The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Morris was a painter known for his colourful spreads, the aesthetic of the matted rag rug blended with the sensibilities of Christopher Wood and Edward Burra, Pissarro and Utrillo. His work had a disarming quality that suited Guggenheim Jeune and the Wertheim Gallery where it fitted in with the taste for child art, ‘unprofessional’ art and free-range Surrealism. A decade earlier he had been considered quite the leading figure; indeed in 1928 the critic T. W. Earp wrote that ‘the paintings of Cedric Morris are the happiest event which has occurred during the last few years in the annals of English painting,’ especially happy in that he had never bothered to get himself skilled in ‘the mechanical redundancies of the art school’.6 He and Lett-Haines had quite a past as players in the travelling avant-garde of the twenties, associated then with Jean Cocteau in Villefranche, with the Paris crowd, the big names – Hemingway, Man Ray, Picabia – and others besides, ranging from Nancy Cunard to Nina Hamnett. They had thrown memorable parties. Morris – who was to become Sir Cedric in 1947 when he inherited a baronetcy – told Lucian that the thing to do before such parties was to ‘toss yourself off in the taxi to make your eyes shine’. ‘He was so quirky and odd. But he wasn’t bitter.’

  Morris had taken to speaking of London as ‘that evil place’ and, exercising his social conscience, became involved in schemes to alleviate distress in his native South Wales through art, serving as trustee of an arts centre in Dowlais (where unemployment was 73 per cent) and inviting people from there to work at Dedham with the aim of enlarging their experience without subjecting them to academic routine. He advocated ‘sincere painting’, unvarnished, unmodulated, robust. He said of his pupils that he could, ‘by making them peg away at it, sometimes turn their weakness into their strongest feature’.7

  Lucian liked Morris’ relaxed attitude. ‘No teaching much, but there were models and you could work in your own room.’ An arc of easels would be set up on the lawn around a model in swimming trunks. Morris’ love of plants and animals, louche schoolboy humour (tireless innuendo concerning Constable’s Flatford Mill neighbour Willy Lott and his cottage) and even his persistent giggle were more appealing than the courses that Lucian could have tried in London, whether draughtsmanship with Bernard Meninsky or the subdued tones of the Euston Road School. He was self-taught but not naive, still less faux-naif. ‘His tag at the beginning was “Cézanne from Newlyn”: a bit unfortunate.’ His drawings, veering between suave and waspish, impressed Lucian. As did his practical tips: how to stretch and prime a canvas and how to economise with turps bought by the gallon from the oil merchant, not ‘pure turps’ from the art shop. Not that he ever acted on these. He was never one for chores.

  ‘Concerning Plant Painting’, an article by Morris in the Studio for May 1942, could have been written with his restless pupil in mind. ‘The first reaction of the painter to the suggestion that he should write about painting is a retort that he should mind his own business and that you should look at the pictures,’ it began. Delving into his subject on a rising note of waspish glee, he mocked any idea of floral prettiness. ‘The aspect of belles et jolies fleures, or charming, gay, lovely, etc., mean no more to me than such qualities do in natural reaction to life in general; it is more the attributes of grimness, ruthlessness, lust and arrogance that I find, and, above all, the absence of fear in their kingdom.’ This led him to pose flowers as living creatures endowed with human values and characteristics. ‘Be he able to express the blowzey [sic] fugitiveness of the poppy as could Jan van Huysum, the slightly sinister quality of fritillarias as Breughel the Elder, or the downright evil of some arums, the elegance, pride and delicacy of irises, the strident quality of delphiniums, the vulgarity of some double peonies, chrysanthemums, roses, and most dahlia … all this and much more the flower painter has to do.’

  The notion of evil in an arum lily may be questionable but the idea that portraiture covers everything, that it’s the life that matters more than the likeness – a sense of life made sharper and more immediate – was an inspiration after the cautionary procedures of the Central. ‘I thought Cedric was a real painter. Dense and extraordinary. Terrific limitations. I remember him showing David Kentish how to do Welsh tiles on a roof with a knife and I sort of smiled to myself.’ He began to feel proficient and in good company, compared to the Central. ‘There were people working seriously. You could talk to Lett-Haines – who actually ran the place – and he’d tell you about what it was like in Paris. I liked the whole thing there. There was a very strong atmosphere.’ At the Marlborough Head pub, where he had a room, a fellow lodger Ralph Banbury, a former accountant and admirer of Morris (with whom he had had an affair), would greet him every day with a ‘Hello, boy’, telling him that what he really wanted in life was to be presented with a crisp new five-pound note every morning. ‘There were certain undertones. When the war started he went into the Guards almost at once and was killed.’

