The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘I’ve always tried to leave very slowly: I’ve got this thing about running away. I didn’t go back until the opening night. It was terrible rubbish: the only thing that stopped it being a failure was the names. Eartha Kitt was in it: she was unknown then: I did some drawings of the Katherine Dunham dancers and she was one of them. And in the front row were Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth. She had married Welles for a bit.’

  During this stay in Paris Freud ran into his ex-lodger Eduardo Paolozzi. ‘He was living on the fifth floor in a house with four floors. I was with him once at Les Deux Magots in the sunshine and girls going by and he said, “In a few years from now I’ll be in my Cadillac and there’ll be a blonde next to me and a brunette next to her going to Saint Jean de Luz and you’ll say, “There goes Eduardo: I knew him before he sold himself.” Eduardo was always making up to Isabel Lambert [Rawsthorne] and one day he was going on and on, this huge man, and she thought why not? And went with him. How was it? “Exhausting,” she said. “I had to do all the work.”’

  Paolozzi amused him. Unlike James Lord, aspirant American writer, whose short story ‘The Boy Who Wrote “No”’, published in the final number of Horizon, had served as his introduction to Connolly circles and who was now establishing himself in Paris as a go-getting confidant of those worth knowing. Freud having introduced him to Marie-Laure de Noailles, Lord commissioned a drawing of himself, sat for him in the Île de la Cité hotel, and failed to pay for it. ‘Such a crook; he said he was terribly sorry he couldn’t pay because he was so poor but he’d give me the manuscript of “The Boy Who Wrote ‘No’” (a bit Southern School) which he never did. He’d started in Paris: a GI on the game. Picasso put him up in the rue des Grands Augustins and drew him. My drawing of him he gave in the end to the Picasso Museum.’ Dining with Dora Maar and others, a few years later, Lord started going on about how boring it had been to be drawn. Freud responded. ‘I said how painful it was, drawing a crooked little cunt.’ Lord, in his memoirs, was to be hardly less critical of Freud.

  ‘It was famously hard to get a flat in Paris and I never really tried. I’d have found a room. But I kept on Delamere.’

  There he began a minute portrait of Barbara Skelton (two and a half inches by four, on copper) as a wedding present for her intended: Cyril Connolly. A challenge, even by Connolly’s standards, Skelton had the reputation, fostered by Connolly who revelled in self-pity, of being a hard-nosed termagant; her liaisons included spells with King Farouk of Egypt. Four or five sittings were enough for Freud to set down the essentials of what, he said, Connolly described as the face of an ‘angry despatch rider’.15 The marriage took place in October 1950, but the painting remained unfinished and was not handed over. ‘Partly, I realised I couldn’t give it to him.’ After she left Connolly for the publisher George Weidenfeld, Freud showed it to him. ‘He said that if he had seen it then he wouldn’t have married her. It’s pretty nasty.’

  One night on the upstairs landing at Clifton Hill, Freud recollected, Michael Wishart had a shock. ‘He was staying in Clifton Hill – Kitty was away, she went away quite a bit to stay with her grandmother – and there was an Irish-Jap girl called Haru and Michael was drinking and drugging and saw this naked girl going to the loo and thought he had DTs.’ She was what Freud regarded as a passing fancy. ‘Haru was around in Soho. She was very gentle, she had a sister, a stripteaser on roller skates, who was famous and pretty and a bit of a bitch. I wasn’t in focus for her: no cars or weekends. Her father was something to do with the Japanese Embassy in Dublin. Ambassador he was, her mother a native. So there was a bit of a background.’

  One day Anne Dunn noticed two drawings in Freud’s room at Delamere and asked whose they were. ‘Just a boy I know.’ It was Michael Wishart. For her this was opportune. ‘I met Michael through Francis Bacon at the Colony Room. I’d seen quite a lot of Francis and I’d said to him I’d had to have yet another abortion and he was absolutely angelic and came round with books and things to my squalid nursing home and was very consoling and sweet.’ Michael Wishart was something of a relief and soon after, in July 1950, she married him. Craxton said the unsuccessful suitors were furious about it as Wishart’s homosexuality, they felt, should have put him out of the running. Freud saw it differently. ‘Anne imitated me by marrying Michael Wishart, Kitty’s cousin. She imitated in moving next door to me in Delamere and getting a place near Clifton Hill.’ She had had enough of the uncertainty of being, or not being, with Freud. ‘I always feel, mixed up with the great attraction or affection or whatever it is I have for Lucian, an absolute horror of his viciousness about people and towards people. I feel even talking about him I should be doing something against the evil eye. I thought the worst revenge I could do was go off with Michael in fact. I actually thought: what can I do? And this seemed to be a real hit out at everyone: Kitty, Lucian and so on, but it turned very quickly into love. I grew to love Michael, and although it didn’t work out as a marriage it worked out as a relationship.’16

  The day before the wedding Lorna Wishart persuaded Anne that it would be as well to have her hair cut short and to wear a conventional tweed suit. She did so and, she felt, looked completely awful while Lorna turned up with her hair loose looking glamorous. ‘She looked like the bride.’ Soho legend had it that the wedding party in Francis Bacon’s Cromwell Place studio went on for three days. Whether it did or not (probably not: Michael Wishart was so drunk on the wedding night the bride spent the night at his mother’s), Freud stayed away. Rumour – spread by Bacon – also had it that he and the bride spent some hours together immediately before the wedding. This he denied. ‘I didn’t go: difficult for me to go because of her. It went on all night and a friend of Lorna’s came to stay in Clifton Hill for the party and he got terribly drunk and came back at five in the morning. Francis painted the chandelier red.’

