The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  In wartime London, with its battered, spiv-ridden shabbiness and intensified nightlife, Freud liked to see himself as a zoot-suit flâneur. Opportunity came for those like himself who, whether relative newcomers (‘gee its foggy here!’) or non-combatant go-getters, hadn’t the inhibitions of the born British, brought up to stick to their own and know their place.

  Moreover, being a naturalised subject of the King he was in no danger of being shoved into the Pioneer Corps or, worse, interned. Getting by was his preoccupation, spelt out in the table-top parades of his still lives. The red jacket, the Janus head and glinting lumps of coal could be regarded as emblematic in time of war; however, they perform more convincingly as disparate objects brought together for no other reason than that they were there because they were there because they were there: things that served, things interestingly arrayed. Freud now knew the need to focus exclusively, to concentrate. The drawing habit that had been essentially an urge to doodle and adorn had developed into sustained impulse. Now that he had his own room to paint in he could regard himself as an assured painter, and now that he could achieve intensity there was more likelihood of his being able to move from graphic rhyme, as it were, into poetic risk.

  An article by Kenneth Clark on ‘Ornament in Modern Architecture’, published in the Architectural Review, expressed disapproval for new ways in complication. ‘Every line of modern poetry labours with meaning and imagery till we long to throw the floundering poet some empty, buoyant convention on which, for a few seconds, he could rest and recover breath. But conventions no longer sustain; they sink, deflated, and drag down the poem or musical composition with them.’15 Freud’s Man with a Feather, painted at Abercorn Place in early 1943 and devised to mystify a little, is a portrait in questing mode examining the idea that conventionality is sustaining. In it the young man’s dilemma, whether to be surreal or metaphysical, is resolved into a show of attitude. As pensive as a Memling youth, as impassively composed as Giovanni Arnolfini in the Van Eyck marriage portrait (which had just been restored at the National Gallery), Freud presents himself coolly, collar askew, tie awry, hands placed just so. The contrivances in pose and setting are actuality rejigged. Calculatedly puzzling, the set-up creates pit-a-pat intrigue with blank windows blanking the mirror image and every element itemised: black tie, black jacket (‘keeping it all black’), black bird, black mannikin, black sky; pale face, pale fingernails, pale leaves, white feather. The artist’s painting hand – his left hand, that is – stretches across his body in a studied measuring gesture indicating that this is a picture of consequence, not to be dismissed as merely School of Cedric Morris but rather to be seen, and admired, as an apprentice masterpiece.

  Ambitious yet cautious, Man with a Feather exudes Maldoror dolour: ‘He waits for the twilight of morning to bring with its change of surroundings a derisory relief to his overburdened heart.’ Posed with ‘this imaginary house behind, with this imaginary man in the window’, Freud’s image of himself begs questions and proffers hints. ‘Slight Dreigroschenoper,’ he conceded: ‘the chambermaid’s song about the hotel by the harbour, which I also used in the mural for the actor. The bird on the window sill flew in from early things.’ The leaf-shaped stepping-stones trail back to the North Atlantic (‘I always loved the idea of icebergs; though when I went to Newfoundland I never saw any’) and refer back to the shattered glass underfoot in the hall at Abercorn Place. They were also (this being an elaborated conceit) a childhood mealtime memory. ‘We used to have cold vanilla soup, a German dish, and it had islands of egg white in it. To me, islands meant that a bit: Hiddensee. I always liked the early Auden poems that had islands in them, the thing about leaving islands: “The little steamer with its hoot / You have gone away”.’

  Characteristically, Freud’s recollection was briefer than the original lines from the 1st Mad Lady in The Dog Beneath the Skin:

  The tiny steamer in the bay

  Startling summer with its hoot.

  You have gone away.

  While Freud was still working on the painting, his most ambitious so far, Peter Watson slipped him £25 in fivers. ‘It wasn’t terribly much but I thought: this is it, I’m going to start living.’ In the Coffee An’ he picked up a red-haired girl (‘Sort of whore: not a real one as she wouldn’t have come back with me if she was’) and took her to his room where she stayed a night or two. She was impressed by the fivers, astonished at the picture and puzzled about Freud. ‘He’s absolutely mad,’ she told her friends back in the Coffee An’. ‘You know what he does? He does tiny yellow bricks; he just paints yellow bricks; fucking mad.’ He decided he rather liked being traduced. ‘I felt slightly proud at this; like it always says in the newspapers: “My wife doesn’t understand me.”’

