The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Cross-examining Freud, the defence barrister, Sir Valentine Holmes, tried a cosmopolitan slant. ‘He was trying to break me down; not break me down but get me to say something.’ He talked about Freud’s ‘travels in the South, in sunny France and beautiful Greece’, implying that he had no time for England. ‘No wonder,’ he said, ‘when you got back to your small room in Bayswater—’

  Freud interrupted. ‘My large room in Paddington!’

  (Laughter in court.)

  ‘Bayswater is the genteel name for what’s nearest the park,’ he later explained. ‘I felt that was a turning point, rather …

  I was said to have said, “In Britain everything is so foul and crazy that artists either go crazy, become a Surrealist or get into a rut,” and to have gone on about “the clockwork morality of Britain that one feels on a bus …” It was talk about licensing hours and so on.’ Why clockwork? ‘I was talking about the symbolism of the clocks in the work of Giorgio de Chirico,’ Freud explained. It so happened that the judge, Lord Goddard, had attended a dinner held recently to mark the opening of a de Chirico exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists so he let it pass. A hanger and flogger, Goddard was notoriously hard on softies. Observing that the plaintiff had been described in the article as having ‘dreamy eyes and frayed cuffs’, he said, ‘I’m surprised you aren’t suing about that.’

  ‘The summing up was so violently against me and ridiculing me that the jury – a special jury of higher rate-payers only – gave me the verdict, and costs, which must have been huge, were paid by them. Gerald Gardiner said to me, “Lord Goddard is one of those old-fashioned lords who sums up in a way that goes against the way the case has been going, to make the jury think twice.” Costs were huge: people had to come over from America. I checked up a bit and saw the chairman of the jury drive away in a Rolls-Royce.’ The plaintiff was awarded ten pounds damages. Hardly a triumph, but then he had brought the case more out of irritation than anger. Once the case was over Gerald Gardiner asked Freud if he would paint Carol, his daughter, who was a student at the London School of Economics. ‘He said, “I hope you’ll charge a lot as I make a lot of money.” It was the only time I ever accepted a commission blind. What a shock. She was very nice: Dutch potato eater, nice expression on a rather potato-ish face. Gerald Gardiner and his wife came to Delamere when I’d nearly finished. Carol sportingly said, “Well, I like it, anyway.” But some years after he wrote to me. “I had a burglary,” he said, “and the burglar must have had fine taste, because the only picture he took was yours.” I knew Mrs Gardiner had destroyed it. Like Lady Churchill did. Cecil Beaton liked the painting, which was a bad sign.’

  His name having been what had alerted Time to an unremarkable show in an obscure gallery, Freud felt it necessary to rebut any notion that he was less than appreciative of his adoptive country. ‘Obviously I was longing to go abroad. But it certainly wasn’t to do with “I’m fed up here.”’

  ‘Always when I return I am overwhelmed by the ugliness of the architecture, the gloom of the people, the drabness of the sky, the obedience to authority.’ To Cyril Connolly, sounding off in the final issues of Horizon like a tetchy paying guest, ‘peevish, overcrowded, bureaucratic England, land of cut films, banned books and class-conscious little moustaches’,19 was sinking fast. Across the Atlantic his diatribes could have passed for understatement. American commentators, isolationists especially, were apt to represent Britain as a bankrupt socialist state still fancying itself an imperial power. ‘On every side radio announcers and newspaper reporters bleated that Britain was mismanaging her affairs, running into debt, twisting America and persecuting the Jews,’ an English journalist, June John, reported in Leader magazine in September 1948. June Rose, the Time reporter, was perplexed by Freud’s indignation at being made to sound anti-British. During the hearing she said, ‘I don’t know why Mr Freud’s taking this line; after all, we are both Jewish.’

