The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘She found some letters the girl had written to me and wrote back a letter signed “Freud and Co” saying “just leave us alone”.’ By another account the letters were from Pauline Tennant; there were probably letters from both. ‘The girl on the Scillies proposed to me but I said, “I can’t; I’m sort of not free.” So Lorna said, “I thought I’d given you up for Lent but I’ve given you up for good.”’ The falling-out was violent. Freud did all he could to win her round; he gave her a white kitten, presenting it to her in a paper bag; and then he galloped on a white horse across the fields and up to her window at Marsh Farm, suicidally fast. ‘At the time of the break-up she had drawings, small ones, which she destroyed and she wrote to tell me so. It was the end. I wondered why. I was very cut up about it.’ One surviving drawing, inscribed ‘For Lorna 27.11.45’, was a clean sweep of Scillonian beach with a single pebble, a lone sea thistle and black rocks like sharks’ fins in the sea beyond. He also sent her the emblematic bleeding heart and pierced hands and feet the size of a prayer card. ‘She was more and more Catholic.’

  Craxton said, ‘Lucian was really in love and when she dumped him he was terribly hurt.’32 He went after her, and there was an incident with a shotgun. ‘I remember shooting,’ Freud admitted. ‘I wasn’t aiming at her; it was, as it were, an Annunciation.’ The Wisharts always associated one particular tree as being the one that Freud had shot. Or was it that he hit a cabbage?

  When Freud went to Paris the following year he lit candles for Lorna. ‘Without being religious, it was a way of keeping in touch.’ He hardly saw her again. ‘I’m never any good at going back.’ She constructed a shrine in the form of a grotto, destroyed the letters that he had sent her, took up gardening and attended mass daily. Reconciled with her husband, she nursed him devotedly at the end of his life; he died in 1987, she in 2000. For Freud she remained an ideal figure, a true muse; her dismissal of him was all the more disheartening in that he had obsessed her and she had forsworn him. This was a passion that he could all too easily understand. Did her newfound faith diminish her liveliness? ‘I can’t say. Probably a lively religious life.’

  Preoccupied yet readily diverted, Freud had appetites to slake. Dick Wyndham’s daughter Joan, whom he had first encountered, by her account, at the poet William Empson’s New Year’s Eve party in Hampstead (presumably 1945/6) was one such distraction quickly realised and, in terms of involvement, about as weighty as a couple of picture postcards.33 Freud took her down to a basement nursery where Empson’s children, Mogador and Jacob, were sleeping. Empson discovered them there and chucked them out so they went off through the snow to his studio where a hawk sat in a cage eating a mouse. They went to bed. Next morning, she recalled, he drew the hawk and then, wearing his grandfather’s long black coat with a fur collar, took the hawk out for a walk. An involvement developed and she went around with him for several weeks, often with Johnny Craxton, ‘his inseparable companion’,34 to the Café Royal, to concerts in Chelsea Town Hall, to a performance of Picasso’s jibber-jabber play Desire Caught by the Tail and to second-hand clothes stalls in street markets. ‘A new twist to our relationship: we were in bed when a girl’s voice said “Cuppa tea, love?” and I saw this dark girl with huge eyes who totally ignored me and didn’t offer me any tea. The next two nights she slept on the sofa … I think her name was Kitty.’ What Freud really liked, she reported him as remarking, was to pick up unknown little girls in the park and bring them home like stray kittens. ‘One thing I liked about Lucian was that he always told me the truth, no matter how painful. And’, she added, ‘you never knew where you were with him, and he liked it that way.’35

  A mixed exhibition at the Lefevre in February 1946 included Ben Nicholson, Sutherland (thorns), Craxton, MacBryde and Colquhoun, Bacon’s ‘Figure Studies’ picturing tweedy rumps and, on one wall, four paintings by Freud: Dead Heron, Scillonian Beachscape and the two portraits of Lorna Wishart. Bryan Robertson, writing in the Studio, in March 1946, on ‘The Younger British Artists’ (‘a brave company … carefully probing in different directions’) cited Ayrton, Craxton and Minton, but made no mention of Bacon or Freud. They did not fit in. Maurice Collis on the other hand, writing in the Observer, singled out Woman with a Tulip for comment: ‘a tiny portrait by Lucian Freud, the youngest of the young men here, shows remarkable skill. He may turn out the most gifted.’36