  Having settled into an agreeable routine, suddenly, on the morning of Thursday 28 July, Lucian was awakened by crackle and glare. Across the street from his bedroom window the art school was ablaze. A Chinese medical student who had been acting as a model and was the only person sleeping in the building jumped in his pyjamas from an upstairs window. The excitement was terrific, for after the Colchester Fire Brigade arrived it took an hour to get the blaze under control and another six hours to extinguish it completely. Since he and a friend, David Carr, had been smoking in the school until late Lucian thought that he could have been responsible. ‘The Chief Constable of Essex came and looked and said it was a fuse, but I knew it wasn’t. I just wondered.’

  During the damping down, Alfred Munnings the horse painter and a future President of the Royal Academy, who lived just outside the village, drove up and down the street in his Rolls-Royce braying with delight. ‘He shouted, “Modern Art is burning down,” and “Hooray: now you’ll never be able to paint except out of doors.”’ Munnings was famously reactionary. ‘Wore one black and one brown shoe. Once he was at Waldorf Astor’s, drawing the horses, and Astor asked him what Brighton was like. “Lots of Jews on the beach buggering each other,” he said. Being a grandee, with a park, he had hunters and when war broke out he shot them all as in the First War they had been called up. He was impulsive: must have felt terrible about it.’ By then it was rumoured locally that the Home Guard had him down as a fascist to be disposed of were invasion to occur. He decamped to Exmoor.

  The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing the morning after the fire, East Anglian Daily Times, 1939

  The fire was dramatic enough to fill a page in the East Anglian Daily Times. Photographs showed students searching through the debris, among them Daphne Bousfield cuddling a Buddha that she had borrowed from her father, a retired major in the village, and recovered miraculously undamaged. The Daily Mirror ran one of these photographs and identified the youth in linen suit and sandals holding a charred sketchbook as ‘Lucien [sic] Freud a grandson of the famous psychologist’. It was a sort of debut. The cause of the fire was put down to a cigarette dropped on paint rags. Whose cigarette it could have been was not established. Morris set the smouldering wreckage as a subject for everyone, including himself, to work from. ‘The students’, Lett-Haines told the local reporter, ‘propose to rebuild the school for themselves, but I don’t see how they are going to do it.’ For the time being tuition continued in the billiard room of the pub and two miles away in the stables at Pound Farm, Higham, where Lett-Haines and Morris lived.

  ‘Pound Farm was lovely. It had a brick paved yard, which Cedric had made himself. There weren’t animals about, lots of evidence of them – cages and so on – but not even a dog. Stuffed birds he did have, which I drew.’ Lucian worked in the stables and on a low hillside beyond, painting a box of apples among other things, and was photographed with the others in the garden relaxing in a deckchair in shorts and sandals and borrowed sombrero. He served as a model too, and was paid for it. Morris himself drew from him: ‘an acrobatic pose, just a m
inute or so though’.

  Around the same time he became briefly involved with his cousin Jo Mosse. ‘My nice dumpy cousin. I was staying with her mother and my cousin Wolf and Michael Hamburger near Dunmow in Essex. I was impressed with her, as at the Central she had been having an affair with John Skeaping. Jo and I had hardly any sexual encounters until I sort of seduced her. Or she seduced me, actually. They were playing games downstairs with my aunt and Jo said, “Come upstairs.” Romance it wasn’t and it endeared her to me. It was just after the Central. We went on a bit and were always friendly.’

  By September 1939 Sigmund Freud was, he told Marie Bonaparte, ‘a small island of pain floating in an ocean of indifference’.8 Lucian was aware of this. ‘I was commuting to London some days. Grandfather was dying. He kept on having things cut away.’ He had already seen him a while before, through a glass panel in the door of his hospital room. ‘I didn’t go in. There was a sort of hole in his cheek, like a brown apple: that was why there was no death mask made, I imagine. I felt upset.’

