The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  The most notable of Ernst Freud’s London buildings were Belvedere Court built in 1937–8 in Lyttelton Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and Frognal Close in Hampstead: six ‘well planned and well designed’ houses, as Nikolau Pevsner noted:8 flat-top moderne houses that he designed in 1937 and in two of which he had ‘an interest’. Lucian admired them: ‘Subtle: each house is different. He didn’t think that he had problems but people jumped on hearing him. I went with him once to Frognal Close, the building site, and – being used to German workmen – he was shouting, “Why you got workmen who don’t work?” and they were looking at each other in amazed stupefaction, at him in his pork-pie hat and with the rather long hair he had. He was trying to tell them what to do in Viennese English. I felt protective.’ The Freuds befriended the potter Lucie Rie when she arrived in London in 1938; Ernst Freud converted a mews house in Albion Mews into a flat and studio for her, accommodating her Ernst Plischke furniture; she told people she thought him a pig. Unlike Gropius (who spent time at Dartington before moving on to America), Ernst Freud found that England – his England extending from Regent’s Park to Walberswick – suited him well enough, eventually. He added an extension of several rooms to Ernest Jones’ house in Sussex (Jones was Sigmund Freud’s English standard-bearer). But jobs were few and he was understandably disconcerted when people taking a friendly interest asked him, this presumed German, how Hitler was. According to Frank Auerbach, who was sent to England from Germany in 1939 at the age of eight and whose cousin Gneditch was an assistant to Ernst Freud before the war: ‘Ernst Freud must have picked up a lot of work, doing conversions. He was in with Mr Hess who was a property speculator who kept buying houses. My uncle was Hess’s lawyer and when Hess was my uncle’s landlord in Belsize Park I think the conversion was by Lucian’s father and when Hess refused to pay for something in the bathroom, my uncle said, “Rather stupid: we’ll put it on to the next bill.” Of course the war made him slightly more well off. I don’t think he, Ernst Freud, was a speculator: Hess was a speculator.’

  The choice of school was partly up to Lucian. Abbotsholme in Staffordshire, a school with a farm and progressive credentials, was a possibility. He went there for a couple of days to see whether he would like it or suit it. ‘At lunch they said something scoutish like “Any volunteers to get up at five in the morning to go to the forest beyond the wood and chop trees?” So I thought I’m not going there.’ It was decided that Bryanston, a less heartily progressive boarding school, would be more suitable; he needed however to serve time at a prep school before starting. ‘They thought they would de-Dartingtonise me and Bryanstonise me by insisting on prep school first.’

  Before that there were the holidays, at Saint Brieuc in Brittany, which Lucian remembered for the candied fruits he filched on the boat crossing the bay to Saint Malo. He had a handy phrase, ‘Ma mère attendra plus tard,’ which he found got him out of paying for things if caught. ‘We were well dressed so got away with it; my mother didn’t mind anything so long as it was legal.’

  During his two days at Abbotsholme he had been encouraged to take photographs of his potential new school. He took one so good, he thought –‘a superb photograph into the sun into trees’ – that he stuck it into an album and photography engaged him briefly. ‘Some artistic things of milk bottles on a stand at Walberswick’ were followed by human interest. At Southwold, a mile or so up the coast, the Duke of York – soon to be George VI – arrived to preside over his annual summer camp where public schoolboys mucked in with lads from deprived districts. ‘He was walking along with all the campers in long shorts and I walked backwards taking my photo of him. He looked a bit nervous, and I went rushing off to the chemists in Walberswick to get it developed.’

  Kitted out in school uniform, ‘a little half-sun emblem on the cap: the evening sun going down on the equator’, Lucian was sent off to Dane Court at Pyrford near Woking in Surrey, a school with a liberal ethos. There were weekly music appreciation classes and, besides, the headmaster’s Danish wife (hence ‘Dane Court’) introduced ‘Danish feasts and games to do with barrels and apples’. Advertised in the New Statesman as a school of ‘Modern ideas. Good food. No Prep. Sensible discipline. Reasonable fees’, the school boasted in its prospectus ‘every facility in the neighbourhood for riding, boating, bathing, and nature study’, most of which appealed to Lucian. Unlike at Dartington, sport was compulsory and competitive. ‘I thought what an extraordinary idea and I liked it. I was in all the teams. I won the swimming cup on merit, and the boxing cup, because the three best boxers were ill in the san. I was fast, but interested in fighting, not boxing. My interest is to hit and run really: street fights, wrestling a bit. I used to jump on people, get them by the neck until they couldn’t breathe, then run off.’ Wrestling lessons taught him arm locks and as a centre forward he learnt to kick: skills that remained with him.

