The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘There was this thing called the Churchill Club. Soirées. Gatherings. I’ve got an idea that it was at the Clarks’ on Thursdays.’ It was primarily at Ashburnham House in Little Dean’s Yard, part of Westminster School, which had been evacuated. The headmaster, John Christie, had wanted the premises put to use: ‘Theoretically,’ his daughter Catherine Porteous remembered, ‘it was for officers from other countries, for their rest and recreation, but it was staffed by elegant hostesses: Pamela Harriman and Jane Clark were prime movers, so grand people went there.’8 Prompted by Craxton, Freud found this a good place to go and be seen in. ‘Eliot sometimes went, Spender – before his later rather admirable ridiculousness – David Cecil, Isaiah Berlin, Freddie Ashton. John Sparrow [a future warden of All Souls] was there, I’d just been to sea and he said, “I’m a sailor”; he was a non-acting commander: what he really liked was policemen. There were outings and concerts. It seemed very heightened in an exciting sort of way.’ There was the opportunity to hear K. Clark, for example, lecturing on ‘Looking at Drawings’. Being in the right place at the right time had its appeal as a form of luck: coincidence yielding opportunity, gossip triggering insights, disparate lives by chance connecting.

  ‘After the war my father did some work for Philip Hendy in a large house that he had round the corner from Abercorn Place; this was just after Clark left the National Gallery and Hendy had been appointed Director. My father did the interior conversion. He said to me, “He’s got an awful problem now he’s Director of the National Gallery: nothing he’s got is good enough to hang in the house except Henry Moore drawings.” Hendy was known as “the Bootlace” at the National Gallery. An odd coincidence: his daughter married – as second wife, my parents told me – Bob Woods, the farmer at Dartington that I had worshipped so.’ Such coincidence had potential. Ernst Freud’s clients were useful contacts for Lucian the aspirant who could now aim to draw well enough to match up to, if not better, drawings by Henry Moore, who happened to be K. Clark’s most favoured artist.

  Both sensible and idealistic, Clark’s programme of exhibitions at the National Gallery – which included in 1940 a display of more than 300 examples of ‘British Painting Since Whistler’ – and lunchtime concerts, principally piano recitals by the redoubtable Myra Hess, preserved the emptied building from requisition by a wartime ministry. Besides regular shows of war art, amateur and professional, there were exhibitions more to the Director’s taste: in 1942, for instance, contrasting paintings by William Nicholson and Jack B. Yeats. At the time Freud saw nothing in Yeats’ impasto. ‘I went round K.’s house with somebody and K. showed us a Jack B. Yeats of a flower in a washbasin. “It really has a quality, don’t you think?” he said. Being young, I said, “No.” And he said to the man I was with, “Now we’ve been told.”’

  Halfway through Much Too Shy, a film shot in the summer of 1942, George Formby, the toothy Lancashire comic, enters an art school seeking tips on how to draw bodies, given that he can already do heads. The camera follows him as he gawps at students engaged in producing cloven faces and other Surrealistic derivatives. So this is Modern Art.

  As in all his screen roles, Formby playing Andy the Handyman is an eager ukulele-strumming mock innocent, gormless yet canny. Sidling through the easels he comes across the character actor Charles Hawtrey, Soho layabout and future regular in the Carry On films but here the voice of student pretension, loudly echoing Isidore Ducasse. ‘Anyone can do the external!’ he cries. ‘We see inside a man! We see his soul, his thoughts, his fears and his worries.’

  Barely seen, glimpsed as a profile and head of hair in a corner of the studio is Freud the film extra. Though referred to by the Hawtrey character as a ‘brother brush’ (who, off screen, he said, ‘pursued me very much’), the director, Marcel Varnel, thought Freud pretty useless for he didn’t even know that artists’ palettes have to be held at a cocky angle in the left hand. ‘“Haven’t you ever”, he demanded, “seen a painter paint a picture before?”’ Freud thought it pointless explaining that he was left-handed. ‘The director said this is how you do it, so I said thank you and did it.’

