The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  The way a life goes happens by chance: someone met, something read. Lucien Fleurier in Jean-Paul Sartre’s story ‘The Childhood of a Leader’ reads Sigmund Freud on dreams and this fires his imagination. (‘“So that’s it,” Lucien repeated, roaming the streets. “So that’s it.”’) Like Lucian, Lucien finds inspiration in Rimbaud, Lautréamont and the Marquis de Sade. He learns ruthlessness. ‘The first thing to convince yourself of’, his seducer tells him, ‘is that everything can be an object of sexual desire, a sewing machine, a measuring glass, a horse or a shoe.’9 For the newcomer from London, Paris was persistently enlivening. ‘Montparnasse was very like Les Enfants du Paradis: the street life, wandering round, booths and shouting girls, so matey and friendly you couldn’t believe they were whores.’ These particular objects of desire were not for him. ‘Couldn’t afford them. I think if I thought of them as whores I wouldn’t have fancied them, the look and everything: trained in two and a half minutes. It’s also their sinister, horrible malevolence, and it’s to do with their intelligence, the way they were pressing and showing an interest without any knowledge.’ At every level the culture seemed fierce and perverse. ‘Every restaurant had ridiculous prices which weren’t real prices,’ the understanding being that the true black-market cost would show up in the final bill. Sometimes, however, Olivier and Jean-Pierre would go with him to a restaurant and take the menu at face value. ‘They just paid that and left and of course couldn’t go back again.’ There was also the casual melodrama of the circus. ‘I went a lot. The Cirque d’Hiver and Cirque Medrano. You could go round afterwards and look at the poor animals in cages. I saw a charwoman brush aside the lions that had been roaring just before. They were doped of course. There was a cage with a wolf with three legs and a stump, gnawed away, and I heard a very ordinary French woman saying to a little boy, her son, “Comme elles sont jolies les blessés.”’ What a peculiarly French thing to say, Freud thought. Could she have been aware of the Marquis de Sade’s fetching remark: ‘Comme ces sont jolis les mortes’? No. That woman’s remark struck a chord. ‘There’s something noble and beautiful about stumps, it’s to do with noble pity. In England, if that happened, someone would say, “Talk about fucking morbid …” Some things are formative and this affected my aesthetic sense, so to speak. It was to do with the French attitude – French malevolence – because they are detached, in a way. With them, the eye plays such a strong part.’

  Quite apart from the distractions, it wasn’t easy to settle to work in a hotel room. Freud made a drawing of a castor-oil plant on the balcony railings outside his window, etiolated in comparison with his previous Scillies gorse and pines. ‘The feeling of the plant being different, potted in a different way. Very French. I felt – even though I didn’t use it – the balcony would imply what was behind: the shutters of the room opposite.’ Podbielski, who had introduced him to the Coffee An’ and since then had been to Australia and back, came to Paris. ‘Seeing the drawing, he said, “I had hopes of you, but didn’t think you’d do anything like that. It’s absolutely no good at all.”’

  Two sketchbooks were filled with Olivier and Jean-Pierre and their monkeys. ‘The good ones of Olivier were stolen by a girl in love with him. Lena went into my room and took the drawings.’ Lena Leclerq, a nineteen-year-old farmer’s daughter and aspiring poet, had met Giacometti in a café and then been introduced around. A few years later, at Giacometti’s suggestion, she became housekeeper to Balthus at his Château de Chassy, a job that ended with her attempted suicide.

  Michael Wishart arrived, sent by Peter Watson whom he had first met in Delamere Terrace. ‘On him the stifled yawn looked good,’ he wrote in his autobiography High Diver, published in 1977. ‘Peter’s cure for boredom was to interest the young. No one was better at it.’10 ‘Bright and clever and lively’, as Freud saw him, and a persistent reminder of Lorna, Wishart came to Paris with Ian Gibson-Smith who, incidentally, now owned Woman with a Tulip. ‘As he [Gibson-Smith] was pestering him, feeling slightly protective I let him move in with me – in my small room.’ There was an involvement, curtailed because Freud found it ‘physically painful’, he said.11 Anne Dunn, young heiress, aspiring painter, future Freud intimate (and later to marry Michael Wishart) confirmed this. ‘Michael himself told me of the affair with Lucian but I think it was of brief duration when they were both staying at the Hôtel d’Isly.’12