  Freud resented the assumption that, having been uprooted from Germany, he was unappreciative of the land he had grown up in. ‘All my interests and sympathy and hope circulate round the English,’ he said, and indeed this manifested itself in a knowledge of bloodstock and Who’s Who, a liking for thoroughbred Englishwomen, fair-haired ones especially, and an appreciation of John Constable, Max Miller and good tailoring. Having been naturalised British meant being not more British than the British but more at home: enabled to come and go without question. He felt himself to be a free agent in Conrad’s London, Sickert’s London, the London of The Waste Land and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Michael Hamburger, his childhood friend from Berlin, arguing from a similar point of view said that the free agent is also one who takes cover, practising ‘extreme conformism so that you don’t stand out. My work as a translator was to do with displacement: a way of keeping in touch with an earlier part of my life; Lucian I knew had a kind of double life.’20

  Mastery of a language is only achieved when what is implicit is recognised, not just what is said. The ‘clockwork morality’ referred to in court was ambiguity. ‘Well, I like it, anyway’ was mild defiance. Just as, in painting, he had moved beyond artless candour, so too in the language he used Freud was conscious of having replaced his childish German with a richer English. ‘My initial language has almost fallen away. I was terribly interested in words. You learn them and enrich your vocabulary. “Why”, my mother said, “do you say everything is ‘squalid’?”’

  His acquired English came close, in conscious style, to the plain English of George Orwell, as indeed his drawing style matches the clarity of Orwell’s prose. Though no question of his doing so ever arose, he would have been the ideal illustrator of Orwell. ‘I knew him from the Café Royal, I met him there with Stephen Spender, he was always hanging round. He wasn’t very old when he died and yet he seemed so old. He’d got good manners. He always spoke in exactly the same tone because he had been shot in the throat; there was no intonation because it was coming out over an obstacle rather. He was very unphysical. He seemed terribly dry, everything about him seemed dry.’ He seemed to dislike art. ‘He was decent: to such a degree that his decency was almost a form of imagination.’

  Sonia Brownell, tiring of Horizon chores – she had become its one staunch organiser and, in Cyril Connolly’s absence, effectively its editor – and realising that it had little future, took on Orwell. He became her cause – as Freud said, ‘she loved to sort out people’s lives’ – and, with the success of Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in the summer of 1949, and the worsening of his TB, he was an eminent if enfeebled literary lion to tend. In October 1949 she married him, in a bedside ceremony at University College Hospital, not expecting the union to involve anything more than her becoming the legalised organiser of his affairs. She had always been bossy and marriage, Freud maintained, made her more so. ‘She was very nasty to him; she was disgusted at his becoming amorous through TB. The doctor told Sonia, “He’s dying, but if you marry him he might get better. If they have something to live for it can change the metabolism.” He started getting better; Sonia panicked and said, “If he’s going to get well enough, we have to go away, and will you come with us?” I got on well enough with him so I said I would.

  ‘Kitty and I used to go and see him – he was fond of Kitty, nice to women – and he said to me that when in pain, in hospital, he’d think of all the things he’d like to do to the people he hated.

  ‘Sonia was a great friend, we were much involved, but she and I were not amorous. I never went with her and I never worked from her. It never occurred to me to draw her. She went away to France so much she gave me the key to her flat. But she was also a nuisance, trying to be helpful; she was always trying to solve people’s lives which didn’t need solving, always trying to get Kitty to leave me. She was a marriage wrecker.’

  It was arranged that Freud should go on a private plane with Orwell to Switzerland, thence to a sanatorium. His role would have been to help lift and carry. ‘I wouldn’t have gone but at the sa
me time it seemed churlish to say no for an unlikely event in the future.’

  On the evening of 21 January 1950, a few days before the planned flight, Freud had dinner with Anne Dunn at L’Étoile. Then, she remembered, they went to a club: ‘The Sunset in Percy Street, just opposite Sonia’s flat. He said, “Why don’t we ring up Sonia and ask her to join us?” So that was what happened. She came over – she had stayed at the hospital until nine o’clock which was as late as they allowed – and we drank for a couple of hours and that was when they were trying to reach her from the hospital to tell her that he had died.’21

  Freud’s view of Sonia Orwell, as she called herself thereafter, was coloured by her domineering traits in later life. ‘Sonia was heartless; the last five days she never went to visit him [in fact the hospital allowed her to visit him only one hour a day, and this she did]. Panicked when he got better.’ But talk of Sonia living it up with Freud while Orwell died was malicious, Anne Dunn insisted. ‘Lucian and Sonia did have an affair but that was earlier. He was with me that night: Sonia went back to Percy Street and we went back to Delamere Terrace.’22

  18

  ‘My night’s entertainment’

  The December 1949 number of Horizon had been the last. The magazine was discontinued for a number of reasons: it had lost its wartime distinction, circulation was tailing off and, after ten years, those producing it were tired of the routine. Eighteen instalments of Augustus John’s biography had appeared by 1949 and more were threatened. Sonia Brownell – to whom Augustus John once said, almost out of politeness, ‘May I fig & date [fecundate] you?’ – had left, and Peter Watson was more interested in the ICA, which needed the money that he had been sinking into Horizon. He would have continued backing it had Cyril Connolly shown enthusiasm, but Connolly was fed up, self-indulgently so. His closing editorial ended with an epicurean bleat. ‘From now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.’

