The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘Ann Rothermere asked if I’d give out a student prize at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. I said yes. It was quite a grand prize – £100 first prize – all these pictures were put round a room and Cathleen Mann and I went along, and an art critic with a double-barrelled name, I forget who, very bored. All very bored. And there was a picture I really liked. I was excited. I thought I’d not seen a better one and I got it the prize. It was Anne Dunn I gave it to. (There was a connection: Anne was Cathleen Mann’s mother’s ex-husband’s daughter by another wife.) If someone’s very keen it’s stronger than not being interested.’

  Some years later, Freud heard, Anne Dunn talked to a doctor in New York about not drinking. ‘She said, “I’m very awkward and shy and so I really have to drink to make me talk.” “Why talk?” he said.’

  PART IV

  FIRST RECOGNITION 1949–58

  17

  ‘My large room in Paddington!’

  ‘I used to go to lunch with Marie-Laure de Noailles in the Marais: hôtel particulier, a large shady garden. She’d say, when I first went, “Would you like to stay back?” Bérard took me the first time and she was shocked that I’d only been once to Vienna. She had a lover in the war, an Austrian count, who lived in Vienna and she said, “Why don’t we go for a trip?” Yes, I was married to Kitty by then …

  Marie-Laure was famously mean but stupendously rich.’She was in her mid-forties. Her father had been a banker, her mother was a poetess. (‘There’s a late Vuillard of this tiny woman in bed with manuscripts around her.’) And she and her husband, the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, were seasoned patrons of the Moderne, Surrealism in particular. They had commissioned Buñuel and Dalí’s L’ge d’Or, the Vicomte insisting that Stravinsky write the score and Buñuel insisting that he should not. Even their wealth was surreal. ‘They owned New York harbour …

  I think they had a very bad time at the beginning of the marriage, which was arranged: grandeur marrying money.’ She had come upon the Vicomte embracing his gym instructor; subsequently they lived in separate parts of their house in the Marais, a hôtel particulier with dark mirrors let into the walls of the garden. He had his own staircase.A woman of varied accomplishments, she was a painter. ‘They had something very nice about them,’ Freud said. ‘I think she made anagrams and screens. She had a collection. She had a letter from Picasso about going to brothels (in Barcelona I think), all illustrated. I loved going with Marie-Laure to the theatre and so on, but the idea that the chauffeur was outside waiting – I didn’t like that. One of her lovers was a painter called Tom Keogh; his wife was a novelist and she did something absolutely brilliant: she started an affair with Baca the chauffeur.’

  In May 1949 Freud and the Vicomtesse went by plane to a Vienna soon to be used as the location of The Third Man: Graham Greene’s ‘city of undignified ruins’ abjectly split like Berlin into American, British, French and Russian zones. ‘The Russians being so contemptuous of the Austrians they arranged for the airport to be Russian ground, where taxis wouldn’t go, so we had to be met by a car at the airport: she’d got that thing of making things rather special. (She quite waved it around that she was a vicomtesse. Monstrous behaviour.) Vienna was amazingly gloomy and beautiful; the Habsburg tombs; the beauty of the river going through. I noticed no children anywhere: very odd. We stayed about a week.

  ‘She took her amazing heavy jewels, worth a million and so heavy on her neck they made bruises. We went into antique shops and two assistants were kneeling on the floor looking at the things on her neck and wrists: she had all these jewels on, very bizarre. Then we went to some nightclub and I separated from her and she rang at 4 a.m. “Darling, I’ve been robbed of all my jewels.” But it turned out that one of her friends – she was drunk – took her jewels off for safety. Something I only noticed when we travelled was that she’d got immaculate behaviour. She said, “Darling, if you’d like company I’d be delighted to see you,” and gave me her room number. I was several floors above her.’ They were staying in the Grand Hotel. ‘I went to the barber’s shop there and the man said, “You are a self-shaver? Selbstscherer.’ Which sounded to me like Selbstmörder, suicide.

  ‘I did some things with Marie-Laure and some not.’ At night Freud preferred to be unaccompanied. ‘I rather went out on my own. I met a girl I thought wonderful, married to an American at the Embassy, an upper-class Italian girl; and I went round the nightclubs. The same people were going from club to club. These places, in basement rooms, were unbelievable: curtains shaking and groaning behind, Russians in ill-fitting uniforms and all the Austrians being terrified of them.’