  Lucian found that not only was he the oldest boy in the school, he was the only one to have grown a fang between his front teeth: ‘a tooth that only sharks have. It stuck out, and when it was taken out the dentist said it was an amazing rarity and could he have it. It made headlines in the dental magazine.’ A fellow pupil, Jack Baer, regarded him, as ‘a star in the firmament’.9 Sixty years later he still remembered, he said, how much he admired and feared him. ‘All other characters were half the size. I felt his age and sophistication and I was jealous of his savoir-faire. He was like an adult, dark, with a serious expression, the most inspiring, interesting, provoking figure there. He made me a sort of captive audience.’ Baer’s parents lived near the school and he would go to see them at weekends, often accompanied by a friend or two but, he said, he never took Lucian. ‘He would have been my obvious choice, because of our backgrounds.’ (Baer’s father was a German Jew who had come to England before the First World War.) ‘But no.’ Anyway, he exasperated Lucian, who resorted to bashing him. ‘I tried to get him to react: he was screaming, lying on the floor. Then I felt badly about it, as he was tall, weak and weedy. So what can I do? I thought. If you are to show someone that you are sorry, give them your most precious possession. I had an octagonal box covered with veneer and mother of pearl, given me by my mother; so I gave it to him – if you give something to someone it makes you like them – and he said thank you and took it and he didn’t know it was precious. I was embarrassed.’

  Lucian became a boy scout, a member of the Kangaroo patrol, and attended church at Pyrford near by: it was compulsory, same as sport, not that he objected. The church had medieval wall paintings; these he barely noticed but he did enjoy some of the hymns they sang there: ‘“For Those in Peril on the Sea” – paintings go with songs.’ News of the civil war in Spain stirred him and he decided to do something about it. ‘The first political thing I was caught up in. Anti-Franco. The paper we had at school was the Daily Express, which was rather pro-Franco, and I wanted the News Chronicle, which was anti. Anyway I started a paper, which I printed on hectograph jelly in the lavatory at night. It was quite hard work. I tried to get Jack Baer, who was deputy leader of the Kangaroos, interested. He wasn’t much good on the Dane Court Chronicle, but there was “Big Toe’s Revenge”, a cartoon by a boy called Harvey II, a bogus Red Indian cartoon. I wrote it, Harvey II drew it (for me, the Editor, to do cartoons was not right). He had a nice curvy style of drawing. I wrote the Chronicle and printed it – there were two or three editions – and sold it on parents’ day and sports day, which caused unease, and the money from it went to a News Chronicle fund: “Milk for Spain”.10

  ‘The hectograph was a primitive, messy, duplication method. You had to get a tray coated with hectograph jelly, write on it the wrong way round with hectograph ink and put paper on the jelly to print. You could get about thirty copies. They got pale pretty quickly.’ Adrian Heath, later the co-author of a definitive 300 Years of Industrial Design, helped out. ‘I was probably layout man and printer,’ he said. ‘I remember Lucian’s seriousness and enthusiasm and feeling I was engaged in a very import
ant project with him. My clearest memory of all is the look of the thing. It was on foolscap paper and the print was a brilliant violet colour. The production was curious and very messy: it was printed on jelly!’11

  Content was whatever caught Lucian’s fancy. ‘We found curious things lying in the grounds, pamphlets or letters, and we made dramatic meanings out of them. One whole issue was based on a crazy letter we found lying around somewhere, to some housewife, an ordinary suburban letter, and we pretended it was a radical spy document affecting the whole future of school and country. That was the best issue.’

