The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Those who bought works did so mostly from personal involvement or connection. Man with Moustache, the portrait of Craxton, went to the tenor Peter Pears; La Voisine (The Neighbour), a drawing of Ruby Milton from Delamere Terrace (‘Mesens told me that “female neighbour” in French is “voisine” and I liked the sound of that’), was bought by David Carr. George Melly, the gallery assistant, and Robert Melville, who did the paperwork, were daily witnesses to the Dadaist side of Mesens competing with his greedy side. Mesens organised Surrealist dinners on Thursday nights at a Spanish restaurant. ‘George Melly read a poem about “a shower of knives and forks” and as he read he let a shower of knives fall on the table and we were thrown out.’ Others who attended included Jacques Brunius, musician and critic (‘very intelligent and a nice wife’), and the film-maker Humphrey Jennings, who impressed Freud as being quiet and sour and not long after, in September 1950, went to Greece looking for possible locations for a film to be called The Good Life only to fall backwards off a rock on Poros and consequently die.

  Mesens boasted that in ten years he never sold a painting to a public gallery in Britain and the showing and selling of Craxtons was a concession to his backer Peter Watson, as he disliked them. As did Douglas Cooper, former backer of the Mayor Gallery and arch-connoisseur of Cubism, who stood in the gallery one day shouting that they were rubbish. He also picked on Girl with a Kitten (which went to Stephen Freud) for ridicule. Absurdly so, Freud felt: ‘He wrote, “Academic painter tries to get interest by strangling the cat”; actually (though it’s not in the picture of course), one hand was supporting the back legs.’

  The show attracted little attention. ‘I think my work wasn’t thought to be a body.’ Unlike Craxton, who cultivated homogeneity on hessian, canvas and cartridge paper alike, Freud did not have an overriding style. He sold less well than Craxton, who considered Freud his junior. ‘He was dismissive of me on the whole. That didn’t bother me. He swapped a drawing of his for a painting of mine (Greek Boy); that was his feeling about my work.’

  Grudges, some rivalry and the loss of contact as Craxton took to spending all the time he could in Greece first diminished then ended their friendship. Up to then Craxton had been the better regarded of the two, generally speaking. Freud then overtook Craxton or, rather, moved into other circles. He was to maintain, not altogether convincingly, that he had not been aware of Craxton’s sexual preferences. ‘I only knew that Johnny Craxton was queer very late, after Greece (there had been a tarty boy in Greece); it took me years to find out. He always mocked queers.’

  Frank Auerbach, Freud’s great friend in later life, saw the falling-out as a deepening exasperation. ‘There was a resentment’, he told me, ‘of Craxton continually adducing a close relationship which, if it had existed – which I suspect it did – didn’t last for more than six to eight months. Lucian did rather grow out of Craxton’s basic frivolity. Craxton’s priorities, if you put it in order, were: having a nice time came first, slightly impressing people came second and doing some nice art came third.’23

  Occasionally, for a number of years from the mid-forties, Freud stayed with the Sutherlands at Trottiscliffe in Kent: Christmas ’44 for instance (Sutherland returned from war-art assignment in France the day before) and Christmas ’45. One year Graham Sutherland showed him a Cézanne drawing he’d just been given: ‘three or four squiggles: it seemed odd in this cottage: a large sheet with pencil squiggles’, taken from a sketchbook that Kenneth Clark had bought at £3 a page and used as Christmas presents.

  Once when Freud came down Sutherland asked him to go with him to Maidstone Prison (‘a marvellous Regency building, a bit like the Manet with the green ironwork’), its tall white walls gigantic in the backstreets. He had been asked to give a talk. ‘He asked if I’d come because obviously he was nervous. He was a local celebrity.’ On the way there they joked about being careful not to say the wrong thing but the inevitable happened. ‘When we got to the gate there was a queer-looking, well-spoken man who ushered us in. Graham said, “Lovely evening,” and the man said, “It must be, out there.” The Governor said that he was a scapegoat from an international fraud.’ They showed slides of their work and answered questions. ‘One really well-known burglar: we looked at his things and thought they were pretty good. He said, “You like them, eh? Do you think I ought to take it up professionally?”’ The Governor asked if they would like to come again, regularly perhaps. ‘Through Paddington I had a kind of rapport with the inmates. I’d like to come back, I thought. Though better not. It was not necessarily a question of take a sandwich with a screwdriver in, but they were so like the people I was living among. When we mentioned to the Governor – who was called Vidler and was by way of being enlightened – this very charming burglar, who used to sign himself “Tiptoes” at his burglaries, in lipstick, he said he’d give his right arm to cure him. “Tiptoes” was queer, the Paddingtonians said. And misguided.