  Wishart sat for a painting of the Sunday-morning market on the Île de la Cité. ‘A barrow and a bird keeper: 26 by 22, on canvas,’ Freud recalled. ‘He was distressed if I blinked while he was painting my thumb,’ Wishart wrote. ‘However the extraordinary wit and originality of his conversation when he was still barely more than a child was so rewarding that I underwent this torment willingly.’13 Not for long though and when Freud went back to London to get money the painting was put aside. And then, returning to France, he met on the cross-Channel boat a young man called John Margetson en route to Switzerland, suggested that he break his journey in Paris and why not at the Hôtel d’Isly? Margetson spent three days there and sat each morning for the bird-seller painting. The head had been completed and Michael Wishart was not around, so Margetson’s green sweater and blue corduroy trousers substituted. After each sitting Freud took him out and about. ‘Lucian introduced me to an amazing variety of people including Giacometti and Jean-Paul Sartre (how existentialist we all were!).’14

  A few weeks later Freud scrapped the picture, which left him with The Birds of Olivier Larronde to complete: parrots bright as tin toys in a red tin cage. For this he did a number of preparatory sketches, and a drawing of a bird in a cage intended as a bookplate for Larronde. He also produced a small, chilly portrait of Robert Lemarle. ‘A queer, drunk, bitter man. He had been a doctor, struck off, and I met him through Peter Watson in London just after the war and he said, “If you come to Paris will you do a head?” and as I had no money I rang him up. He used to ring me at the hotel at three or four in the morning. Olivier and Jean-Paul were amazed at me not realising what that was about, it was so obvious.’ Needing an easel, Freud asked Lemarle if he could help. ‘He said, “Let me see …’ and borrowed one for me from the Galerie Zak. The gallery had Soutines. Soutine would bring in marvellous pictures and then demand them back to repaint the hands. So the gallery would get a man in to paint the hands in so that Soutine wouldn’t take the paintings back and destroy them. And it worked.’ Watson also gave him an introduction to Wilhelm Uhde, the Prussian art critic who had bought and sold Picassos before the First World War and whom Picasso had painted, purse-lipped, in his prime Cubist manner. He lived in the Place des Vosges and was the authority on primitives, most notably the Douanier Rousseau. ‘He discovered Bombois and other primitives and I said, “Why didn’t Bombois do the Place des Vosges?” “Probably because he didn’t get a picture postcard.” He wasn’t a dealer then: he wrote, and he was melancholy; reminded me a bit of my grandmother, he was so affected by things. It was a modest apartment, an entresol where servants had lived, with lots of books. Not nasty: lonely. He was very queer and there seemed to be some feeling … I felt quite pleased to get out.’

  A weekly fixture during this first stay in Paris was lunch every Sunday at the residence of Prince George of Greece, in the Avenue d’Iéna in the 16ème. ‘It was my poste restante; my mother was worried when I first went to Paris and so it was arranged. Very formal: servants in white gloves. One side of the dining room was hung with portraits of Kings of Greece and Denmark and on the opposite side were Bonapartes. Prince George – he was the favourite brother of the King of Greece, had a castle in Denmark and somewhere else – said, “We both like to look at our ancestors at meals.” In his youth he had collected drawings, a mixed lot, lesser nineteenth century, but I was looking round, rummaging in the cellar, and he had amazing things: I saw this Goya in a very rough frame. He had Goya drawings and Zurbarán still lives. They lived completely separate lives.’

  Princess Marie had just finished her three-volume book on Edgar Alla
n Poe (Edgar Poe: étude psychoanalytique) and she talked about it. ‘He was necrophile,’ she said, and Prince George said, ‘Ahem: we are at lunch.’ She was also preparing for publication, by John Rodker in London, Myths of War, a psychoanalytical study of the phenomenon of nations regressing to ‘primitive barbarism in time of war’, focused on the circulation of racist myths, slur and hearsay: ‘France, crushed as she was, could not resist this German anti-Semitic pressure which, moreover, many a French reactionary welcomed in compensation for the generous welcome which France, before the war, had accorded the persecuted of Central Europe.’15 From what Freud remembered this too was not a topic for discussion at table.

  ‘Their ignorance of life was so extraordinary. Princess Marie said, “We are lucky: we have strawberries from a place at Versailles, it’s so lucky getting these as ordinary people can’t.” But I’d just seen piles of them in Les Halles on my way there.’ The food was an experience in itself. ‘A whole head of parsley deep-fried in oil, drained, and you helped yourself with a spoon. The luxury was that you would have had to have had two gallons of the best olive oil.’