  If Dane Court achieved little academically with Lucian it did stimulate his competitive instincts and acerbic streak. Among the linocuts he made was one of a bolting horse, which was, he remembered, how he felt. He published a poem in the school magazine, emulating the trailing kerfuffle of Morgenstern’s Snail’s Monologue (‘Soll i aus meim Hause raus? … Rauserauserauserause …’). Recited from memory seventy years later, it went:

  Worms are creatures that vary in size,

  Some being silly and some being wise.

  They haven’t got tongues so they can’t tell lies,

  They go about naked without any ties.

  So if you meet a worm any day

  Pray do not turn your face away.

  And if you want a poor worm to assault,

  Stop and remember it isn’t his fault.

  The moral of this story is,

  The poor worm should be sympathised with.

  The syntax was deemed unacceptable. ‘The master turned the last line round to “Needs all your sympathies”.’

  When the time came to sit the Common Entrance examination, Lucian flunked it, or so he said. ‘A complete failure; I got nought in certain subjects.’ Nonetheless Bryanston accepted him. Once again being a Freud helped see him through. Jack Baer too was offered a place. ‘Lux will be there,’ he told his father; this was, for him, a dreadful prospect: further years of Lux lording it over him. But as it turned out he saw little more of him and went on to become, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, ‘among the most creative and imaginative Old Master dealers of his generation’.12

  Bryanston, founded ten years earlier and housed in a Queen Anne Revival country house, was less disposed than Dartington had been to let the pupil pick and choose from the timetable. The curriculum was organised according to the Dalton Plan: work was set and boys were supposed to do it largely on their own initiative; although there was opportunity for waywardness, attendance in class was expected. Short trousers were worn.

  In the Backward Latin class, taught – though to little effect – by the writer Aubrey de Sélincourt, Lucian met a boy called Patrick George, a few months younger than him, who told him about the Oil Painting Club. ‘There was a ridiculous art room and then, Bryanston being rather independent, there was the Oil Painting Club.’ Learning that ‘it was in a sense rebellious’ he decided to join. Meetings were held in the end section of an open-air dormitory on the ground floor. ‘Very cold and with a Valor heater giving off a pervading smell of paraffin’, George remembered. To ingratiate himself and impress the membership Lucian bought a painting by a boy called ‘Koala’ Barlow (‘because he had hair like it’) and wrote home for the money. They held an exhibition and prizes were awarded. George got second prize for a picture of tugs beneath a bridge; Lucian won with an underwater scene and moreover almost sold it.

  The primer for students of the Modern, among whom members of the Oil Painting Club counted themselves, was Herbert Read’s Art Now, published in 1933, a key book (‘Tanguys and everything’) that Freud came across at Bryanston, skipping the text and lingering over the plates. Otto Dix’s Grünewald-style Blond Girl appeared opposite Chaïm Soutine’s turbulent Maid of Honour, Edward Burra’s spooky fiesta figures confronted Paul Klee’s Gay Breakfast Table. Most telling of all for Freud in later years, though not then, was the pairing of a Picasso Baigneuse, an arching seaside construct like a sculpted capital A, with Crucifixion, a wishbone figure by the then aspiring interior designer Francis Bacon.

  ‘Pansy’ Hughes, the Bryanston art master, considered these to be sheer affronts; his preference according to Patrick George was ‘crinolined ladies and ploughmen coming over the hill in watery water colour’, though Lucian remembered him as being slightly more advanced than that: ‘More Gauguin’s maidens riding on the beach’. A taste he shared. ‘Even then I realised that I liked it but that it was something a bit too easy to like.’ Certainly the same could be said of the Tahitian nakedness of Old Man Running, his second oil painting. The first he remembered as ‘a kind of marshy grey yellow swampish’ picture of a naked man bending over. Old Man Running, signed ‘Lux’, was a jibe aimed at his art master, at his elders, at those avuncular and lonesome figures Edward Lear enshrined in limericks. The cross-country run – a routine punishment for Freud and one that he enjoyed – sends a Lear-like aged Uncle Arly scampering over the Dorset hills and far away.