  After asking his doctors to administer extra morphine Freud died on 23 September. Unlike the rest of the family, Lucian did not go to the funeral at Golders Green cemetery. ‘I did write to my aunt that it was not out of disrespect.’ He could have reminded her that, opposed as he was to religious rites, Freud himself had not attended his mother’s burial nine years earlier. His ashes were placed in a Greek urn presented to him some years before by Marie Bonaparte.

  That autumn Lucian tinkered with illustrations for what he and Micky Nelson from Bryanston conceived as the Black Book, a dark reflection, they imagined, of The Yellow Book in that it was filled with drawings influenced by Aubrey Beardsley in his Lysistrata vein, all rumps and smirks and pen-and-ink stippling. ‘It was in a black folder. It was juvenile but lively.’ They also had in mind Verlaine and Rimbaud escaping to London.

  In that devil-may-care spirit Lucian went to Oxford one day with Peter Watson – patron of young artists and prospective backer of a new literary review to be called Horizon – accompanying him on a return to old haunts. ‘He had been sent down because he gave a cocktail party and the street outside was blocked with so much traffic: Gerald Berners wrote a novel about him giving motorcars to everybody. Cecil Beaton was envious of his Rolls in beautiful colours and when Peter became fed up with Beaton he gave him a Rolls and never saw him again. He liked Oxford. We’d go to Oxford for the parties of boys I’d been at Bryanston with. A flashback: I remember coming into the foyer of the Randolph Hotel with Peter when the war began and a drunk man in evening dress singing:

  Mademoiselle from Armentières

  Parlez-vous,

  Hasn’t been fucked in twenty years …’

  Twenty-one years on from the Armistice and naturalised British in the nick of time, the Freuds were in no risk of being interned, but for Ernst Freud, as for most architects, prospects dwindled once the war began. He decided to rent out the house in St John’s Wood Terrace and take a flat in Maresfield Gardens, cheaper and safer once he had reinforced the ground-floor rooms against air raids. Lucian – who, with his grandfather dead and adulthood in prospect, I will refer to from now on as Freud – was more concerned with the prospects of the East Anglian School and what Morris had to teach him.

  Invariably, whether painting people, landscapes, birds or flowers (he was becoming a revered cultivator of irises), Morris bunched forms and wadded patterns and colours, giving portraits especially a conspiratorial if not mildly ridiculed look. Freud appreciated this (‘His Alison Debenham is pretty good; Mary Butts is amazing, and Frances Hodgkins, and I loved the one of Paul Crosse’) but, being far from assured as to what he wanted to achieve, he felt his way by drawing primarily and using paint for gloss only and elaboration. Here Morris was a force for good, setting an example of sustained application. ‘Paint the background and the eyes and work down in one go. It was great to watch: a feeling of sureness. He used to start at the top, as if he was undoing something, with roof, sky, chimneys all along, and go down, like a tapestry maker (except that they work from the bottom up).’ Morris taught him by example, encouraging him to step up production to, ideally, a picture a day. Painting excursions were arranged. ‘We went to Ipswich docks in Lett-Haines’ car. I did a brilliant, rather big, two foot by two and a half there, using linseed oil in the paint to make it more glistening. Ugh. I learnt to work properly, to work hard. I got the feeling of excitement working.’ He even sold one of them, to one of his father’s friends.

