The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘My father’s favourite musical instrument was the one-man band: bike, drum and trumpet. Grandfather too prided himself on being unmusical. In Vienna you have to have attitude.

  ‘He wasn’t the sort of architect who’d draw houses that weren’t built. Richard Neutra was an old friend of his from Vienna and Gropius he admired, and knew a little, but he was obviously not in the forefront. He did things very quietly and even though the style was quite radical he was not an innovator of the style, he was a user of the style.’ His buildings included a small cigarette factory, the Neue Villa in Dahlem, for Sigmund Freud’s friend Dr Hans Lampl, and a house overlooking a lake in Geltow near Potsdam for Dr Frank, Director of the Berlin Discont-Gesellschaft, a novel feature of which was a window, described in the Studio Year Book: Decorative Art 19343 as ‘a glass wall 20 feet long sliding down into the cellar, worked by weights and easily manipulated by hand’. He fitted out consulting rooms for psychoanalysts – couches calculatedly placed just so in relation to the analyst’s chair – and designed furniture: heavy shelving in African rosewood for his own study, and sofas that Lucian remembered as being ‘most inventive in ashwood and very severe’. In a Berlin of grand turn-of-the-century apartment blocks, the interiors that Ernst Freud produced were clear-cut expressions of modernity installed behind ponderous façades.

  Frank Auerbach, who, many years later, was to become Freud’s closest painter friend and whose father was a lawyer, remembered the type of apartment that he and Lucian grew up in as being stiflingly well appointed: ‘The apartment. I don’t know what you’d call it. A sort of hexagonal hole with doors leading off it in various directions, my father’s office being one of the doors leading off. These flats were big and there were courtyards where people would beat carpets in the centre of the court. Ours was a Wilmersdorf flat. Tiergarten was Park Lane.’4 Evidently the Freuds, thanks to Brasch family money, were one step up from the Auerbachs.

  Sigmund Freud with sons Martin and Ernst (seated left), 1916

  In April 1922, Sigmund Freud wrote to Ernst for his thirtieth birthday: ‘You possess everything a man can want at your age, a loving wife, a splendid child, work, and friends.’ This was more than the usual good wishes. Earlier that year there had been (as Hans Lampl put it) ‘a brief period of alienation’ in his youngest son’s marriage about which he knew next to nothing, for disturbing news was generally kept from the Professor. However, according to his daughter Anna – a not altogether reliable source – he blamed his daughter-in-law for whatever upset or estrangement there may have been and lamented how few women know how to love their men. An admirer sarcastically referred to by Ernst Freud as ‘Schwäbisches Nachtigall’ (the Swabian Nightingale) was said to have addressed poems to her. Seventy years later Lucian Freud confirmed this. ‘He wrote these poems to my mother. Sonnets. But I don’t think she would have given my father any cause. She could never have had anything to hide; it wasn’t her way.’ As it was, the couple were reconciled, Lucian was born and the marriage thrived. ‘I’m sure they were happily married as they would go abroad on their own to Italy or Spain or Greece.’

  Lucian Freud’s mother, Lucie Brasch, 1919

  In later life both brothers, Clement and Stephen as they became known, took to letting it be known confidentially that, their mother having died meanwhile, the time had come to disclose that the Swabian Nightingale, Ernst Heilbrun, was, quite possibly, Lucian’s father. Setting aside the entertaining thought that if he didn’t happen to be descended from Sigmund then he could be relieved of the irritation of it being so often said that he had inherited the genes of psychoanalytical acumen, Lucian dismissed the guess as a brotherly slur. ‘My grandparents adored my mother. Both loved her and were terribly pleased that my father – gentle, quiet – had married such a talented and good woman. In some ways, considering what you read about Berlin then, they led a sheltered life.’

  While Ernst Freud was known for easy-going optimism (though subject to migraines), Lucie Freud was admired for her seriousness, her beauty and vivacity and, moreover, for being a good housewife. ‘My mother’s classical scholarship – University of Munich – came in useful once, when they were on a boat and there was a priest on it and the only language they had in common was Latin.’ Ernst, being Austrian – the Berlin police picked him up once in the twenties as a suspect foreigner – lived by Viennese conventionality. ‘We had lunch on Sundays with our parents. Father required two vegetables for a main dish and he made coffee after the meal as men did that in Vienna: it was one of the links between Turkey and Vienna. The famous couch was Turkish.’