  Proud of being the great-great-great-granddaughter of the Marquis de Sade and owner of the manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom, Marie-Laure had an idea. ‘She’d got that thing of making things rather special. We were introduced to Dr Masoch, a sort of professor at the university and the great-nephew of Sacher-Masoch. So she said to him, “Sie sind Masoch, er ist Freud und ich bin Sade.” There she had it: sublime coincidence, a surreal royal flush. ‘The man ran for his life.’

  Another expedition brought out her dynastic bent. ‘We were in the Habsburg tombs. At the very very end of the rows of barred cells, which begin in 1400, there were empties waiting and she said, “Oh no, Charles’s little nephews!” She was proud of it and said it in English.’

  They looked at the Freud house at Berggasse 19. ‘I only saw it from the outside. Marie-Laure was shocked that there was no notice and arranged to have a plaque put on it.’ This could not be done overnight. It was five years before a plaque was unveiled, and then only because the opportunity presented itself when the World Federation for Mental Health met in Vienna.

  By day Freud went to the museums and found them deserted. Many of the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s paintings were away on a tour: as it happened, they were in London that month, at the Tate. ‘But the Brueghels were there, as they are on panels and couldn’t tour, and I was very impressed by the Bellini: the woman looking in a mirror, his only secular picture.’ He went repeatedly to see Brueghel’s Christ Carrying the Cross, its trail of humanity obscuring Christ, the gibbet and the crow, the leaping dogs, the thistle in the foreground, the muddied cartwheels, the cutpurse – a Paddington face in a Paddington crowd – and the skull. ‘I thought how marvellous, how far things are, how extreme to have a momentous event incidental: the action, the tragic story, leaving it in the middle distance. The fact that it could mean so little to someone.’

  One week of Vienna was enough for him. ‘Vienna is about as Baroque as I can stand.’ In later years there were to be calls from Vienna for the Sigmund Freud furniture to be shipped back for a Freud museum, and there was to be a Freud memorial on top of an underground car park (‘A bit of turf: park your car, go upstairs, and jump about on this tin roof with turf’). To the grandson the objection to such amendments was not political, let alone moral. ‘Just something to do with their reactionary attitudes and smug optimism.’ Though a drawing by him of two pigeons had been included in a British Council exhibition for Vienna the previous year, he vowed that he would never exhibit in Austria. The deaths of his great-aunts were not to be put aside.

  Back in Paris, Charles de Noailles asked Freud whether Marie-Laure had got into trouble at all in Vienna. He was reassured. Marie-Laure, Freud found, was prepared to be helpful. Impressed by the drawing of Bérard she said that she would get Freud a commission to paint Count Alexis de Redé. ‘Where did he get his title?’ he asked.

  ‘Marie-Laure was naturally active, very impulsive, sophisticated and very emotional.’ She also wrote novels and painted. ‘One was of a man with a sword, three-quarter length. Snot colours. “I got so tired of people saying they looked like me,” she said. She obviously did get passionately interested in people, but mostly with queer people who were all in competition. The first time I went with Bérard to one of her grand lunches – distinguished people, Poulenc was there, and tarts, and there were footmen posted behind the chairs – she kept me
back and said, “How do you like my collection of reptiles?”

  ‘There was a party where the house was turned into a village, Daisy Fellowes did the food and her huge Spanish lover, a faker of Picassos, was there: Óscar Domínguez, who stole things from the house and copied them; he was really wild and quite dangerous. He charged me like a bull, probably because I’d been talking to Marie-Laure. His pictures were spectacularly bad. He did ballet decor and killed himself. There was a photo in French Vogue of a party of Marie-Laure’s. Tout Paris was there, apart from the very grand people who thought Marie-Laure was immoral. Georges Auric, Poulenc, Dior, were named and in the spine was me: my name wasn’t there, but my mother found the photo and kept it.’

  Two full-length portraits by Goya hung in the dining room. Freud noticed some years later that they had been removed to a drawing room. He asked why. ‘Darling,’ the Vicomtesse said, ‘people kept comparing me to the Goyas.’ Once she had proposed to Picasso: ‘You be Goya and I’ll be the Duchess of Alba.’ Portraits, some flattering, of Marie-Laure hung in a ballroom, portraits by Bérard, Berman, Dalí, Tchelitchew. And by Balthus who, when he painted her in 1936, had told her that he couldn’t manage it in such surroundings. ‘So he took an obscure room – bed and chamberpot – and locked her in and went away for three hours.’ Though Freud thought the portrait good, he didn’t especially like it. ‘Why have this hard wooden chair? I thought. Marie-Laure called Balthus “Ma jolie petit rat”. Quite accurate.’