  Freud’s 1939 paintings are naive in that they appear untouched by, indeed oblivious to, academic discipline. His self-portrait from that pre-war summer is a face flattened, as it were, behind picture glass, spread like a pelt and barely more animated than a mask. It could be his version of a funerary portrait – such as the one given to his father by Hans Calmann, or those belonging to his grandfather and displayed in the study at Maresfield Gardens – posthumously painted and set into the wrappings of an embalmed head covering the actual face. Horses and Figure, a brown study of masked head and horse heads thinly painted on a sheet of tin, combines menace and alarm with affectionately observed hindquarters, muzzles and necks. Similarly Woman with Rejected Suitors is mock psychic, with intimate touches such as the crease in the elbow and curve of a nostril: details that make her more than a figure of fun. The woman was Denise Broadley from Dedham, a student contemplating becoming a nun. ‘Cedric and I had a joke about her: no one would ever take her to anything and these were her rejected suitors.’ Jammed together like skittles the imagined lovers haunt her. In that Freud had been reading Ulysses, she could be a dejected Molly Bloom. ‘I did some huge imaginary women’s heads. It was then that I realised how people change the air. It’s what haloes do … “He has that air about him, people say.”’ An essay in character, Woman with Rejected Suitors struggles for air. Poor Denise Broadley, sagging in her rayon blouse, was herself a Cedric Morris reject and Freud was being knowing at her expense. Eventually she decided against the convent life and went into the Land Army.

  In the mind’s eye sensations could be readily exacerbated. The newspaper seller in Memory of London standing hand in pocket on the lookout for punters was based on a man Freud used to see at the end of St John’s Wood Terrace, here transferred to a narrower and more sinister pitch – more like Flitcroft Street – and worked up into a likely pimp. In the autumn of 1939 blackout was a novelty and moonlight, or the lack of it, became appreciable suddenly after half a century of uninterrupted street lighting. Freud’s memory here is of night in the city, of the unheimlich or uncanny, the fear and thrill of back-alley encounters and the sound of footsteps in the dark, ‘Footsteps coming nearer’, as the caption read to a similar scene in Bill Brandt’s A Night in London, published in 1938, and in his photo essay ‘Unchanging London’, published in Lilliput magazine in May 1939 in which images from Gustave Doré’s London of 1872 were aligned with his: shots of men conferring on street corners in Jack the Ripper or Mack the Knife neighbourhoods with policemen near by, waiting to nab them. Freud had been reading Henry Miller’s Black Spring. This, he said, ‘is quite a bit in the picture’, not least Miller’s ‘gutters running with sperm and brandy’.

  ‘I borrowed a suit from my friend Michael Jeans that belonged to his father, dark-grey flannel, horrible pinstriped. We called it “The Suit”. I usen’t to be let into places. There was a pub in Shepherd’s Market that I was turned out of; I asked the man why. “No reason given,” he said. That’s why I wore The Suit. Anyway, I took Lys Lubbock out and we were walking along Piccadilly when I saw somebody to chase, or exercise my headfirst dive on, and I dashed across the road to where the Green Park railings had been taken down for the war effort, and dived over a barbed-wire fence and the brand-new suit got torn to bits. Lys said, “You’re really mad.” Really really mad, she meant.’

  PART II

  THE PHONEY WAR AND THE REAL WAR 1939–45

  5

  ‘A private language’

  At the
end of October 1939 the East Anglian School closed for the winter and Freud and his Bryanston friend David Kentish decided to go off on their own and paint. They rented rooms – £3 10s a week – in an isolated cottage called Haulfryn outside Capel Curig, near Betws-y-Coed, where the Kentish family had connections. Owen Kentish was a governor of Bryanston and his sister was headmistress of what Freud described as ‘an evacuated baby school’ in Bangor. ‘So they knew about this boarding house. David laid it on. Rent was very modest, which my parents paid. Full board. Rather nice landlord: Pritchard, ex-miner. It was the first time outside art school where I worked very hard on my own. Well organised.’

  They spent three months at Haulfryn, fully provided for, with a shed fifty yards from the house where they could paint. Memory of London was done there (‘in a mountain hut: nostalgia’) and the apples painting, begun in the stables at Pound Farm, became Box of Apples in Wales, its background Snowdonia, treeless, and therefore – in terms of displaced apples – marginally surreal. Not that conscious Surrealism was involved, the mountains shown were as Memling, Patinir or El Greco would have featured them: alps arising wherever. The sides of the crate fitted into the setting like the angular walls in the field outside Van Gogh’s cell at Saint Rémy. Pleased with what he had so swiftly accomplished, Freud wrote to Cedric Morris: ‘I’ve finished my picture of the crate of apples by putting a Welsh landscape in the background. I also painted a large monster and landscapes of more monsters and a street at night … I am doing a great deal of drawing all the time. I think my painting is getting much better and the paint is more interesting than it used to be.’1