  The large pencil drawing Cacti and Stuffed Bird, a still life assembled on Cedric Morris’s window ledge and completed during one of his last brief stays at Benton End, was reproduced in the May 1943 number of Horizon. Various breeds of cacti, some young and squirmy, others with lumps missing from their lobes, crowd the dead-and-alive sandpiper paraded in its glass case. Pleased with its edginess and complexity and the touches of Conté colour, Freud came to regard it as a sort of graduation piece, a parting view of the prickliness and parochialism of East Anglian School weekends.

  Undated postcard early 1943:

  Darling Felicity thanks for your letter I have been to Cambridge for a week. I did a picture of a baby there. Do come to London for easter I have bought an enormous stuffed fish. I sold that cactus picture I did in Hadleigh I am doing a very large self portrait I bought a book called ‘LONDON’ with engravings by Gustave Dore for a shilling in Cambridge I had always wanted it. I am overjoyed tonight as I have just found a tube of Francis Foxes analeptic herbal ointment for the scalp which I had lost for weeks. I quite agree with what you said about C and L [Cedric and Lett]. Im afraid there will be a great catastrophe there one of these days. I have found a shop where all the garments are as interesting as your red coat. You must come to us when you are in London lots of love Lucian16

  Rummaging through junk shops and street markets in search of things to draw or wear or brag about was reliably stimulating, never more so than when Craxton came upon a hand-embellished print by William Blake: Satan Exulting over Eve. At a shilling Doré’s London was less of a bargain than the £15 Blake, but its scenes of the metropolis a century earlier, alternately fogged and benighted, elegance contrasted with grizzled poverty, backed Freud’s notion of being, like Doré, a graphic adventurer, slipping freely from posh to desolate to rakish: ‘so free, so free, so free’.

  ‘I’ve always liked buying things. At Bryanston the terrible picture by David Barker. Craxton knew a bit about china and dealt in it and I got to like things. Early imitation Chinese, as Bristolians liked it: pottery imitation porcelain. I used to collect Bristol plates, an early Queen Anne one, a Delft bowl, an early one with flowers on. Ian Phillips borrowed it and broke it and felt terrible and gave me a piece of furniture. I had a passion for Spanish rugs made in prisons and monasteries: traditional Spanish birds and fish designs, very vigorous, marvellous colours, blue and white and sometimes red and black. Miró colours.’

  Social rummaging was a parallel pursuit and, again, Craxton had the greater initiative. He introduced Freud to Tom Kendrick, Curator of Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum, who took them to the Savile Club where the pre-eminent Robert Donat gave them tickets for plays. ‘Craxton was a tremendous crasher. If he was in the country he would just go to a house and ring the bell. “The back door is always open,” Jane Clark said to him.’

  In the spring of 1943 Peter Watson rented Tickerage Mill in Sussex for a year from Dick Wyndham, known as ‘Whips’ Wyndham on account of his keen interest in chastising young women. Isolated in woods up a long private track with its own pond (where the ashes of Vivien Leigh, a later tenant, were to be scattered), Tickerage served as a weekend resort for Watson’s friends and protégés. Freud and Craxton were among the first
, and the Horizon hangers-on, notably David Gascoyne, a literary prodigy six years older than Freud, who had gone to Paris aged seventeen and there gained admission to Surrealist circles. He sat for Freud, eyes closed, pondering a phrase or savouring the Christian mysticism that was already superseding Surrealism in his philosophy. ‘At night,’ he had confided to his journal five years earlier, ‘I lie tormented on the yellow eiderdown, a prey to acute mental conflicts and disintegrating doubts. A sort of dialogue goes on inside my head.’17 During Gascoyne’s fortnight at Tickerage Freud drew him awake and sleeping, his brow consistently furrowed.18 Gascoyne’s talk of ‘the velvet crater of the ear’19 was too poetic for Freud to stomach; he did however design a bookplate for him: ‘David Emery Gascoyne’, the poet rejuvenated in a school cap topped off with a leering dog, and with an assortment of fur, flesh and fowl plus four-legged fish trailing around the label’s edges. An animal garland for one who described himself as a ‘Poet-Seer’ and, in later drawings, looked blinded with despair.