  Home life was compartmented and secluded. First a nanny then a governess had charge of the boys. The barber came to the house, and the dentist. (‘Stephen said to me, “I forget: was it the dentist or the barber that you bit?”’) Round the corner, in Bendligstrasse – now Stauffenbergstrasse – were the Mosse cousins: Dr Mosse, his wife Gerda (Lucie’s sister) and their children, Jo who was a couple of years older than Lucian, Richard – ‘Wolf’ – a year younger, and Carola. The Mosses’ wealth derived from newspaper publishing, as did that of the Ullsteins, who lived next door to the Freuds. Gabriele Ullstein, a few months older than Lucian (whom she knew as Michael), was the granddaughter of Louis Ullstein, publisher of the Berliner Morgenpost and the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung whose Ullstein Printing House, on Ullstein Strasse, was one of the finest modern industrial buildings in Berlin. Looking back, Gabriele suspected that her mother rather kept her distance from Lucie Freud, uncomfortable with having so good-looking a neighbour. Arrangements however were made for the Freud boys to join Gabriele and others in an improvised kindergarten with use of the Ullstein sandpit.

  Gabriele Ullstein and Lucian Freud c.1925

  Every afternoon, Gabriele Ullstein remembered, nannies gathered in the Tiergarten with their charges and settled into cliques. Children with Misses looking after them were hived off from those with Mademoiselles or with Fräuleins. Superior broods had English nannies and governesses; Gabriele had Rose from Ipswich, then a Miss Penfold, then a Miss Parfitt, while the Freuds had a Bavarian to look after them. Lucian did not take to her. ‘Fräulein Per Lindemeyer (we called her Linde): I remember thinking there was something wrong about my mother coming up to the bedroom to get an affectionate goodnight when, just before, I’d been beaten by Linde the governess. Just bashes with her huge arm.’ Linde’s recollection of Lucian, decades later, he reported, was that he was ‘Very lively but not affectionate’.

  ‘When we went to Bavaria to stay in a chalet that the Ullsteins had, on the way down on the train to Munich, in the sleeping car, she fell out of the hammock.’

  The Bavarian chalet had a balcony around it where every afternoon the children were made to sit on their potties. Silent concentration was the rule until one day, according to Gabriele, Lucian decided to play up, jerking himself along the landing on his potty like an eager jockey. He was, Gabriele felt, a born instigator. ‘Lucian had the authority of expecting to be obeyed.’ His memory of this went further. ‘I remember feeling very merry on the upstairs landing and wanting to go out looking for mushrooms and wild strawberries.’5 Let loose, they splashed around in a stream and competed to see who could get the most leeches on their legs.

  Told at his first school to tie shoelaces in a particular way, he promised himself: ‘I’ll never tie them that way again.’

  Misbehaviour always stimulated him. ‘We were walking with our nannies in the Tiergarten, with Michael and Paul, the sons of our doctor, Professor Dr Hamburger. There were beggars around, there were lots then, and there was a beggar with a flaming red beard and eyes and we rushed to get money from our nannies to put in his bag and tiptoed, terrified, up to him. But Paul, who was the youngest of us, toddled up and took all the money and put it in his pocket and I thought it terrifically funny, this amazing feat. When I got home I told my mother and she said it was wrong. But then when my Aunt Anna bought a farmhouse, with her friend Dorothy Burlingham, at Hochrotherd, th
e vendor was a beggar from the streets of Vienna: a prosperous beggar with considerable property, she was told.’ Paul Hamburger was to become, in London, Paul Hamlyn, publisher and philanthropist.

  After lunch the boys were sent to their room for a rest and when the blinds were drawn Lucian would say, ‘Have I gone blind?’, knowing he’d get a reaction out of Stefan who couldn’t see the joke, ever.

