The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Dublin was welcoming. Freud took rooms in Baggot Street and met a number of congenial painters there, one or two of whom proceeded to emulate his style. ‘The operative person was John Ryan, rich writer, failed painter, who owned Bailey’s Hotel and all the dairies in Dublin; he bought my drawing of Cecil Beaton. His sister was a famous film star, Kathleen Ryan: she was the girl in Odd Man Out. Then there was Oonagh, who married Paddy Swift, a painter who with a deaf poet, David Wright, later – in London – founded a magazine, X.’ He didn’t see much of Anne who became aware of his attention straying. ‘There was a girl called Helena Hughes, who had been a girlfriend of Michael Wishart’s, very gamine-looking, and that was my first feeling of real threat. I realised that if I turned my eyes to left or right he would have vanished with Helena. And he did, later on. There was also another girl (though I don’t know that anything happened) called Claire McAllister, who was an American poet with red hair.

  There was always an element of hidden relationships lurking.’12

  At least one painter whom Freud came to admire greatly was to be seen around Dublin: Jack Yeats, aged seventy-seven, brother of W. B. Yeats, down on his luck and still painting with fitful brilliance: ‘strangeness so entire’, as Samuel Beckett put it,13 spelt out in titles like Boy Jumping over Water and keyed to melancholy. There had been an exhibition at the Tate that year: pictures slipped loose from their origins in illustration into images of wistful souls, roused seas and drizzling skies. Freud hadn’t thought much of the first Yeats painting he had seen, a flower piece belonging to Kenneth Clark, but after Galway he thought much more of him, feeling, he said, ‘very sympathetic to his whole life. I didn’t talk to him. He walked in St Stephen’s Green all day. He had no market, and Victor Waddington – the Dublin dealer – sort of saved his life. Victor told me that as he hadn’t got any teeth his friends clubbed together to get him some and had a dinner to give them to him and they all shouted “speech speech” and he got up and said, “Now I’ve got all these teeth what am I going to eat with them?” He must have had a little money – not been on the floor – because poverty in Ireland was so poor.’

  Inevitably, for there was no avoiding him in the bars of Dublin, Freud also came upon Brendan Behan, famous for having been in prison in England for IRA activities. ‘Lots of people disliked Brendan as he stole from very poor people and gave to the rich. Things like overcoats. I saw a certain amount of him and knew his brothers; I went on the back of Dominic’s bike to his parents’ house; best house painters in Europe, marbling and everything, over many generations, they were, and literary: his grandfather wrote the Irish national anthem. “You can make money out of being a house painter, where you can’t out of being a writer,” he said.’ Behan, who had been employed repainting everything from a lighthouse to the railings of St Stephen’s Green, was a mighty boaster.

  ‘Very early on, at Horizon, they received a story from him which they couldn’t print, about this workman going to work, makes a friend, a great friend, they spend more and more time together, the young one is BB and the other is married, and the wife dies and they go home together. When Behan became famous – through The Quare Fellow, which was mostly due to Joan Littlewood – Cyril Connolly said, “You know, I remember that story. I couldn’t print it: he was obviously queer.”’ By then the story, ‘After the Wake’, had appeared in Points, a magazine published by Peggy Guggenheim’s son, Sinbad Vail.14 ‘Brendan Behan just had sex, not affairs. I was told, when I first went to Dublin, that he really liked getting pinky Trinity College boys, especially if English, and he’d take them down to brothelling parts on the other side of the Liffey. He came to London to boast and I remember him in the French Pub and Dylan Thomas really putting him down: Dylan ridiculed him, being quicker, more worldly and sophisticated. There used to be cigarettes, De Reszke Minor and Major, and the packet had a separate little hinged box that said “four more for your friends”; I remember Dylan saying, “I wish I had four friends,” and I thought four friends would be quite a lot.’

  In November 1948 Freud exhibited once again at the London Gallery. ‘A small roomful of his work is almost lost in half a dozen shows – a houseful of absolutely worthless stuff,’ the painter William Townsend, a colleague at the Slade, wrote in his journal.15 The other exhibitors included a painter Cawthra Mulock, just a name to him (‘a funny name’), two Australians, James Gleeson and Robert Klippel, who was a sculptor, and John Pemberton, who was ‘a sad Charlotte Street Surrealist. Went to Paris and starved to death, I think. Modish: did magazine illustrations for a living, vaguely to do with sex. Lived under duress but always elegant, wore a bow tie.’