  After two days at thirty shillings a day on Much Too Shy, which he did not go and see in the cinema (‘I felt a bit disdainful once I got my sixty shillings’), Freud had three further days at the Elstree Studios wearing a beret in a French Resistance drama that he remembered as being called The Private Life of Jacqueline, confusing it possibly with Talking About Jacqueline, in which there is no trace of a Frenchman in a Basque beret. Here he was required to pray in a cathedral during an air-raid scene and sit in an outdoor café. The film proved to be a stinker. ‘Incredibly crappy it was and a flop. The star a few years later was a doorman in a nightclub.’

  The suggestion that he might try getting work as an extra by signing up with United Castings had come from the actor James Donald, ‘quiet and sort of puritanical, very unqueer: just below being a top star’. He was to make a career of playing admirable officers, culminating in the leading pretty decent one in Bridge on the River Kwai. In 1942 he was captain in Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve, shot at Denham at the same time as Much Too Shy; Freud spent a day on the set and painted a mural for the bathroom of Donald’s newly acquired flat in Primrose Hill, staying there for a while before Donald moved in. ‘It was a scene by the shore with slightly Russian opera girls looking out and a ship coming into harbour, from The Threepenny Opera, and a woman suckling a dog. Mixed materials: I used chalk and all sorts of stuff and he was really upset by it. He got a bit interested in art, especially Feliks Topolski, because he was a great admirer of Bernard Shaw who made that remark about Picasso and Topolski, that both, when they started a painting, it’s an absolute mess, and when Topolski finished it’s absolutely brilliant.’ No one going along with that, let alone baulking at the mural, could be regarded as a friend.

  The Anglo-Soviet Treaty signed in May 1942 prompted shows of solidarity. The red flag flew over Selfridges and the following month, just ahead of an officially ordained exhibition at the Wallace Collection (‘Artists Aid Russia for Mrs Winston Churchill’s Aid to Russia Fund’), the architect Ernő Goldfinger hosted ‘Aid to Russia’ in his modernist house in 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, with a display of works by Epstein, Hepworth, Moore, Nicholson, Schwitters, Klee, Sutherland and others, among them Craxton. Peter Watson was on the organising committee. A collector, Hugh Willoughby, formerly of Wildenstein’s, whom Freud remembered as leading ‘a very ordinary retired person’s life in Brighton’, lent one of his Picassos (‘he talked all the time about what they might be worth’) and Craxton went down to collect it. The painting was La Niçoise, a larky portrait of Nusch Éluard, wife of Paul Éluard, the bulk of whose collection had been acquired not long before by Roland Penrose, most notably Picasso’s Weeping Woman.

  When the exhibition closed Freud was asked to take a Picasso to Brighton, where Hugh Willoughby had temporarily converted his flat into a gallery. It was a sunny day and having placed the picture on the opposite seat in the railway carriage he marvelled at it. ‘I was so amazed that the bright sunlight in no way made it any worse or more garish or weaker or more painty. It was as powerful and strong as possible.’ He always maintained that the painting was Weeping Woman, but it was possibly the portrait of Nusch Éluard that he was returning to Hugh Willoughby. Whichever, it was the blazing panache that so appealed.

  ‘You can use your intent to make anything seem like anything: Picasso’s a master at being able to make a face feel like a foot.’

  Undated: typed on his father’s headed notepaper with the ‘Ernst’ of ‘Ernst L. Freud’ obliterated:

  Darling Felicity

  I would love to come down this weekend. thanks very much for your letter I went to Brighton last Monday to see some wonderful Picasso pictures that a man has. I went too the opening of that enormous exebition for Russia in portman sqare [actually the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square] wich is rather awful, and saw many familiar faces including moudie, allan walt
an, algy newton and two old ladies of ninety, who said to one another ‘what I REALLY like is pure spontaneous enjoyment’!