  Having tried drawing and painting in his room, Freud decided to have a go at etching. Betty Shaw-Lawrence from Benton End, who happened to be staying in the hotel, gave him an etching plate. ‘Maybe I asked, maybe I said I’d like to try it. I just scratched the prepared plate.’ The washbasin in his room served for ‘biting in’ (i.e. bathing the metal plate in acid) The Bird (a hummingbird that he had pocketed one night in a club perched in a cage the size of a toaster) and an even smaller etching of the French equivalent of a Chelsea bun. The printmaker Javier Vilató, whom he had met in the street on his way to the cinema one day, recommended a printer off the Quai Voltaire. Vilató introduced him to his uncle, Pablo Picasso.

  The liberation of Picasso in August 1944 had been almost as widely reported as that of Paris itself and two years on he was still the freed genie of Liberation, too famous to be seen in cafés or nightclubs. Vilató told Freud that when any American soldier came and was really crass and went on and on his uncle would say ‘I’ve got a friend who I’d really like you to meet who lives round the corner’ and send him round to Gertrude Stein. Jaime Sabartés, his secretary, ‘his concierge really’ Freud said, served to fend people off, leaving Picasso to live according to his image. ‘He fascinated me. His behaviour and the way he treated people and the way that he was so malevolent. I was wearing the tartan trousers left over from my exhibitionist period and he said, “Oh yes, when I was in London” – I suppose to do with the Diaghilev Ballet – “there were people wearing those trousers, but they were up to here” – up to his chest they would have been on him – and then he said, “I remember this” and he did “Tipperary”. Slight English syllables, more the tune. Picasso was always a performer and the more people looked at him, the more he did it. He said, “Do you smoke?” then put his hand on to a huge Moroccan figured brass lid and lifted it and there was a packet of Gauloises.’ On other occasions (he saw him seven or eight times, he thought, over the months) he and Picasso talked about their mutual acquaintance Roland Penrose’s penchant for being tied up by ‘La Lutteuse’, a woman wrestler. ‘Jean-Pierre got her as a treat for him and Olivier: a woman to make love with; there was talk about how nice it was. I felt sorry for her, as she was unmercenary, very simple, from Brittany. Then Roland and Lee got her to England and shared her and she had a nervous breakdown.’16 Freud particularly disliked Lee Miller (Penrose). “She had filthy manners: like lifting her legs up with no knickers so that young men could see: OK, but to do it after fifty was so disgusting.” And her war photographs ‘of someone who’s being threatened or killed and makes it look like camping. It’s true I’m biased, but her photographs: “First Person Who Got into a Concentration Camp” … Ugh.’ As for Penrose, future biographer of Picasso, well-intentioned patron of the arts and Surrealist aficionado: given his ‘pathetic masochism’ he was, Freud maintained, a mildly ridiculous do-gooder. ‘In London he thought he was just over from Paris for the weekend. George Melly was always dining there and once he introduced to Penrose a boy who had, he explained, been in jail. “A convicted thief?” Penrose said. “In my house?” He was shocked and alarmed.’

  The supremo of the dwindling Surrealist circles in Paris was André Breton. He assured Freud that he was one of his grandfather’s greatest admirers. ‘One thing impressed me: during one of the late lunches at Lipp’s with Giacometti, pompous Breton said to him, “I know you’re no longer one of us but your work is better than all of ours.” He felt he was the king, pope, and could confer these things. He was keeping up with things.’ Giacometti, on the other hand, was wholly admirable. ‘Very fierce and humorous, amused by things and quick.’ He loathed Picasso largely, Freud maintained, because when Annette Giacometti came to Paris wanting to see Picasso she was turned away by Sabartés. Freud told Giacometti about Lena taking his drawings. ‘He laughed and said, “Aaaah, la voleuse.” I think Alberto quite liked being stolen from.’ A pall of plaster dust covered everything in his studio: a small and narrow room behind Montparnasse with a single light bulb. ‘It took almost a mental discipline to distinguish between the paintings, the drawings and the sculptures. It seemed all the same activity: everything was white.’ He remembered posing for two drawings. ‘I used to work in my hotel until three or four in the afternoon and he’d take me to have a meal at Lipp’s, which was terribly nice; I couldn’t speak French much then and it didn’t occur to me that we could have spoken German, I so dislike speaking German. Not that I can very well.’