  Girl with Roses dominated the show. ‘This portrait’, William Townsend judged, ‘looks like the work of someone quite simple minded – using simple in the right sense – pressed by the business of tracing out his subject in all its particularity, down to the last irregularity of the sitter’s fingernails, and never flagging, convinced to the last minute of the importance of the job.’ He added: ‘The painting has a large rhythm, a sense of the whole thing in each part like an early Florentine portrait; though German is perhaps a truer derivation.’16 The British Council paid for it in December, enabling him to go to Paris again.

  Paris, more than Dublin, remained the preferred destination. ‘It was so nice to be very easy about it. I felt a bit of a native. I used to go to Paris and with my small case arrive at the Gare du Nord on a Saturday night and go straight to the Bal Nègre and stay all night dancing and look for a hotel in the morning. I may have been broke but it didn’t mean I was without money in my pocket. I never connected movement with money. Movement and money hadn’t got any link. Kitty used to give me money sometimes. And copyright money was distributed and I’d be in debt to my father.’ Any work he did in a Paris hotel room had to be small scale: the drawings for Flyda were as sustained a group as he could manage, their air of fixation cooling into indifference. He took Kitty with him several times and it was there that he made the etching in which she becomes a character with a past, like someone discovered by chance, as it were, in a Sickert print: this woman under the blankets, lips parted, eyeing a rose. Kitty, who was prone to spending days in bed feeling exhausted or faint – migraines coming on – remembered him being solicitous, holding her head. He had come to expect her to wilt. ‘“I might become ill,” she’d say.’

  Ill in Paris: Kitty in bed, etching, 1948

  Ill in Paris has an air of incipient disdain. ‘I bit it in the washbasin: one dip, really quick and dangerous.’ The face half buried in the pillow looks trapped, squinting a little, gasping at the nearness of the rose, its leaf awkwardly inserted into the scene like a levelled blade. This is Girl with Roses nine months on and an aggravated version of Interior Scene: the drawing of a stem of Connemara blackberries and, half concealed by net curtains, Anne the interloper whose view of the Freud marriage – once she had found out about it – was that it just did not work: ‘I think Kitty was so needing, needful, it got on his nerves. Lucian couldn’t bear anyone asking too much of him.’17

  Nine or ten impressions were printed of Ill in Paris, one proof of a smaller previous try – both eyes showing above the bedcover (he gave this to Dickie Buckle) – and two or three of an etching of a single rose, one of which he gave to Christian Bérard’s lover Boris Kochno – a survival from the Ballets Russes who ran the Ballet des Champs-Elysées. After that he gave up etching, telling himself that it cramped his style. When he took to it again, in the early eighties, eventually on a far larger scale, he did so as a painter resorting to it as a welcome alternative activity to painting with the practical advantage of each image being editioned.

  Portrait of Christian Bérard, ill in Paris, December 1948

  Meanwhile he got on with drawing Bérard in bed. A first sketch he gave to the restaurateur of the Mediterranée, inscribing it ‘To Jean, Christmas 1948’; the second, his graphic masterpiece, turned out to be the final image of Bérard. ‘I worked on it probably for a mo
nth, went a lot. I went in the morning and we had lunch after.’ He finished it in December. Immediately before, Bérard had been drying out at the Saint Mandé Sanatorium. He drew him in his flat, fifth floor, 2 rue Casimir Delavigne, where from the roof terrace Kochno pointed out the attic where Rimbaud had lived. Henri Cartier-Bresson had photographed Bérard seated dazedly at the end of his bed, greatcoat buttoned up, a half-read Peter Cheyney thriller to hand. Now Freud drew him recumbent, his beard more neatly trimmed. He came closer to him than Cartier-Bresson had done, the better to examine the glazed eyes, the gourmet jowls. His Bérard was Holbein’s Henry VIII, a lord of misrule laid low. Two months after Freud drew him, Bérard had a stroke – collapsing at a rehearsal of a play by Molière – died and was buried in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. Beaton composed a eulogy for Ballet magazine.