  I have finished my piture of those birds and men [Landscape with Birds] I might bring it down to show you. Jonnie craxton and I are thinking of opening a new Russian barbers shop where you can get a timoshenko haircut sitting in one of timo’s saddles with cotton wool from turkistan in your ears, chewing some licorice roots from siberia. I bought some lovely postcards from victorian times where you pull leavers and people start doing acrobatics or change their clothes disrobe and change into witches flowers start sprowting babies and couples start having champagne dinners behind the hedge … Lots of love LUCIAN.9

  In September 1942 the Lefevre Gallery included Landscape with Birds in ‘Contemporary British Paintings’. ‘Newish-comers worth marking,’ the Studio commented: among them were Denis Wirth-Miller, Betty Shaw-Lawrence, John Minton and Michael Ayrton. To Freud’s amazement the painting sold. ‘I heard it was someone French or foreign and the only person I knew to do with the Foreign Office was Donald Maclean – the Russian agent – so I got him to do some spying and he found out that a man in the French Embassy had bought it.’ He remembered his reaction to being told that a complete stranger, a Free Frenchman indeed, had bought it. What a boost. He was up and running. As the nursery rhyme said:

  All the birds in the air couldn’t catch me.

  Saturday [late 1942]:

  Darling Felicity thank you so much for the bugle it is delishious so are you I find I can play many a strange note on it. I got you a very old scarlet and dark blue coat with brass buttons and white cord and strange decorations and R.M.F. written on the shoulders its lined with white wool and red silk and its very warm but I can not send it to you now because its being painted in a picture but I will when its finished

  There is comlete chaos here and I have just managed to recover an aluminium frying pan which I left in the garden a month ago …10

  Sitters were hard to find and harder to retain, Freud found. Gerald Wilde, who stayed at Abercorn Place at Peter Watson’s behest towards the end of 1942, seemed well placed to do so; having been discharged from the army as ‘psychologically unfit’ he was presumed available but, being more squatter than guest, he felt no obligation to sit. Wilde, who was a spasmodic painter with a volcanic talent and temperament, had been taught, a little, at Chelsea School of Art by Graham Sutherland who, he maintained, had then stolen his ideas and a stack of paintings besides. Initially Freud was impressed by the little man’s lively rancour. ‘He rebelled against his teaching and set himself up in the art school and Graham minded that. K. Clark went to see him and bought four or five things: he had a room of things he bought just to help the artist.’ This was, surely, a sitter in a million, providentially arrived at number 14.

  Stories about Wilde abounded, mostly apocryphal but sufficient to make him legendary in Soho and beyond. Was he the sole survivor of a bomb-disposal squad? Certainly he had been in the Pioneer Corps for a while during the Blitz, working on demolition, but there was no record of any such incident. After his discharge he had done labouring jobs. Drunk or sober but mainly drunk, he had it in for policemen and would shout at them in the street; again, Freud liked the sound of that and his ability to paint profusely from time to time, not diligently but on the hop. Naturally, when Joyce Cary’s novel The Horse’s Mouth appeared in 1944, word went round that his Gulley Jimson, a rogue genius of a painter, just had to be him, though in fact Cary would not meet him until 1949. Yet Wilde assured Cary that he was the original.11 Similarly, though not related to Oscar Wilde, he had succeeded earlier on, by virtue of his surname alone, in being taken up by Lord and Lady Alfred Douglas. Nifty opportunist that he was, no sooner was he settled in at Abercorn Place than he took to foraging locally: too close to home, where Freud was concerned. ‘He went round to my mother – he sensibly got her address, it was in the phone book – touching her for money, and telling Lady Alfred stories. My mother had this side of being a very good person and suddenly had a bit of scope. (Stephen and Cle weren’t going to bring in degenerates.) But my father came in. “This can’t go on,” he said, seeing Gerald, with his wall-eye and everything. My mother said afterwards, “I’m afraid your father shouted at him.”’

  Freud couldn’t get Wilde to settle. ‘It was difficult. He was difficult. Insensate rages in the mornings.’ A painting on panel – an architect’s sample scrounged from home – was begun and developed to a point where the incompletion reflected the sitter’s character: Wilde as a toby-jug head in three-quarters profile, the skin translucent (thinned Ripolin), a curve of mirror frame lodged behind him like a broken halo, he who had just seen fit to shrug off the offer of a stipend from Sir Kenneth Clark. Why take money, Wilde reasoned, from the man who paid for the upkeep of that unforgivable Graham Sutherland? The marked discrepancy between the eyes was evidence of Freud’s growing exactitude. His left eye had been damaged, Wilde said, when his mother threw a flatiron at him. Or was it, he mused, an accident with a knitting needle?