  Freud’s drawings of sea holly and cacti among the pines and palms of Tresco came as close as he ever would to the profuse ground cover effected by Craxton and Minton. His preferred objects were prickly and stranded. ‘On the beach in Tresco there was an old lifeboat and I did an elaborate drawing, the same size as Drumnadrochit, in ink, quite hatched, with the bottom of the boat with old green paint on it which I used.’ A similar boat painting – ‘a little long one on a bit of board, slight hole in it’ – he gave as a thank-you to Peter Watson.

  Cedric Morris kept two or three of Freud’s Scillies drawings stuffed in a cupboard at Benton End and would show them to visitors, smoothing out the creases. Dr Hoffer bought one, as did Podbielski, who had returned from Australia anxious to advance himself socially and write a novel. ‘I think he thought either a high-powered social life would help with the arts or the other way round. Suddenly he was a great friend of Princess Margaret: she gave a party for him in the fifties.’

  Dead Heron was reproduced a few months later in Orion III (a literary miscellany published by Nicholson & Watson), illustrating ‘Some Young Contemporary British Painters’, an article by Michael Ayrton, who wrote: ‘Oddly enough the work of the young painter who seems to me to approach nearest in treatment and conception to Stanley Spencer is Lucian Freud. Whilst not British in origin, he may be said to be of the “School of London”.’ Comparisons with Spencer always irritated Freud (Spencer, it is safe to assume, never noticed) because of their basic dissimilarity. At most they operated at cross-purposes with occasional overlaps. Spencer invariably composed, proceeding from drawing to squared-up drawing transferred to canvas and then filling in systematically; whereas Freud, even early on, painted by aggregation, building up the image not from drawings but from unmediated observation. The ‘School of London’ tag, applied here for the first time, was to be rather more irksome, indeed something of a stuffed albatross around his neck. Ayrton emphasised that Freud’s work was ‘completely divorced from Sutherland’s and from his friend John Craxton’s, in that the content is utterly static’. He argued that painters such as Freud were essentially northerners. ‘The core of that tradition is northern, whatever overstrains and undercurrents of Mediterranean art may be present. Its strength lies in this fact, and its individuality.’37

  Freud was learning to be unambiguous. As he went on he became more aware of the ways people operate, the ways things appear, the chances to be taken, the ramifications of acquaintance and the demands of involvement. The paintings were beginning to reflect his feelings in distinctive ways. For example, unlike the vanilla icebergs of conceit in Man with a Feather, the black rock islets in Scillonian Beachscape – painted back in Delamere Terrace in the winter of 1945/6 – slit the stillness of the dark-blue sea. The aggrandised pebble, so neatly flawed, was a find; the puffin came from a Bewick wood engraving; the sun-dried sprig of sea holly was taken from a drawing. Rocks, puffin, holly, stone: rhyme, contrast and singularity in a clear morning light, neither symbolic nor surreal. The play on scale (puffin, pebble, seed head) and the clarity of touch create a sort of vigil. Freud’s Scillies becomes Shelleyesque:

  The birds did rest on the bare thorn’s breast.

  Scillonian Beachscape was bought by F. S. Hess. ‘A great friend of my father for a time. Bought a house in Walberswick. Hess had been an incredibly successful financier in Germany, his wife was a sculptor who studied with Barlach, and he was monstrously dishonest. When he played chess he cheated, my father said. He had Scillonian Beachscape above the fireplace and it flaked, got dandruff and had to be restored.’