  Seventy years later Clement wrote about his mother’s favouritism. ‘When she came into the nursery she nodded to Stephen and me and sat down with Lucian and whispered. They had secrets. I did not realise for many years that this is not what good mothers do.’6 Lucian himself didn’t regard being his mother’s chosen one as advantageous. ‘It’s what my brothers resented; and so did I. A violent thing, really bad, was when, during a picnic, I picked, or took, some fruit. “Give it to your brothers,” my mother said, and she forcibly tried to take it from me and I wouldn’t let go. It was apricots, and I squashed them in my fist.’ He was to maintain that her reaction was inexplicably passionate, so much so that he never trusted her again.

  Lucian used to say that always – or as far back as he could remember – he’d found his brothers unrewarding. ‘They were always together and I was always alone. On the Berlin tube Cle caught the outside of his hand in the outside of the escalator. Terrific screams. I remembered getting his hand out and thinking how odd: it was frightening but I thought just how odd. I was just looking at him screaming.’ A photograph taken in the street in 1928 shows them hand in hand. ‘The three of us in English clothes, tailored, and dark-suited sneering men staring at us pampered boys.’

  Their mother read to all three but especially, he felt, to Lucian: ‘Schiller and Goethe ballads, Schiller’s “Der Handschuh” [The Glove], a ballad in which the hero drops into a cage to retrieve his lady’s glove, a cage with a lion, a tiger and two leopards who won’t fight: they spare him and he throws the glove in her face. And one about Frederick the Great, how he rode up and down in front of his troops in the battle and shouted “Gauner!” – Villains (No, that’s not the word. Spivs? Cheats?) – “Do you want to live for ever?” And a soldier answered, “Fritzen: not to betray for sixpence a day, this is enough.”’

  Lucian was stirred by the rhythms if not the sentiments of Heimat – homesick – songs and he loved comic poems. The conceits in Christian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs), printed in a heavy typeface on rough paper, appealed for their confounding logic: the notion of the gaps in a picket fence being used to build a house much to the fence’s annoyance; the clock with two pairs of hands, one pair advancing, the other retreating so as to tell the time both ways and, best of all, ‘Fisches Nachtgesang’ (Fish’s Night Song), spelt out wordlessly in typographic waters composed of hyphens and brackets. When he was seven he was given a ballad book with illustrations that ranged from Grünewald (‘marvellous’) to Adolph Menzel (‘thrones and lowly corners’); there were drawings he took a lifelong dislike to (‘Käthe Kollwitz, I’m sorry to say’) and drawings to wonder at, particularly Dürer’s study of his hollow-eyed mother and Das Grosse Rasenstuck (The Large Piece of Turf), his miraculously vivid clump of weeds.

  Equally attractive were the picture books devised by a cousin, Tom Seidmann-Freud (born Martha Gertrude, daughter of Ernst’s elder sister Martha Freud), who died in 1930 aged thirty-seven, shortly after the suicide of her husband Jankel Seidmann. Her books were made to be tweaked and fingered and coloured in. ‘Things you could pull and things disappeared and red and blue paper where, if you passed them across the drawings, people disappeared. I loved the way they were drawn.’ Das Wunderhaus (The Wonder House) and Die Fischreise (The Fish Journey) were perked up with trim little outline drawings of captivated youngsters, amazing flowers, whippety rabbits and suchlike. The even more succinct Hurra, Wir Lesen! Hurra, Wir Schreiben! (Hurrah, We’re Reading! Hurrah, We’re Writing!) (1930) and Hurra, Wir Rechnen! (Hurrah, We’re Counting!) (1931) had squirrels, storks, cats, frogs and children of all nations and races prompting first steps in reading and arithmetic.

  Tom Seidmann-Freud: Hurra, Wir Lesen!

  Freud’s earliest drawings, treasured by his mother, displayed similar idiosyncrasies, demonstrating what Grandfather Freud characterised as ‘strahlende Intelligenz’, the radiant intelligence of children. There were upbeat goblins, skeins of chimney smoke intertwining over rooftops and rhythmic flights of fancy: five eager-beaked birds in a five-fingered tree all straining in one direction, readied to be up and away.