  ‘In Paddington I’d be talking about something I’d read and they’d say, “Yeah, I read a book,” and you realised about the dreaminess: it was when they were in prison and it was something in a magazine they read. Because when they were inside they were thrown on to it.’

  Being with Kitty in Delamere Terrace, ‘living for the first time with someone at close quarters’, Freud had a captive sitter. She became his extending theme through 1947 and into 1948. With her, towards the end of 1947, he began Girl with Roses.

  The two pairs of eyes in Girl with a Kitten were a picture-book rhyme compared with the free-verse stripes of the jumper in Girl with Roses running rings round the body above the swirl of the velvet skirt. Seated slightly to one side, told to sit up, shoulders squared with some degree of confidence, Kitty has her head turned extra full face. ‘I was arranged,’ she said.24 Her unease came of being so firmly put in her place. Some might see here the stricken expression on the face of the kept woman in The Awakening Conscience, but no double entendre attaches. The face is as ‘modern’, as forties a face as the Cubistic visages of Robert Colquhoun’s Woman with a Birdcage and Woman with Leaping Cat, and indeed Picasso’s squint-profile portraits of Dora Maar who, in the first performance of Desire Caught by the Tail, had played Thin Anxiety. Kitty is Anxiety Caught by the Tail. ‘Kitty was someone who panicked even if nothing happened.’ If only she had been allowed to get on with her knitting. (Like Lorna, she knitted a lot.) Newly pregnant, cautioned to stillness, clutching one rose above the thorns and resting the other on her lap, she landed herself with the role of Virgin of the Annunciation, the birthmark a stigma, the fingernails touchingly uneven.

  The pose was a rearrangement of Daffodils and Celery, a smaller, slightly earlier painting, in which three daffodil heads trumpet above the reflections in a cut-glass jug: warped images of the Delamere Terrace window melted into the curves of handle and spout. How much better it was to work from someone with breath and body heat and real presence.

  In the etching Girl with Fig Leaf and a Conté and pastel drawing, Girl with Leaves, she has something of the Queen of Hearts look of Picasso’s Françoise Gilot, celebrated in paintings, in lithographs and on the flanks of vases. Similarly Girl with Roses is Kitty armed with a device. Her fig leaf, roses – ‘Talisman’ roses she said, ‘Peace’ roses he said – and spreading chestnut leaves are protective, deflecting attention, potentially hypnotic. Nanos Valaoritis put a resounding spin on the painting in an essay in Botteghe Oscure. ‘Fear is expressed in the contracted body, the eyes, looming out, like those of a huge rabbit in the far end of the pen, which has seen a hand opening the door. She wants to be as small as possible yet she is enormous,’ he wrote. ‘She is possessed by herself to the highest possible degree.’25

  The painting preoccupied Freud well into the New Year and was his masterpiece in the proper meaning of the word. A miniature magnified, proving his capability, it was immediately bought for the British Council collection for just under £150, to Kenneth Clark’s annoyance: he wanted to get the Tate to have it, as did Fre
ud. ‘I think my career would have been rather different if he had done because I wouldn’t have been, not exactly written off – I was never written on – but I’d have been more seriously considered; I think I’d have got requests to show and interest from collectors.’ As it was, Fleur Cowles reproduced it in colour in the launch issue – February 1950 – of her plush magazine Flair as an exemplary opening double spread in a planned series of individual examples of ‘Memorable Art’. This was the first – and for some time last – moment of journalistic recognition for Freud in the United States. The accompanying double spread on the artist made one thing particularly clear: ‘He wishes to be known only through his pictures.’ Flair folded within the year.

  15

  ‘Me with horns’

  Some time in 1947 Felicity Hellaby received what turned out to be her final picture postcard from Freud. It featured a bathing belle retouched by the sender to show a toothy fish menacing her plus a man’s leg sticking out of the water.