  PART III

  FRAN
CE, GREECE, FIRST MARRIAGE 1945–9

  12

  ‘French malevolence’

  Lieb Mut

  Thank you for your letter. No no no I’ve not got pap’s shirts and nightshirts. I wish I had as it is cold at night here. I’ve told you once allready I’ve not got them so try and remember that I haven’t got them! I suppose you found a piece of material covered in paint in the Rue Jacob which you took to be pap’s shirt tail but you made a mistake it was not a piece of material at all, but a piece of Paper resembling shirt material owing to the fact that it was damp. The marks on, what you imagined to be the remnant of shirt, were not Paint marks but bread crubms [sic] which naturally attached themselves to the paper. Now there is one thing which you will justly accuse me of: if your explanation is correct why did the marks which you claim to be breadcrumbs vary so much in colour and texture to give me the illusion of paint marks? You will say. Here is the answer. This optical illusion was made a possibility by the poor baking materials in Paris at the present time. Many loaves (such as the one in question) come out of the oven unevenly baked. I admit that the quality of fuel used in the oven as well as unexcusable carelessness on the part of the baker may be responsible for such a loaf.

  Love L.1

  This letter, written from Paris on pink wrapping paper in August 1946, was posted without a stamp. Lucie Freud folded it up, stuffed it back in the envelope and put it away. As a reply, sufficiently spun out to fill the crumpled tissue, it was elaborate enough to appease her. It was playful bluster designed to screen his needs. He wanted, he told me, ‘to avoid a confession that could occasion forgiveness and the threat that posed of resulting intimacy’. So it was worth insisting that he was having a quaintly hard time in Paris. Cold nights and dodgy bread: forget the missing shirts. Cloth become paper and paint become crumbs. His mother, he assumed, would pick up on the echo of Morgenstern’s ‘Song of the Derelict Shirt’:

  Kennst du das einsame Hemmed?

  Flattertata, flattertata.2

  ‘By the time the war ended I was longing to go to Paris. I went in 1946 when you were allowed to go; before that only those such as Peter Watson, who had property there, were allowed.’

  Gradually, after four years of occupation, six years of hiatus, Paris became attainable again. Kenneth Clark and John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate, were the first cultural emissaries, flown in by RAF bomber in October 1944; once there, Rothenstein jumped the queue of well-wishers in the rue des Grands Augustins and twice had brief audiences with Picasso. Herbert Read, who went nine months later for the British Council, remarked, in an article ‘Art in Paris Now’ for the Listener, that Surrealism was in eclipse, that ‘the general trend might be regarded as reactionary’ and that Picasso, Matisse and Braque were being productive. ‘And though they tend to repeat themselves they are all still far more inventive than any of the younger painters.’ By ‘younger painters’, he meant those approaching the age of forty. ‘There is little evidence of artists of a still younger generation,’ he added.3 Read, in Paris because of his role in selecting an exhibition of British Children’s Art, buttonholed Picasso at the vernissage and was gratified to be told by him, on looking at the work of twelve-year-olds: ‘At that age I drew like Raphael: how long it took me to unlearn all that and paint as naturally as these children!’4

  Paris was taken to be, above all other cities, the world capital of Liberation. Here lay future prospects, young artists from Great Britain could assume, though currency restrictions rendered travel there more or less impracticable. Nonetheless, Craxton managed to get there, aided by Peter Watson, in early 1946 and quite soon after wrote to Freud saying that Pierre Loeb might show their work at Galerie Pierre. Coincidentally the May 1946 number of Horizon carried poems by the eighteen-year-old Olivier Larronde interspersed with Freud drawings (a rose in a glass and an oyster) which gave Freud a pretext for contact and a sufficient connection when he arrived in Paris a couple of months later, Peter Watson, once again, providing introductions and wherewithal.

  ‘I stayed in the Hôtel d’Isly at the corner of the rue Bonaparte and rue Jacob. Jean-Pierre Lacloche and Olivier Larronde were there together in the hotel. It was a kind of slight arrangement; the idea was, they were supposed to teach me French and I was supposed to teach them English. Olivier learnt English in about ten minutes and I still can’t speak any French.’