  With his fine beak-like nose, his untidy red beard and lank wisps of silken hair [he] was one of the best-known personalities in Paris. So great was his innate dignity, that even under the most farcical circumstances, such as when, in a violent fit of enthusiasm, he would try on himself the latest bonnet in the most fashionable hat-shop, his wild eyes defied one to laugh at him. When he walked down the Quais in his dirty cigarette-ash-covered shirt, his soiled coat and unbuttoned trousers, with his dirty little dog Jacinthe hooked underneath his arm, Bérard was the quintessence of French taste and elegance.18

  ‘One must start with everything,’ Bérard had said, ‘then begin to eliminate detail after detail until only the vital core remains.’19 Freud’s drawing shows, with delicacy and candour, the exhaustion of the epicurean maintaining the pose, eyes turned up, lower lip slightly askew, the stubble on the jowls exquisitely flecked, white on grey.

  Having drawn Bérard, Freud took Kitty south, to the Hôtel Welcome in the old port of Villefranche-sur-Mer, where Bérard had stayed, and the backstreets of which Jean Cocteau used as the underworld for his film Orphée, released in 1950. Christopher Wood and Nina Hamnett of Soho had been there too, as well as, most recently, the Sutherlands. Freud painted Portrait of Kitty (1949) in their room, her head in profile against the winter light and the blistered paint of the shutters, looking markedly older than in the previous portraits. ‘Very different character, a change very much,’ he said. When he exhibited it at the London Gallery the following November Epstein bought it, loudly remarking that he could not see what the fuss was about, it was ‘so traditional’ a painting. ‘Kitty was the most patient model,’ Anne Dunn commented.20

  Kitty returned to London, where Epstein made a wide-eyed bust of her. Freud remained in Villefranche for more than a month. Itching for company he went over to Meraud Guinness’ Tour de César. ‘I walked, maybe got a bus; I never actually stayed there; I longed to meet someone who actually I could like.’ He also went to the municipal casino in Nice. ‘I was winning and it was rather late at night and the chips started piling up and suddenly there was a girl on one knee and another behind me looking over and there was another one on the other knee nearly. God, this is the life, I thought. Then of course, as I went on being watched, I went down and I didn’t notice it, but then I just looked on my knees: the girls were nowhere to be seen.’

  As it happened, his younger brother was working on the Riviera. ‘Clement had progressed from the Dorchester to the Hôtel Martinez in Cannes. I saw him there because, playing roulette at Villefranche, I had not a franc left, so had to walk back from Nice. I arranged for him to give me some money. He made it difficult, making arrangements about walking to a special place.’ They met at a funfair in Cannes. His choice. ‘There were those machines that climb slowly up and come crashing down round a curve. Big Dipper. He wouldn’t go on it. Two people had been killed the week before: a mother holding on to her child. Well, of course, I’d spent all my money on it. Anyway, in the afternoon, after getting the money off him, I managed to make him go on it. (I may have a sadistic streak, I think.) I was down below watching him go round, roaring with laughter at his fear and anger; he couldn’t get off he was in such a state. Then we went to a restaurant, a modest restaurant, and he said, “This isn’t quite right,” and walked into the kitchen and told them off.’

  By the window in his room he painted Lemon Sprig, Still Life with Aloe and, on an etching plate, Still Life with Sea Urchin, with ink dribbling under the doleful eye of the punctured squid. The hotel threw him out. ‘I left the Welcome because they thought I might burn the hotel down. There had been a burglary and it happened during meals and I didn’t take meals, just had potatoes, so I was arrested.’

  The armpit creases in Portrait of a Girl (1950) are tellingly intimate. This was Anne Dunn again. She remembered the painting as having been done at a time of great strain: ‘Things in my life, things in Lucian’s life, hidden relationships lurking.’ For one thing, her mother had no time for painter or portrait, which she did not recognise as being of her daughter, bare shouldered, nakedly independent. ‘My mother hated him. She couldn’t bear the way he moved. He’d sidle in through the front door, he’d come in like a crab and she’d say, “What’s that rat doing in the flat?” So I had to tell her a lot of lies.’ She had moved to a flat in Alma Place to be near Freud in Clifton Hill, bought an Australian fruit bat as a pet and a cageful of doves, and took to painting like him. ‘I can’t believe how innocent I was; I thought I was very sophisticated but in fact I’d been to bed with only about two people.’21