  Darling Felicity How are you. A horse how delishous Id love to see you and it I have a sparrow hawk I’d love to see you soon. Where are you? Lucian.1

  Once she was no longer a current friend or correspondent, she put away the letters and cards. Talking from her home on the island of Sark in 2012 she told me: ‘I look back on it and think how lucky I was not to be too involved; it was great fun to be with him. But my husband shared my life and Lucian wouldn’t have. I imagine it was ’43–4 the last time I saw him. I never met him again. After the war I had nothing to do and I bought myself a horse.’2

  Freud was image-conscious in a guarded way, liking to look intriguing. In the photograph taken by Ian Gibson-Smith in Abercorn Place and eventually published in Penguin New Writing in 1948, he was the artist in a rugby shirt caressing his zebra head, stripes meeting stripes. In photographs taken for Vogue by Clifford Coffin in March 1947 the artist was equally pensive in his Merchant Fleet sweater, standing with Greek Boy, his most photogenic painting from Poros, perched on the easel behind him and his sparrowhawk perched on his wrist. Coffin also posed him as the voyager returned, seated in front of the two Poros self-portraits, Man with a Thistle and Still Life with Green Lemon and, in several shots, the fine Dutch cupboard of which he was very proud. The caption for the photograph chosen for publication some months later was ‘Man with Bird of Prey’. Editorially, the sparrowhawk was the lure.

  When in 1944 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed the elderly Matisse settled in with a roomful of doves, how benign he appeared, yet – seeing that he was clutching one dove the better to draw it – how tenacious. Freud with his falconer’s glove was the imperious young artist sporting his twitchy possession much as Peter-John Hannay in John Buchan’s The Island of Sheep ‘had generally a hawk of sorts tucked away in his change coat’. Freud kept his at Delamere Terrace, learning and appreciating hawkish ways. ‘There was a letter to The Times from someone that said, “I have lived near Lord’s cricket ground for many years and for the first time I have seen a kestrel hawk.” It was mine, I thought to myself; it was one I tried out that got away.’ Far from being discouraged by the loss he bought two others and fed them rats from the canal bank, shot with a Luger that he had swapped for paintings with Billy Moss of the SOE. Moss was the author of Ill Met by Moonlight, his account of how he and Patrick Leigh Fermor, plus supportive partisans, kidnapped General Kreipe, the German garrison commander on Crete, in 1944.

  One of the kestrels soon died. Peter Watson’s boyfriend Waldemar Hansen, whom Freud drew at Delamere Terrace, remembered the survivor swooping round the room and settling on the artist’s wrist to be rewarded with mice. Taking it on the Tube caused a stir. Besides being impressive to be seen around with, hawks were good to draw, better than dead rabbits or the zebra head which, outstaying its usefulness, was pushed out on to the first-floor landing. One of the birds accompanied him to Essex when he visited Michael Nelson and his friend Mervyn Jones-Evans at Felix Hall, a dilapidated country house they rented near Chelmsford. ‘It was so happy I left it there.’

  When Freud produced headscarf designs for Zika Ascher (as did other artists at the time, among them Sutherland – hectic ink blotches – and Henry Moore) he turned for inspiration to his hawk-rations mice. ‘Ascher changed the colours, which upset me; either he or Mrs Ascher made the mouse pink. The colours were too sweet. I got a dress for Kitty with mice and they somehow faded out through the colour; the mice were the only organic thing in the design.’