  When the Horizon office in Bedford Square was dismantled it was rumoured that Craxton took the Diego Giacometti chandelier. Typical, according to Freud, who by then had turned on him, initially more out of exasperation than malice. ‘Johnny Craxton was abroad a lot in Greece and Crete, where he bought a house, and he freewheeled for a while into the fifties. At twenty-seven he started copying his early works. Graham [Sutherland] was very bitchy about him: he referred to his “mooning boys”. Craxton had imitated him. But there was a little spark at first.’ Reviewing Craxton’s one-man exhibition at the London Gallery in 1949, Wyndham Lewis wrote: ‘Craxton is like a prettily tinted cocktail that is good but does not quite kick hard enough.’1

  Bacon was now noted in terms of reputation among artists and Freud grew closer to him as the rift between himself and Craxton widened. ‘Johnny got very angry once when I said that I liked Francis’s work. “Oh that’s the smart thing to like,” he said.’ Peter Watson included all three – Bacon, Craxton, Freud – in an ICA exhibition, ‘London/Paris: New Trends in Painting and Sculpture’, held at the New Burlington Galleries in March 1950. They, together with Peter Lanyon, and the sculptors Maurice Lambert, Robert Adam and Reg Butler, were contrasted with the same number of French artists, among them Germaine Richier and abstract painters such as Bazaine and Hartung of whose ‘fuzziness’ Patrick Heron, writing in the New Statesman, complained. To him Craxton was ‘possibly simply the most original painter in the entire collection’ whereas, reviewing Freud’s first show at the Hanover Gallery the following month, he wrote: ‘Nothing could be more opposed to the spirit of the School of Paris than the paintings of Lucian Freud.’ This could be interpreted as a distinction.2

  Erica Brausen, whose Hanover Gallery opened in late 1947 to become for some years the smart place to exhibit, showed Gerald Wilde – once, in 1948, nothing sold – also E. Q. Nicholson. More to the point, she took on Sutherland, and Bacon too, as well as Freud. She had been involved with ‘Peter’ Norton and Dorothy Warren’s Storran Gallery and had worked for Rex Nan Kivell at the Redfern. Having grown up in 1920s Berlin she had stories to tell, Freud remembered, about cabaret life there then. ‘“This nightclub with this huge snake in the ceiling and the snake would piss all over us.”’ He rather liked her contrariness. ‘If she sold something it was hers, and if not, not. She was tremendously impressed by Paris.’ Besides Sutherland and Bacon and an architect-turned-sculptor Reg Butler she showed Giacometti. ‘And Germaine Richier, which I hated much more even than that sculptor who did bogus Italian art: Marino Marini.’ As for Arthur Jeffress, he dismissed him as a decadent who discharged his money on male whores: ‘not ones off the street, but ones who were around’.

  ‘Erica was funny because everything was “Darling” and then when money was mentioned she became hysterical. Francis brought in a large picture, a terrifically good one of a curtain, a tiny person looking through a curtain (and a safety pin, no doubt). “You can’t do this to me,” she shouted.’ When young painters came to the gallery in the hopes of her taking a look at their work she was merciless. ‘A young man would come in with his paintings tied with leather straps. “OK, young man, put them round the room,” and he’d undo them and she’d look and say, “Where are ze pictures? I don’t see any pictures.”’