  Freud thought the innocence superficial. ‘Anne was competitive, particularly with her sister, Patricia, who had been having an affair with Aly Khan. Anne, aged sixteen or so and envious, managed to go to bed with Aly Khan and he was taken with this jerky, wild, younger sister and said, as she got out of bed, “If there’s anything you want, just ask”; and when I met her three years later she was desperate for money so she said, “I’ll write to Aly Khan.” She asked for a hundred pounds and he sent her it, a lot in those days. He was a wild gambler and short of money himself.’

  A predictable crisis propelled her back to her mother. ‘The first time I was pregnant my mother was naturally absolutely furious and wouldn’t help in any way and then eventually she did but she said, “He’s got to pay for it,” and I knew perfectly well that he wouldn’t, and so I had to get someone called Derek Jackson to pay for it. He was wonderful.’22 Then for a while she lived in part of the house Cyril Connolly had in Sussex Place near Paddington station. Freud ‘saw a lot of her’ there, he said, and she began a portrait of him. Connolly had a crush on her and bought Freud’s painting of her, selling it on to her many years later.

  Looking back she saw that the competitive possessiveness was stimulated by devious urges. ‘A lot of people like Cyril were a little bit in love with Lucian and Cyril wanted the relationship with “his women” as it were, for himself: Lucian somehow put his signature on something that Cyril wanted. Lucian was very scathing to me at the time about Cyril and I was so enamoured of Lucian and so completely his creature I kept seeing people through distorted vision: I thought everybody was ridiculous, that Cyril was ridiculous.’ Freud’s hold on her was, for a while, absolute. ‘It is hard to remember: I thought it excruciatingly painful and life without Lucian would have no meaning whatsoever. He was the sun and he managed to downgrade and diminish everyone else in his eyes. In removing himself he removed the reason for existence. I was very influenced by him; it took a long time to break away.’23

  By Freud’s account the pursuit was primarily her initiative. ‘She sort of chased me. She had an amazing energy and determination about money, which was rare then, in 1949 or whenever. She came in for quite a lot of money quite a bit later, but she had a lot of half-sisters and her father decided, as old men do, that she wasn’t his. She looked at art a bit and pre that was a nice girl who painted horses. Her mother showed her work to Salvador Dalí.’ The effect on her of Freud’s energy and impulse was devastating. ‘His invasive spirit transformed my world and my perceptions of it. A firefly in the fog of a drab and exhausted post-war London.’24

&
nbsp; The firefly flitted from woman to woman and ‘one never knew how many’, she said. ‘That was very worrying. An analogy is Barbara Skelton who used to drive Cyril [Connolly] absolutely mad: every time he turned his head she’d gone off with a waiter or something. It was extraordinary how quickly Lucian would work. Next minute he’d be gone.’25 One night at the Gargoyle Freud met Stella Clive, a dancer in the Royal Ballet who later became a hoofer in The Boyfriend. They went off together in a taxi and she appeared at the ballet the next day with a sore lip; there had been a struggle, she explained. This strange young man phoned her and made demands; she was not prepared to sit for him and as she was working she saw no more of him. Frank Auerbach, who first knew Freud a few years later, felt that the womanising wasn’t wholly predatory. ‘Lucian didn’t speak like somebody who put notches on the bedpost or anything like that, he was actually absolutely romantic.’ It was more a matter of hoping for reciprocity or indeed matching psyches. ‘He had a relationship with a girl he picked up in Soho who had a terrible stammer; he on the whole was very discreet but he told me he found the stammer very erotic. At climax she called out “Mummy, Mummy!”’26

  Anne Dunn recognised that he had a perhaps compulsive desire to have the upper hand. ‘One doesn’t walk into a victim situation but if one perhaps had been victimised in one’s childhood Lucian was quite productive at bringing that out. I think he looked very like his grandfather and behaved like his grandfather. The same control. One was clipped on to a dynamo.’27

  Freud gave her a heart tattoo on her thigh, taught her how to hold on to the backs of lorries and buses when they were cycling around London and did his bit to advance her professionally.