  This old man however has higher connections. Lucian enjoyed, and memorised, whole stretches of The Poet’s Tongue, an anthology selected by W. H. Auden and John Garrett and used as a textbook at Bryanston. ‘Poetry is a struggle to reconcile the unwilling subject and object,’ they wrote. ‘Those, in Mr Spender’s words, who try to put poetry on a pedestal only succeed in putting it on a shelf.’13 Auden had been appointed to teach at Bryanston in 1935 only to have the offer withdrawn when, Freud understood, a letter from him to a pupil was leaked to the headmaster. ‘Not a question of him teaching there after that.’ The finale of The Poet’s Tongue was the storm scene from King Lear. Lucian’s old man (‘such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’) has to be ‘Nuncle’ Lear, stripping off and breaking loose on ‘a naughty night to swim in’.

  In an essay on John Masefield’s Reynard the Fox, Lucian wrote that the string of similes applied to the hunted fox (‘Like a rocket shot … like a ripple of wind running swift on grass; Like a shadow on wheat when a cloud blows past’) ran in the wrong order. ‘Each one was slightly weaker than the last.’ He was proud of his perception that imagery (‘Like the gannets’ hurtle … like a kestrel chasing … like all things swooping’) should be deployed, not merely listed. The English teacher, ‘Dicky’ Moore, wrote ‘good idea, well put’. Lucian took this to be a patronising tick in the margin implying, he felt, ‘and bollocks to you’. He learnt by heart Harry Graham’s Ruthless Rhymes and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, particularly the latter, given the artless illustrations to them by ‘BTB’, Basil Blackwood. There was, he thought, something brilliant in stringing poems and drawings together, fitting thoughts and jokes and feelings into picture phrases.

  The editor of Punch, E. V. Knox, was more encouraging than Dicky or Pansy, initially at least. Lucian submitted a number of cartoons to him. ‘The first one I sent he sent back with a note saying “good try: try again, E.V.K.”. I never had another note from him.’ Among the Punch cartoonists he particularly liked Fougasse, whose line was lively and casual-looking, reminiscent of Walter Trier, the illustrator of Emil and the Detectives. ‘I might have been influenced by that tiny comma nose he always did. The one I loved of his was of a keeper haring through the zoo shouting, “There’s a moose loose!” and a man asks, “Are you English or Scots?”’

  Lucian did not contribute to the school magazine, the Bryanston Saga, though he saw that it was a good pigeonhole for what could have been regarded as ‘Dada gestures’ – one boy, he remembered, stuffed all his exercise books into the Saga contributions box – but he produced over a dozen poems for ‘The Collected Freud’, with which Michael Jeans, his main Bryanston friend whom he knew from Walberswick, helped. ‘I liked him better than he liked me. He edited it. I tore it up. But I still have the jacket: a commonplace book with a maroon cover. “Nothing added, Nothing taken away,” it says.’

  Among the poems were ‘Ode to an English and History Lesson’ and one influenced as much by Wordsworth as by Morgenstern. He remembered it beginning:


  A constipated hedgehog wandered

  Slowly across the green fields

  Meditating …

  In similar vein (‘Like Morgenstern except there’s no hate in it’) was his ‘Ode to a Fried Egg’:

  On a chalk white plate you lie

  With loathing in your yellow eye

  Swimming in sickly fat.

  Ugh.

  3

  ‘My mother started worshipping it so I smashed it’

  A photograph taken in the garden at Walberswick shows the young artist aged fourteen, shirt off, brushes at the ready, standing over a canvas propped on a dining-room chair while his father, seated on a stool beside him, bows his head appraisingly and cradles the cat. The work in hand was possibly, Lucian thought many years later, his third oil painting: ‘an idyllic idea of little fields with a horse in each field’, as in the last chapter of Black Beauty in which the surviving horses are put out to grass. A happy ending that was all very well for horses, but he was becoming bored with family life, particularly in Walberswick, and particularly irritated by his father coming up behind him, taking his brush and correcting him. Sharing a bedroom with Clement was equally irksome; he even got tired of bullying him, he admitted. A sister would have been good to have around. ‘I’ve always wished for a sister. I’d have got on better with girls, been more natural, not frightened them so much, being so excited and nervous. It would have been a great help to my life. One thing I’d have liked to have had would have been a sister. That and a suit, which I did get.’