  Jean Dubuffet, the former businessman whose first one-man exhibition was at the Galerie René Drouin in May 1946, declared himself an outsider, ‘warmly existentialist’, he said, being involved in ‘the struggle with matter, rather than the aesthete attempting to capture the patina of an apple’.17 Freud was not impressed by his glib primitivism, expressed in larded scrawls. ‘I must say I felt very contemptuous. It was a rich businessman painting. In Temps Moderne there was an article saying “to appreciate the genius of Dubuffet forget everything you know about Art” and I remember thinking well, I don’t want to forget.’ The ‘mental spurts’ of Wols, little nervous collapses on paper, were more genuine, he felt; and the busy automatism of Henri Michaux (‘The ones where calligraphy is urgent drawing’), also the fervent battiness of Antonin Artaud, whose book on Van Gogh Peter Watson had published in English. ‘I wanted to draw him. We used to go to a Greek restaurant at the end of the rue Jacob, as Olivier and Jean-Claude could sign the bill there, and Artaud – he seemed very old, but he died when he was fifty-two – came down the street with a young girl, his muse, and I asked if I could draw him and she said – they must have known I was connected with Olivier – “Yes, if you can give him some opium.” I couldn’t oblige.’

  Larronde and Lacloche did little to encourage Freud. ‘When interesting people came to see Olivier and Jean-Claude in their large corner room – if Cocteau came, for instance – I wasn’t really welcomed. They would freeze me out. Genet often came, Giacometti not a lot, but he did come to smoke opium; he had a pipe there sometimes. I looked after their birds when they went away, but I had no money, no status. They treated me as an idiot. I was a clodhopper, rather.’ As in London, however, Freud managed to insinuate himself wherever seemed best for him. The painter-heiress Meraud Guinness gave a party in her place, 61 Cours Mirabeau, in Montparnasse. She had once nearly married Christopher Wood, was subsequently involved with Picabia and had now become a patron of David Gascoyne. ‘The house or flat was a real little dump; the party was too bohemian to have been considered very poor. Lots of wine. Alexander Calder was there; he looked very big in the place and he fell down the stairs drunk and as he passed he called out, “Your shoelace is undone.”’

  Freud had to return to London once or twice, primarily to collect – and conceal on the way back – his share of the small but growing income from the Sigmund Freud copyrights and his £8 a week advance from the London G
allery.

  The gallery was backed by Peter Watson, Roland Penrose and Anton Zwemmer and run by the Belgian dealer-Surrealist and promoter of Magritte E. L. T. Mesens, who liked to be known as Eduard. To his annoyance, Freud called him Ed. ‘Under the laws of Surrealism by Mesens it was easy for people of no talent to practise art. Mesens was a real dealer. When I produced things he was so greedy for more I felt he made it seem important. I’d never come across a dealer who did.’ This counted as professional encouragement.There were also his birds to see to. ‘I had left my pigeons with my mother and her maid thought they were hawks and fed them meat and they became infested of course with worms and were half-dead, so the first time I went back I had to kill them.’

  13

  ‘The world of Ovid’

  The charm of Paris was wearing off by the end of a stuffy August when a letter arrived from Craxton saying that he was having a good time in Greece and pressing Freud to come and see for himself. After the Scillies, Craxton had taken a downstairs studio in Adrian Allinson’s house two streets up from Abercorn Place, and when Allinson (‘old Edwardian painter: Café Royal scenes’) asked him to leave, he said that he just might have to mention to Mrs Allinson that he had heard the creaking overhead of Allinson’s studio couch. Whether or not he did resort to blackmail over those telltale sounds he stayed put. And, Freud added, ‘The amazing thing was that Johnny actually told me this.’ Craxton had been in Switzerland for a show at the Galerie Gasser in Zurich (‘Gasser was about thirty and had come to England to see what painters and boys he could have’) and, Freud gathered, the possibility had arisen of his being shot by the husband of the woman he stayed with. Consequently Lady (‘Peter’) Norton, who had been manager of the London Gallery in Cork Street before the war (‘Art-mad, even madder than I am,’ said Peter Watson) and whose husband was now the British Ambassador in Athens, had flown Craxton from Milan in a bomber – ‘he was very thick with her; he had to tell her erotic things on the plane, I suspect’ – fixed up a display of his work with the British Council and installed him in a room over the Embassy garage. The Ambassador, Clifford Norton (‘A moustache is what I remember about him, not that he necessarily had one’), had a civil war to preoccupy him and suggested that, given Craxton’s undiplomatic tendencies, the best place for him was the island of Poros. Craxton wrote to EQ: ‘But oh how heavenly the place is & inside the church I felt like preying [sic] for the first time in years.’1