing before and discovering that not only did people look dissimilar from Greek statues, and from each other, but also that every aspect of a person was individual. In a way he was painting portraits of toes, knees, shoulders and all the other bodily parts (sexual ones very much included). David Hockney once reflected on the uniqueness of Freud’s vision, in ‘looking at the person in front of him sexually’. But it had not been so clear, up to this point, that that was what he was doing.

  With Naked Girl it became obvious. This is plainly a highly charged picture, full of intimate sentiments and sensations – so much so that the viewer feels like an intruder. All Freud’s works are – to use Howard Hodgkin’s phrase – pictures of ‘emotional situations’. In this case, the intimacy might seem shocking, the scrutiny certainly ruthless. Freud’s long-term assistant David Dawson, however, sees the painting quite differently:

  LUCIAN FREUD Naked Girl, 1966

  Lucian didn’t like the word psychological, but with some of his portraits you feel you know what’s going on inside his head. In his first nude he did of a girl lying on a bed, there’s so much there: how much the sitter was giving Lucian and how much Lucian gave the painting. She’s so vulnerable, it’s heart-wrenching.

  Before this picture, Freud felt that ‘in a way I was a frustrated painter of the nude’. Afterwards, he came to see nakedness as the norm, the essential truth. ‘When I’m painting people in clothes, I’m always thinking very much of naked people, or animals dressed. I like the nakedness to come through the clothes.’

  He was opposed, morally and aesthetically, to all forms of pretence and covering up: false feeling, false behaviour, even too much powder and rouge covering the skin. The model for Naked Girl was Penelope Cuthbertson, a celebrated beauty of the mid-1960s. In October 1966, around the time she was posing for Freud in Paddington, a very different image of her appeared in Vogue magazine. A feature on cosmetics entitled ‘Beauty Bulletin’ described her as ‘fresh-skinned with straight blond hair’, these features being enhanced with ‘crème glow’, ‘café frost’ below her brows and ‘natural honey’ lipstick. It was exactly what Freud wouldn’t have wanted. After meeting a woman wearing heavy make-up, he once complained that he felt he couldn’t properly see whom he was talking to. What he wanted was to observe what was there, all of it, with no obstacles or barriers of any kind.

  Freud and Bacon, though friends, were very different artists. Bacon, as we have seen, admired Picasso more than Matisse because the former’s work had more of the ‘brutality of fact’, which he himself was aiming for. Freud, in contrast, preferred Matisse, whose work he found less theatrical: not, like Picasso’s, intended to shock and amaze. In Freud’s own work there is certainly a sense of fact, but no brutality. It is the utter honesty of his pictures that sometimes shocks and can make it feel as though no one has ever looked at a face or body so unflinchingly before.

  Chapter fourteen

  AMERICAN CONNECTIONS

  If I’d been the same age in 1910 I might have gone to Paris instead of New York: you just want to see the centre of the contemporary art world.

  Allen Jones

  Late in 1961 a young man called Richard Morphet was just down from Cambridge and newly installed in a job at Robert Sharp and Partners, ‘a fashionable, far-out advertising agency, so much so that occasionally it was the subject of satirical columns in the Guardian’. In the intervals of living the life of Mad Men, early 1960s Mayfair-style – in which ‘terrible, drunken client lunches’ featured heavily – he explored the art world, which lay all around. Later in life he was to become Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery and curator, among many other activities, of major exhibitions on Richard Hamilton and R. B. Kitaj.

  Across the roa
d from Robert Sharp were the premises of Marlborough Fine Art, and around the corner on Dover Street was the ICA. In November 1961, Morphet attended a memorably rowdy evening event there. Its point of departure was a showing of a documentary entitled Trailer, which had been made by the painter Richard Smith and a brilliant young photographer named Robert Freeman. For a London audience at the start of the 1960s, Trailer seemed startlingly fresh and novel with its focus on the modern environment that was appearing all around. Morphet remembers his own youthful enthusiasm: ‘The film went out into the street recording cars moving, hoardings. There was a lot of pop music on the soundtrack too, I was incredibly, almost embarrassingly, excited by it.’ This 8mm colour film is sadly now lost.

  RICHARD SMITH Flip-Top, 1962

  The imagery in Trailer was the raw material of Smith’s art. ‘I paint about communication,’ he stated at the time. ‘The communication media are a large part of my landscape. My interest is not so much in the message as in the method. There is a multiplicity of messages (smoke these, vote this, ban that), but fewer methods.’ It was the visual language in which the message was presented that Smith loved: the alluring surfaces of consumer society, especially packaging and the softly sensual manner in which products were lit for publicity purposes. Smith, like Richard Hamilton and his companions at the ICA, was a keen reader of Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride.

  For Trailer Freeman had shot many still photographs of cigarette packets, including a novel type invented by Robert Brownjohn, an American graphic designer living in London, for the brand Bachelor, which revealed the interior of the pack crammed with alluring rows of fags within. Freeman also photographed several American ‘flip-top’ brands and, in 1962, Smith painted a picture over six feet high of a subject vaguely suggesting skyscrapers or towering factory chimneys, but actually inspired by a cigarette packet. Its title was Flip-Top.