  Darling Felicity [spring 1943]

  I am sorry I have not written before I enjoyed the Sunday of that weekend very much I was forced to stay on till Tuesday as I wanted to finish that cactus picture which I did. Cedric wrote a letter to my mother asking her to persuade me not to come down again as I was too destructive and unscrupulous. It does not surprise me really as he was unusually friendly over the weekend. I think they must have found out that I don’t come down to Hadleigh entirely to see them. Here is a proof of David [Gascoyne]’s bookplate. I have bought an enormous mirror shaped thus [an arched frame] the painting with your coat in it is finished at last Is it not getting rather near your easter holiday/vacation? I have asked a rather sinister woman to write a letter to the british council asking if I could be sent to spain to radiate british culture but I doubt if anything will come of it at all lots of love Lucian20

  Though invited by Watson to stay at Tickerage, Michael Hamburger, emerging poet and translator, did not go. ‘Probably I couldn’t get leave from the army; I didn’t want to go because I knew he was homosexual and that put me off.’ Freud thought Hamburger – a living reminder, for him, of the Tiergarten and the next-door sandpit in Berlin – was too ready with his aspersions. He drew Watson, sharp yet diffident, as did Craxton: similar drawings, three-quarter face, but differing apprehension. ‘Peter Watson had the most immaculate manners and would never have tried anything.’ He and Watson cycled over to Berwick, near Firle, where Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell had supplied fresco-like wall paintings for the church on sheets of plasterboard. All too typical Bloomsbury with their mildly cloistered air, they had been installed and dedicated a few months before. ‘They were not as bad as I thought, but no impact.’ Back at Tickerage, where Bloomsbury creativity was held to be exclusive stodge, there was every chance of drama: if not in the Mill itself, then on its doorstep.

  ‘In the mill house, across from it, Natalie and Robert [Newton, the actor, son of Algernon Newton] lived. Natalie went off with Dick Wyndham. She was extraordinarily funny and witty; she escaped from a loony bin and they rang up Hermione Baddeley and said, “She’s heading your way.” I saw her once in the Gargoyle: screams of agony from the corner where she was with Jocelyn Baines (who wrote about Conrad) and I heard her say, “I couldn’t help it, darling, your eyes are so like little ashtrays.”’

  Little Shelford [May 1943]

  Darling Felicity, How are you? Thank you for your letter. I’ve just spilt a bottle of Indian ink over my sheets. I did enjoy seeing you in London even though I did not really get a chance to talk to you, which I had wanted to probably because of the cold and everything being rather chaotic. I thought you were looking teriffically glamerous. Do come up and stay for whitsun if you would like to. I am staying at a very creamy place. Every morning many parcels arrive each one contains a dead animal mostly chickens and Roosters gamecocks sometimes a rabbit once a baby Pig. I have been making pictures of them. I did one of a gamecock in a bucket of hot scummy water and the fumes and smell of decay was so overwhelming that it sent me into a coma. These animals attract a special kind of fat blue and green fly they are terribly depraved and eat so much of the carcas that they go mad, buss slowly through the air in a dizzy manner and dive with a splash into my paint water where they die.

  Ive bought a stuffed deap sea fish with a beak and spikes all over it like a Cactus of which Ive done a picture. Allso I got a wonderfull book about Deseases of the skin with amazing illustrations you must come and see it. Have you seen the Horizon with my things?

  I have been riding a great deal here it really is one of the most exiting things there is it makes me feel about three times more alive and powerfull than I do otherwise. I put some money on a horse in the two thousand Guinnies next Tuesday called ‘Pink Flower’ I may go to Newmarket to see it run I wish you could come along as well. Do write soon to No 14 as I shall be back there soon lots lots of love lucian21

  Kingsway (18:1) won by a short head from Pink Flower (100:9) in the Two Thousand Guineas at Newmarket on 25 May 1943. If horse riding made Freud feel about three times more alive and powerful than normal, it beat betting by only a short head. The risks differed but, being related, were in the short run equally compelling.

  Craxton and Freud went down to Dorset together a number of times visiting Craxton’s friend Elsie Queen Nicholson, known to her circle as EQ, who was then thirty-five and whose husband the architect Kit Nicholson was serving in the Fleet Air Arm. She had left London with her three children to avoid the Blitz and was living at Alderholt Mill in Cranborne Chase, near Fordingbridge, a house of Regency and Aalto furniture and an Aga, Satie, Kurt Weill and jazz records and paintings by William, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, her father-in-law, brother-in-law and ex-sister-in-law respectively. She designed for Edinburgh Weavers and had a drawing of cabbage leaves reproduced in Horizon in April 1943. Craxton had known EQ since 1940 and the area of Cranborne Chase since childhood, so much so that it furnished him with his formulaic landscape of curvaceous hills. Freud suspected, unconvincingly, that Craxton had had an affair with EQ: they had been to Wales together in 1942 and ‘something happened; she was twice his age.’ The real attraction was her liveliness and hospitality and the busy disorder of family life.