  Bacon’s heads, shown at the Hanover in November 1949 on his return to London after a spell of a couple of years, on and off, gambling mainly in Monte Carlo, were sniffed at, approvingly, by Wyndham Lewis as ‘those dissolving ganglia, the size of a small fist in which one can always discern the shouting mouth, the wild, distended eye’.3 Robert Melville, writing in the final number of Horizon, recognised the hit and miss involved. ‘Bacon is not making it any easier to paint pictures. When he works on a canvas, intellect, feeling, automatism and chance … sometimes come to an agreement.’ Such paintings were lingering images of abbreviated sensation. Pathologically, operatically, heads rolled, teeth bared, the paint built up alluvially, douche upon douche hardened into slate grey, all reminiscent of Lautréamont’s ‘the drop of semen and the drop of blood which filter slowly down my dried-up wrinkles’.4

  ‘One of the problems’, Bacon said, ‘is to paint like Velázquez but with the texture of a hippopotamus skin.’ Not a problem that concerned Freud then: his smooth-skinned Sleeping Nude was no painterly big-game victim. Her pillowed head positioned, coincidentally, at the same angle as Bacon’s Head II, this Paddington Psyche barely breathed. Freud devoted himself to details Bacon had no time for: sheen of hair, weight of eyelids and individuality of wrist, fingernails and nipples. Where Bacon went for affright Freud exercised himself on the textures of wall plaster, marble, pallid skin, coarse blanket and blackleaded grate. When John Minton saw the painting newly completed in January 1950 he described it, in a letter to Michael Wishart, as a ‘rather haunting picture of an ill girl’.5

  That girl, marmoreal on a mattress in front of the dark fireplace, was Zoe Hicks, a daughter of Augustus John by Chiquita, a South American model. Joan Wyndham, who had been in the WAAF with her, said that she had ‘slanting gypsy eyes and the greasy hair of all the Augustus Johns’. Freud disputed this (it was, he said, the skin that was greasy), but he was stimulated by the connection. ‘When, at sixteen, Chiquita had sat and lain for Augustus John she was excited to be pregnant and knitted garments so tiny they’d just go on a frog.’ The frog was Zoe, born in 1923, initially fostered with a policeman’s family in Islington then appropriated, briefly, by Eve Fleming, Ian Fleming’s mother, who, if she could not have a child by Augustus John – as she was eventually to do – thought the next best thing was to kidnap a love child of his. Chiquita married Michael Birkbeck, whom Freud remembered as ‘a squirearchical drunk supposedly on his uppers though he owned a Snyders; he’d go in the pub and say, “We got some Rubenses in my house,” and they set his coat tail alight when he went home.’ The Birkbecks were living two doors away in Delamere Terrace, next door to the Miltons. ‘Poverty was why they were there.’ Freud wasn’t involved with Zoe Hicks for long. ‘She
trained as an actress, played bit parts, maybe once Lady Macbeth, but in a minor town in Japan. She was intelligent, personable and very good company. A wild dancer.’ She had sat for John, whom she discovered was her father when she was in her teens. One of his final acts, shortly before he died in 1961, was to get into bed with her.

  A basic lack of involvement is apparent in the picture. ‘I liked her; she liked me better. I think it was just before Greece, or just after; I was quite mixed up with girls then.’ One of whom, Anne Dunn, found herself being bundled out of the way when Zoe posed. ‘On the landing there was a bath where he kept coal and I never understood what was happening, quite why I was being locked in there and whether he was having an affair with Zoe when everyone said, “Of course he isn’t, she’s terribly in love with her musician,” but I was absolutely sure that he was. And I had to lie in, as it were, for some of that painting.’6

  ‘Are the forms of body and head really understood?’ mused Patrick Heron when he saw Sleeping Nude at the Hanover Gallery in April 1950. ‘One is not sure. Terrific finish, no longer being idiosyncratic, cannot hide an uncertainty, not of drawing but of volume. And then there is a new element here: this work is atmospheric for the first time in Freud’s career.’7 The Paddington daylight in Sleeping Nude was full sunshine, sharp on forehead and shoulder, soft on blanket and neck: a quattrocento light such as embellishes Botticelli’s Venus and Mars in the National Gallery. Kenneth Clark called one day while Zoe was posing. ‘She was on the bed half-covered and I noticed he was very pleased, thrilled,’ Freud remembered. The painting went to Canada, to Daisy Fellowes’ daughter, a friend of Zoe’s, a Mrs Gladstone, and was shown in an exhibition of ‘British Art 1900–1950’, organised in 1950 by Robin Ironside for the English-Speaking Union of the United States. When, nearly forty years later, Freud saw it again in London, he recalled how pleased he had been with it, his first nude, especially the handling of the blackness in the fireplace. He noted that the cloth draped over thighs and mattress fails to lie properly.