  ‘London’, Vogue reported in 1947, ‘is still ecstatically ballet-drunk.’ Like Ascher headscarves, ballet in the post-war years was a determined flaunting of style in the face of austerity. Since the reopening of Covent Garden in 1945, after wartime use as a dance hall, it had become the most extravagantly venturesome of the minority arts, even succeeding on the silver screen in The Red Shoes (‘An awful film: Freddie Ashton did the ballet and I’d go down and see it being made. Very banal suicide, at Monte Carlo’). Accordingly Richard Buckle’s Ballet, having expanded from leaflet to pocket magazine, became spacious enough to carry drawings. Mervyn Peake, Michael Ayrton, Craxton and others contributed, adorning commentaries and reviews with sketches for decor and decorative devices. Set in and around an article on ‘Ballet in Paris’ in the issue for January 1948 were drawings by Freud of a bird in a French cage, a jetty in Marseilles with a dozen or so boats moored to it like leaves on a stem and three thumbnail sketches for Man with a Thistle snipped from the Poros sketchbook. Buckle set a competition for the best suggestions for how he might improve the magazine and published some of the comments in the July issue. It transpired that balletomanes did not think highly of the illustrations. Readers described them as ‘silly’, ‘hideous, disfiguring and irrelevant’ and (in a comment by the critic Clement Crisp) ‘unnecessary and often ugly (e.g. Michael Wishart’s work and recent work by Lucian Freud)’. Another correspondent ‘A.C.B.’ suggested ‘engage as permanent illustrators André Beaurepaire, Lucian Freud and Jacques Callot’. Given that Beaurepaire was busy being a designer for Ascher headscarves and the stage, and that Callot was long dead, that left Freud who was unimpressed by Dicky Buckle’s business methods. He let him have further drawings, such as the Greek gods rejects and, from the Greek sketchbook, a study of George Millar’s boat moored below a fig tree. ‘He was quite helpful as he bought tailpieces to reproduce but he didn’t give them back.’ He hoped to be asked to design a ballet. After all Graham Sutherland had produced costumes and backcloths for Freddie Ashton’s touring production The Wanderer in 1941 and John Piper conjured up a swirly magician’s cave for The Quest in 1943. Ballet put graphic excess on a formal footing. Michael Ayrton’s unrealised La Source staging of 1947, with music by Constant Lambert, for instance, was to have involved an eighteen-foot sitting figure holding a jar through which dancers were to make their entrances. Freud had opportunities only. The invitation from Freddie Ashton to do sets and costumes for Picnic at Tintagel went no further than the Cornish recce of 1944. There was a possibility of designing Ravel’s La Valse in twenties costume for Katherine Dunham, but that too came to nothing. The London Gallery performance of Desire Caught by the Tail he had decided against. His only costume design to be made up was a ‘sort of shepherdess’ number for Elizabeth Cavendish – ‘A large woman: “lovely girl” people said of her; lived with John Betjeman’ – to wear to a fancy-dress party. ‘It was just my idea of a lovely girl: a white dress with a belt and some flowers.’

  Auden was back in London in April 1948. ‘I booked him into the Esplanade Hotel in Warwick Avenue, the hotel my grandfather first stayed in when he arrived in London.’ There was an encounter if not an involvement, one that he did not deny. ‘Made friends the first time; the second time was when I saw him a lot.’ Bacon put it about that, Auden being famous, Lucian had gone to bed with him but found himself unable to perform. He did not draw Auden, an obvious subject. Why not? ‘I don’t know why,’ he said. ‘Probably because he was very impatient and on the move.’

 
The same month Alfred Barr, the founder-director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, came to Europe looking for Futurist paintings, calling on Matisse, discussing the ICA with Roland Penrose and making acquisitions for MOMA, among them Bacon’s Painting (1946), a picture riddled with portent: blinds drawn, carcasses skewered, male figure lurking under the bat wing of an umbrella. He also bought Freud’s Girl with Leaves, which had been picked by George Melly as part of his personal stock at the London Gallery. Mesens was delighted, Freud said. ‘I remember him explaining to me how important it was.’

  On 3 July 1948, with Kitty heavily pregnant – ‘almost on the last day of Annie’s internal life’, as Freud put it – they got married. ‘It was no odds to me. Her grandmother, who had brought her up, was dying – I never met her: she was married to a doctor in Herefordshire – she said, “It would be so nice if you could get married before I die as I was the only one married.” Kitty came from a long line of illegitimates. Her grandmother was a daughter of Lord Grey of Falloden by the governess; Kitty’s mother was only married when Epstein was ennobled.’

  Freud did not discuss the decision to get married with his mother. ‘I never discussed anything with her, but she did say, “Kitty’s not one of the world’s workers,” which was pretty strong for her.’ Friends suspected that he was reverting to being a good Jewish boy for once in ‘doing the right thing’ by Kitty. She was dismayed, he remembered, when they were photographed on the steps of Paddington Town Hall. ‘Thinking that the photographer had been tipped off to publicise her condition, she burst into tears; but it was really just ten shillings for a wedding picture.’ The witnesses were Michael Wishart and Peter Watson.