  The three of them went once to Swanage, where Craxton and Freud clashed on the dodgem cars by the harbour, so much so that the operator gave them each a ten-shilling note to desist. ‘We were completely alone, taking the cars in the morning, driving straight at each other,’ Craxton remembered.22 ‘Lucian bought a lobster and drew it until it stank too high; it was thrown on to a roof where it broke in pieces and fell to the ground.’ They painted outdoors at Alderholt Mill and drew indoors, companionably and competitively; it was, Freud felt, a bit like Capel Curig all over again but more entertaining with Craxton as opposed to David Kentish. ‘Its very wintry here and luxurious,’ he told Felicity. EQ’s children being there brought out the childishness in the pair of them. Her son Tim had a distinct memory – he was four or five at the time – of Freud and Craxton horseplay: fighting over a newspaper. There were parlour-game drawings in which everyone had a hand. Later, as fortunes changed, there was to be dispute over who did what and when, in which Freud was responsible, probably, for a man, a dog and a horse but not for the higgledy-piggledy setting coloured in by someone else, which reappeared decades later as Man and Dog by a Tree and lawyers became involved.

  Fantasy was required, or stretched truth, and Freud responded. ‘I was very keen on doing tapirs. I did a picture, which I gave to David Gascoyne and which he immediately lost, and then I was in Dorset and started drawing these little tapirs and I thought they are too little and too silly, so I drew a canvas around them and then I thought what shall I do with it? So I put a barrow underneath and myself wheeling the barrow and wearing the cap that I got in Canada, which had flaps and was made of crinkly leather: a real memento.’ Freud suspected, in retrospect, that Man Wheeling Picture, a drawing worked up in ink, watercolour and
varnish, represented, consciously or not, his departure from Benton End: the artist quitting the East Anglian School and trundling his bizarre accomplishment to town. It also declared his availability as a weekend guest.

  ‘I used to cycle down to EQ’s. I’d hold on with both hands on the back of lorries – they used to have a big platform with metal bar – and they’d brake suddenly and try and throw me off.’

  ‘We learnt a lot from each other,’ Craxton said. ‘I learnt from Lucian how to scrutinise, which I wasn’t doing before, and Lucian learnt how to plan pictures and use colour. We were packed off to Goldsmith’s College by Peter Watson. Peter was worried about Lucian not being able to draw. Peter said, “Lucian must learn how to draw a hand before he distorts one.” It was Graham Sutherland who recommended Goldsmith’s.’23

  Sutherland had seen in the May 1943 Horizon Freud’s drawing of the poet Nicholas Moore’s baby daughter sleeping in a basket with her rag-doll monkey sprawled across her. The drawing impressed him and he got in touch. ‘Small and neat (trousers creased) and intense, with a look of avian anguish,’ as the critic Geoffrey Grigson described him,24 Sutherland was a generation older than Freud and prominent among Kenneth Clark’s most favoured artists. For draughtsmanship, he thought, where better than Goldsmith’s, where he himself had been a student; his friend the Principal, Clive Gardiner, had no objection to them coming in and drawing from the model, he said. ‘Provided it’s not crowded and you don’t keep anyone else out.’

  They did not take to life drawing classes, preferring to work freely elsewhere. One of the people who had been in hospital with Freud told him about the shelter in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields and another, for the homeless, by Charing Cross station, so he went there to draw. ‘The place had a St James’s club type name: it was an all-night refuge for tramps. They slept leaning on bars and mattresses, like birds.’ He also drew at the Roehampton swimming pool and in Kew Gardens. Then, a month or so later, Sutherland asked if they would like to go with him to Pembrokeshire, the corner of West Wales that served him as his spiritual landscape. He had rhapsodised over it in a letter to Peter Watson (readdressed to Colin Anderson of the Orient Line as a more eminent recipient) for publication in Horizon, extolling its primordial seclusion. ‘A mysterious space limit – a womb-like enclosure – which gives the human form an extraordinary focus and significance’.25 In his Palace Gate flat one day Peter Watson suddenly took Sutherland’s Steep Road drawing off the wall and gave it to Craxton.