  Balthus claimed to be more nobly born than Marie-Laure, to be a Polish aristocrat indeed: namely Balthasar Klossowski de Rola. ‘He wasn’t the Comte de Rouelles in those days, he was M. le peintre Klossowski.’ In fact he had been brought up by his mother in straitened circumstances, initially in Berlin; Rilke had been a surrogate father to him and had arranged for the publication of drawings of Mitsou, his disappearing cat, done when he was ten. His nickname, ‘Baltusz’, on the cover became his name for life. He never, he said, stopped seeing things as he saw them in his childhood. The Balthus look, described by Antonin Artaud as ‘organic realism’ and essentially polished Courbet, affected Freud, particularly the peepshow intensity of the illustrations for Wuthering Heights, published in Minotaure in 1935 and which he came across reproduced in Lilliput. Some of these drawings belonged to Marie-Laure, the rest to Duchamp. Peter Watson had warned Freud that Balthus was highly strung and liable to spit at anyone who wore a tie. Yet when they first met, Balthus was wearing a tartan tie, implying Scottish connections. He explained that the Gordons were among his ancestors; this he maintained gave him a claim to be related to Lord Byron. Freud appreciated the forging of a romantic link for its absurdity more than anything. ‘I wasn’t in awe of him.’ Balthus’ self-serving assertion that ‘paintings don’t describe or reveal the painter’1 was, he conceded, well worth saying, no matter who actually said it. Balthus then, and later, was apt to be disparaging about ‘Dear little Freud’, saying, ‘He could have been good.’2

  They were in a bar once, the Bar Vert in the rue Jacob, Francis Bacon was there too, and others, and Balthus had been asking about Kitty, and Epstein, when he suddenly remarked, ‘How curious, to find oneself talking about Epstein.’ Pompous old fool, Freud said to himself. Already he preferred Balthus’ early work to what he was then producing. Such as the landscapes: ‘There’s a slight Nazi painting thing about them. Looking over the gate.’

  In 1947 a ban on the import of foreign art for sale in the UK was imposed. ‘If it is extremely difficult for a painter to move around the world or export his wares, it is quite impossible for anyone else to go abroad to look at painting,’ Cyril Connolly complained in a Horizon editorial in 1947.3 Anything brought in had to be returned within six months, which meant that, for practical purposes, smuggling became standard procedure in the international art trade, such as it was. Balthus asked Freud to take a painting through customs for him and deliver it to Connolly, the idea being that an article on him would be published in Horizon. If challenged he should say that it was one of his own. They wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. ‘The customs will look at this picture comme une vache regard un train.’ Freud did as he was told and passed through Dover without a hitch. ‘The customs really liked that picture – a little girl up a ladder in a tree – and I said I’d done it because I’d got materials in my luggage.’ In April 1948 the painting, Les Cerisiers, was reproduced in Horizon, illustrating an article by Robin Ironside in which he talked about ‘the immediacy of reality’.4 Connolly failed to pay for the painting and soon sold it.

  While Balthus could claim to be the modern Courbet, Realism (seen as sad reality) was more associated with Francis Gruber, the painter of emaciated figures on bare floorboards, who died in December 1948, a martyr to privation. Shortly afterwards Freud saw a group of his paintings. ‘He’d just died and round the corner, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, there was a memorial exhibition in a brown room: a roomful of pictures which did impress me. Their influence on Giacometti, or the other way round, was it? I looked at them and I believed them: they seemed to work well, then less so, later on.’

  Once when Kitty joined him in Paris Freud introduced her to Giacometti. She asked him if he had heard of Epstein. ‘He said, “Le grand Epstein, bien sûr,” and she said, “Why do you say ‘Grand Epstein’?” She had no idea that Epstein was great, or that her half-brother Jackie’s mother was Isabel [Rawsthorne], who was famous for having been with Epstein as well as Giacometti. Giacometti once lent me money. I asked him how would he like it back, and he said, “Give it to Isabel.” We went out quite a lot together. I impressed him once. Kitty and I were at the Coupole with Annette and Alberto and as we left some louts started pulling girls about and I tripped them over and Giacometti thought me terribly heroic.’

  Giacometti had seen Dead Heron in ‘La Jeune Peinture en Grande Bretagne’ at the Galerie René Drouin the previous winter. ‘He said he had seen it: out of politeness, not interest.’