  Darling Felicity, Wednesday night [late 1942]

  Do lets meet at Hadleigh next weekend or the one after. Let me know if you can and when? Ive just seen a play called ‘a month in the country’ with Michael Redgrave which very good. Ive finished painting your coat so you can have it now Ill bring it down when we meet. I bought some red flannel today the man in the shop said that lots of doctors and Medical Men come in to buy it as there is a certain something in the die that does something to the eye, really most mysterious!

  My Wales trip has been postponed till March. Weve had a crazy boy staying here who kept on eating the crescents off Jonnies still life which he had procured with immense difficulty I am beginning to be able to play some quite eerie noises on the bugle write soon best love from Lucian12

  The sightless two-faced Janus head, a plaster cast belonging to Craxton lugged upstairs for Still Life with Chelsea Buns, was a good substitute for the irksome Wilde. Freud balanced it on the table edge like a chess king checkmated, poised to topple. The cracks in the bust, the hairline branches against the leaden sky, the faceted lumps of coal (‘I was very keen on coal’), the rounded edge of the zinc-covered table (‘partly Ripolin there’), the folds of the red jacket – Boer War period, bought from Bell Street market – and the raisins embedded around the navels of the buns from the Fitzroy Road bakery, are near-animate; the materials – dough, flannel, plaster, metal, coal – swap characteristics. The bust seems as rumpled as the cloth, as fossilised as the coal; the buns are sticky ammonites. Even the floorboards have individuality. Freud was pleased with these. ‘I’m really laying them, I thought.’ Surreality plays no part here, for this is a clear account of actual things to hand enabling the imagination to take hold.

  The Leicester Galleries New Year Exhibition for 1943 included a drawing by Craxton, Landscape with Rocks, which was reproduced in the Listener (‘one of Jonnie’s pictures did you see it?’ Freud asked Felicity)13 where, moreover, the critic R. H. Wilenski singled it out for comment: ‘Craxton gives us formal inventions conducive to some mood.’ The mood was elaborately wistful and the style over-exercised in that a prophet or shepherd was posed among crystalline rocks against a backdrop of pointy mountains. Wilenski went on to commend a number of ‘attractive works’ by, among others, Paul Nash, Allan Walton, William Scott, Ivon Hitchens and Lucien (sic) Freud. In the pursuit of recognition any mention was better than nothing but, clearly, Craxton was establishing a lead.

  In Freud’s experience ‘You couldn’t go out in the blackout without getting the clap.’ Adrian Ryan, a painter acquaintance, recommended a doctor, ‘Dr Freumann, who became one of the Dr Feelgoods in New York and was doctor to the Turkish Embassy; he lived in a modern block of flats in Bayswater Road with his mother in great style. I said, “How much is it?” “I’d have thought you need money,” he said and gave me some. And then I went back to him. “Where do you find all these beauties?” he said. He [Adrian Ryan] had a luxurious
flat in Maida Vale with Soutines – his uncle had money – and had deliberately made himself into something based on a photograph of Modigliani: how exciting, for someone very young – in his early twenties – to live with Soutines.’ Ryan bought Man Wheeling Picture and Freud gave him the drawing Chicken in a Bucket, which Ryan then copied. ‘He moved to Cornwall and never looked back; wrote two or three books, one on “Still Life Painting”. Say no more.’

  Freud also got to know Dylan Thomas, then working for the BBC. ‘He was quite sneery and was rude to me, to do with making assumptions re my friendship with Stephen. Once he came away from Peter Watson’s flat, having gone there to raise money, pulled a wad out of his pocket and said, “Done well.” I thought that was a despicable attitude. I’ve never been alive much to repercussions.’

  After nearly ten years in England Freud was alert to social distinctions and attuned to the culture of understatement. He still spoke (and would do so for the rest of his life) with traces of German accent, syntax and intonation, but decidedly less so than his parents. His demeanour was obviously to some extent his own invention; he liked to appear elusive, partly out of shyness.

  Postmark 24 February 1943 on a pre-First World War postcard of Japanese soldiers:

  Darling Felicity Do lets go this weekend to Benton End I have not yet written to Lett but I will try and phone him at the pub but even if I don’t get hold of him I am sure its OK anyway they like surprises also I feel that if I rang he might billet you with Lucy which would be a bore. Gee its foggy here! Note the smart and handsome japs love Lucian.14