  Rose reproduced in Horizon, 1946

  Olivier Larronde came from a wine family in Bordeaux. He had run away to Paris and had been living in a hotel when discovered and taken up by Jean Genet. ‘His room was so filled with books that when Genet tried to open the door he couldn’t.’ Larronde’s first book of poems Les Barricades mystérieuses was published in 1946. He and Jean-Pierre Lacloche (who had occupied Peter Watson’s rue de Bac apartment during the war) packed their room with furniture and pictures, birds, snakes, scorpions and monkeys, an Italian greyhound and opium-smoking paraphernalia. ‘The flame was always there and the pipe was ready: it was good, supposedly, for Olivier’s epilepsy, though he only had it at night in his sleep.’5

  ‘Jean-Pierre was the son of two whores and adventurers; he had been brought up in America by his mother, who had had affairs with Charpentier the boxing champion and Maurice Chevalier: she went out only with very rich people. She said, when paid hollow compliments, “Put it in the bank.” His father had a colostomy bag as he had been on opiates since he was very young. He took him on burglaries, pushed him through the window of houses where he had dined. Jean-Pierre was nearly caught, and his father said that if he was caught he would denounce him. Jean-Pierre had been a war hero.’

  Finding the pair ‘friendly but distant’, Freud fended for himself. ‘It was clear that I was a tourist among natives and that they had no use or interest in me. Olivier invented words that should be in the language, words that he thought I’d understand. He knew I had two friends, so he would say, “Which would you rather do: kill Johnny Craxton or be killed by Peter Watson?”’

  Looking out for attractions, Freud cycled around Paris until his bicycle collapsed under him. The seamy Paris of Brassaï beckoned, the pungent Paris of Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord with Louis Jouvet as the crook and Arletty as the faithless tart, a Paris breathing still the studio mists of Les Enfants du Paradis (‘I remember feeling uneasy about Jean-Louis Barrault in that and liking Arletty’), the Paris of seeping poeticism where Christian Bérard’s designs for Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête made magic a dreamlike reality.

  ‘France is in an extremely fluid situation today and intellectual life is also fluid, tending to pour over everything,’ Stephen Spender told Horizon readers after his short tour of inspection in the spring of 1945.6 ‘The winds of Existentialism’, Studio magazine’s Paris correspondent reported, ‘blow so fiercely through the literary salons and cafés of Paris that some of our young protagonists of the brush are threatened by its contagious philosophy.’7 If existentialism stood for anything beyond attitude it stood for an elevated realism, free will founded on scepticism as opposed to the despicable self-interest of wartime collaborators, say. Accordingly it could be seen as the Second Front or second wave of Liberation. Young Meursault in Albert Camus’ The Outsider, which Freud read and admired (‘terribly good: the funeral, the mother’), was existentialism personified: ‘a modern type of hero, the man who is truthful and detached through a despair which releases him of obligations to others and to himself – to everything in fact except the truth that life is essentially absurd’.

  To Freud this was tonic, not in any intellectual sense. Intellectual attitudes were anti-instinct, he felt; though admittedly in France, where he hardly spoke the language, the idea of intellectuality had an abstract charm and allure. ‘It just seemed amazingly exciting. The thing that was so stimulating was the intelligence. In London if you saw people, you didn’t know what they were doing or where they were going; in Paris their urgency and feeling seemed strongly expressed, unlike in England. Even the way they drove. There was a joke:
“Why are there so many collisions in Paris? Because there are so few pedestrians and all the cars are trying for them.”’ Auden, who had been through Paris the year before, told Freud that he had seen signs posted up for the American troops saying ‘Drive Carefully: Death is So Permanent’. More Audenesque than existential it was, nonetheless, admirably terse. Under sentence of death Meursault says, ‘I laid my heart open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.’8

  In a basement cinema opposite Saint-Sulpice Freud saw Buñuel and Dalí’s L’ge d’Or (1930), since 1945 one of the long-running showpieces of a free Paris. What particularly appealed to him was the play on sensation: overt lust and quest compared to Neo-Romanticism’s soppy dolour. ‘The lovers in a formal garden, the politician and mistress spring round the tree trunk and then he gets a message to go inside and she, in her frustration, starts sucking the toes of the statues.’ Prompted and heartened he would buy a bottle of triple sec and lie in a boat moored on the Quai Voltaire thinking, he said, ‘I’m in Paris’ and watching the river move. He went to Les Bains Deligny, the floating swimming pool anchored in the Seine, and drew the people there. ‘I remember thinking you couldn’t tell whether they were rich or not or what their lives could be.’ Denham Fouts, who was occupying Peter Watson’s flat, ‘used to go and stand on the diving board and just jump up and down, posing, watching out for young boys to pick up’. It was a hot summer.