  Birds in Tree, c.1930

  Though Grandfather Freud lived in Vienna, he came to Berlin every so often for cancer treatment and to be fitted with what he described as ‘the very model of a necessary evil’: a prosthetic palate to separate his ravaged oral and nasal cavities.

  ‘My first meeting with him was when he was in Berlin, by the lake where he was having therapy or rest. When he walked he was quite bent in a way people are who sit a lot. He was frail.’ His grandfather, he discovered, was a mushroom hunter with biological skills (he could sex eels) and a taste for Morgenstern’s catchy poetry. He also knew all about Max und Moritz, Wilhelm Busch’s comic-strip urchins; indeed, the very first time he met him, he acted like a Busch grotesque. ‘He snapped his false teeth at me and my mother was upset.’ Also, inspiringly, he gave him reproductions of Brueghel’s Seasons from the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Of these Lucian particularly liked Hunters in the Snow because of the skating, and The Return of the Herd with the cattle blundering down the lane. ‘There are no bottoms like them.’ Another time he brought The Arabian Nights illustrated by Edmund Dulac (‘lovely fat books with what seemed to me pretty good watercolours. I don’t know if I’d like them now’) and a two-volume Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Lucian made a set of illustrations for ‘Snow White’ foregrounding the dwarfs: a dozen or so drawings in a concertina strip joined up with stamp hinges. This he presented to Linde.

  ‘A child’s emotional impulses are intensely and inexhaustibly deep to a degree quite other than those of an adult; only religious ecstasy can bring them back,’ wrote Professor Freud.7 He once listed Kipling’s The Jungle Book among his ten favourite works of literature. Its correlation of childish impulse and animal instinct must have appealed, and the flavour of myth. Lucian’s prospects as a Mowgli of the Tiergarten were not good, but he had a golden salamander and there were cats that he used to ‘love and torture’ and an English greyhound called Billy.

  Lucian’s maternal grandmother Eliza Brasch, known to them as Omi, owned an estate at Cottbus near the Polish border. ‘She was this rich widow and I think the reason my father and mother set up in Berlin was because my grandmother helped them economically.’ Lucie Freud did not get on with her mother. ‘She hated her. It was unreasonable. She and her sisters had had a French governess, whom all adored, and their affection went to her and so my grandmother couldn’t forgive my mother for not having her affection. Here was my easy-going, bridge-playing grandmother who saw this and said she’d give the governess the sack, and my mother and her sisters – aged ten, eleven – said they would kill themselves if she did. So she kept her.’

  Decades later Lucian’s eldest daughter Annie was impressed by her grandmother Lucie’s concern for her emotional wellbeing. ‘She believed that a child ought always to approve of itself and that there should be no such thing as clandestine. For example, when a child began to get obsessed with pooh, shitting, words, things like that, she would work out a little system of things – rhymes for what I did so that I could get them out of my system, so that I could not as it were get infected with all this dirty talk.

  ‘It was tyrannical but it was also fantastically secure. My hand in hers. One of the main things about being a child is your physical relationship with the people who love you or are meant to love you. And her hand was absolutely the softest and most enveloping thing and she would always hold my hand if I went out. If I had a story to tell about my toy rabbit she would take this story, there’d be no irony in the way she’d r
espond; if I decided my toy rabbit was going to get married she would get her dressmaker to make her a wedding dress. It was completely selfless, this enveloping love for me.’8

  Grandfather Brasch, who died before Lucian was born, had been a grain merchant. He had acquired the Cottbus estate in lieu of debt. ‘He’d behaved nobly in the war. Asked by the Kaiser to supply grain he said he would, but not on a profiteering basis. I asked my mother, “Everything you say about your father not profiteering: if so, why take the property?” She said that he didn’t want to accept, but my grandmother was so keen on it that he did.’

  The house, Gross Gaglow, built around 1902, was big and ugly, with high windows and a stable full of horses. The boys spent holidays there. ‘We were met at the station in marvellous coaches: they had different coaches for different occasions. The stables caught fire once: nothing to do with me except that it kindled my love of fire. It was very feudal there and the village related to the house.’ Once, when all three were ill, children at the village school were let out so that they could come up to the house and entertain them.