  Still Life with Squid and Sea Urchin was bought – nominally by Robin Ironside, purchaser at the time, actually by Kenneth Clark – for the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), which presented it to the Harris Art Gallery, Preston. Clark maintained that distributing paintings to provincial museums was the best possible patronage for young artists; he often did this through the CAS, notably a number of Sutherland drawings, which he distributed to regional galleries in 1946. Freud was dubious about this skewed generosity. ‘He did something which I think was wrong, which is, he bought to encourage whether he liked the stuff or not. He was very lonely. Girlfriends, yes. He began buying when he was at Oxford: buying a Tintoretto. Ruskin he idolised and, unlike Berenson, he was a good teacher. The only lecture he gave at the Slade that I heard was on Classicism and Romanticism. I couldn’t tell until the very end which side he was on.’

  Clark projected his inhibition and detachment on to others. ‘Great artists seldom take any interest in the events of the outside world,’ he wrote in his autobiography, the second volume of which tailed off into accounts of official commitments. He had perhaps led too charmed a life, Freud thought. To Clark, Freud was a young artist in the unclassifiable category. ‘In the history of English art a few of the most gifted artists have always stood outside the main tradition,’ he wrote in an introduction to an exhibition selected by him, with Robin Ironside and Raymond Mortimer, in 1950 for the English-Speaking Union of the United States, for which the Freud he chose was Sleeping Nude (1950). Consequently, and unexpectedly, Freud was offered some teaching. ‘Clark took Coldstream to see the painting and Coldstream wrote to me saying he was going to the Slade and offering me one day a week, 10–5. He felt that unreliability should be catered for; he thought I represented unreliability.’

  William Coldstream became Professor at the Slade School of Art, part of University College London, in the autumn term, 1949. His methodical painting, described by Lawrence Gowing as ‘the system that maps the visual evidence’,5 had been written off ten years before by that inveterate wri
ter-off Geoffrey Grigson in his magazine New Verse, as ‘a blind man’s painting – clever, correct, well informed, academic and frozen’.6 He had become a practised portrait painter (Bishop Bell, Lord Jowitt) and an accomplished committee man, notably as a trustee of the Tate. He brought with him to the Slade from Camberwell, where he had been head of painting, a number of staff and students, testimony to the fact that his teaching was more persuasive than Grigson allowed, and more tolerant. ‘If there was one thing I really did value it was the individual statement,’ he said, and that, combined with his constant advice to students to ‘look more closely’, recommended Freud to him.7

  Interviewed in 1965 by Rodrigo Moynihan for Anne Dunn’s magazine Art and Literature Coldstream said, ‘what struck me early on was that there is no idea of representation that can be agreed on … it does strike me that there is a possibility for representational painting that leaves one with an extraordinary amount of freedom.’8 In a BBC broadcast on Holbein in 1947 he said how ‘deadly efficient’ Holbein was, painting portraits from drawings. ‘I do become terribly interested, almost obsessively interested in anything – even still life – that I start really looking at.’9 The sitter’s presence was essential, ensuring as it did that liveliness was at stake. ‘I can’t work at all without something in front of me.’ Coldstream found the obsessive processes liberating. He became, for Freud, something of a marker: the dogged practitioner to be respected, not least for his forbearance as an employer.

  Freud’s teaching stints were as intermittent and evasive as he could make them. Initially younger than many of the ex-servicemen students, he was much too shy, or preoccupied, to be an engaged or indeed proficient teacher. There were exceptions such as Michael Andrews, six years his junior and fresh from National Service in Egypt, who impressed him with his astute diffidence. Taking students to the galleries was, he decided, a good way of avoiding the strain of conversations at the easel. He never had the nerve to work alongside them in the life room, as Euan Uglow – a Slade student from 1951 to 1954 – did when he graduated to teaching. He needed his privacy. ‘I used to walk in and watch. I didn’t like being watched.’ Stanley Spencer’s daughter Unity, who was at the Slade in the early fifties, used to see him come nervously into the life room and make a beeline for one girl, being too intent, or uneasy, to pay attention to the others. He hit on a strategy for showing his face without being waylaid. ‘I had this idea of an optical thing: if something goes round fast enough people think it’s still going on. I based my visits on this thesis. Went through all the rooms three times, at enormous speed, wondering what I was doing there. Once I went in a room and was bitten by a dog and I thought at least something happened here: never been bitten by a dog before (I always get on well with dogs), so I thought, well, yes, there has been an interaction.’ Another time – another interaction – he paused for once behind an easel. ‘There was a very odd man, a big bloke. I did that thing of standing and looking at him working, which I felt uneasy about as I loathe being watched as I work. “Are you the new Inspector or something?” he asked.