  A child, Francis, was born in December 1950. Many people, notably the grandmother, Lorna Wishart, had views about the child’s paternity. ‘Lorna would never believe that Francis is not Lucian’s. It could have been Lucian’s and I didn’t know, quite frankly,’ Anne Dunn said. ‘It was born three weeks late: I had to be induced. I was so frightened of what might turn up. But he had brown eyes and all the things that made it impossible for him to be Lucian’s. He simply wasn’t. He was Michael’s.’17

  19

  ‘Being able to see under the carpet’

  In the summer of 1951 a temporary bridge with flags flying was clamped alongside the Hungerford railway bridge over the Thames, there to feed the public across the river into the South Bank exhibition, the centrepiece of a government-ordained celebration of post-war recovery: the Festival of Britain. Here, from May to September, urban designers’ hopes were briefly realised and the decrepit warehouses, the bombsites and slums of South London disappeared behind canvas screens. Those who crossed the bridge found themselves in an ideal plaza, a strange new world of pedestrian precincts picked out in what was, for then, a startling range of colours: sky blue, scarlet, lemon yellow and terracotta. They trailed up steps to viewing platforms and downstairs again, following a Recommended Circulation through pavilions housing The Natural Scene, Minerals of the Islands, Transport, New Schools, Sport, Seaside and Discovery. Never had there been a more genial exposition of British identity for, with Laurie Lee the chief caption writer (and organiser of ‘Eccentrics Corner’ in the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion), verbal sweeteners eased the onset of modernity in the Festival narrative.

  Three miles upstream, in the Battersea Pleasure Gardens, Osbert Lancaster and John Piper installed Regency pleasure domes and Neo-Gothick follies approached from the main entrance by a facetious Neo-Romantic rail-link. And for sixpence visitors could attend Orlando’s Silver Wedding in the Festival Gardens Amphitheatre, a Group Theatre production with costumes, scenery and lyrics by the marmalade cat’s resourceful author Kathleen Hale. The Pleasure Gardens were designed to bounce people back to the good old days of popular culture before radio was invented, let alone te
levision. The South Bank, on the other hand, had a Telecinema as a taste of futurity and novel features such as gas flames flaring through fountains and works of art placed beside pools so as to reflect well. Epstein’s Youth Advances was on a plinth outside Homes and Gardens and Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure was posed as a human landscape feature in the forecourt of the Country pavilion.

  The organisers of the Festival had resolved to demonstrate the virtues of public art and provide employment for artists. For painters there were mural commissions: Michael Ayrton’s The Elements as the Sources of Power in the Dome of Discovery, Keith Vaughan’s Discovery, a landscape with male nudes, and John Minton’s Exploration, a complicated historical tableau. Graham Sutherland’s Origins of the Land, an array of fossil trophies on a backdrop of Festival orange and yellow with a pterodactyl dropping by, was slashed by vandals. Ben Nicholson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Victor Pasmore produced abstract murals for two of the exhibition restaurants, works complementing those of professional designers such as F. H. K. Henrion whose white plaster oak tree, a gigantic piece of shop-window Surrealism in The Natural Scene, anticipated the amplitude of later Henry Moores. Whimsicalities filled the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, the captions for which were supplied by Laurie Lee. And there were casual jobs. Frank Auerbach worked as a barman in the Regatta Restaurant, serving beer and sweeping up below a Pasmore mural.

  To the Arts Council the Festival of Britain was a perfect chance to prove itself indispensable, and it was Arts Council policy to embrace all sorts of artists, within reason. The leading sculptors were readily involved. Twelve were given commissions, of whom three – Epstein, Moore and Hepworth – had their work sited on the South Bank; others, besides them, exhibited in the London County Council’s outdoor sculpture exhibition in Battersea Park. Painters, being more numerous, were awarded a competition. Sixty were selected and invited to produce ‘a large work, on a canvas not less than 45 by 60 inches, on a subject of their own choice’. The canvas was provided (since art materials were still in short supply, this was an incentive) and the assumption was that most of the resulting pictures would be suitable for display in hospitals and schools.

  Freud was pleased to be asked to produce a painting, subject unspecified, his biggest yet. ‘By far. Though it was the smallest possible under the specifications. I realised I’d have to work in a freer way, working on that scale.’ He also saw that he would need money to see him through. Kenneth Clark, he decided, was worth approaching. ‘I have been sent this canvas,’ he told him. ‘The picture would take me a minimum of six or eight months and I haven’t got the money.’ Clark was happy to oblige. ‘“Oh, I’d be very honoured to take care of that,” he said.’ He gave Freud £500 in two cheques, one from Aspreys, the other from Partridges, the antique dealers. ‘He would sell furniture and buy art. When I read Alan Clark [his son] saying, “You know the sort of people who have to buy their own furniture,” I thought hmm: Kenneth Clark did that. Anyway, he gave me the money to do the painting. He was very generous: he made it possible to do it.’

  To show his gratitude Freud produced a study of the palm tree that had stood behind the sofa in The Painter’s Room. ‘I gave him a little painting which I sort of did with a view to giving it to him. A detail, as it were, from the painting.’ The palm, too big now for the room, had been moved on to the balcony. Its lower half made for a nifty little vignette on a copper plate. That done, he brought the plant indoors and positioned it so that its tousled crown related to the top of the lamp post below the balcony and to the bare plane tree on the far side of the canal. ‘I was always very conscious of wanting to put the things I liked together. My palm tree: I really liked that.’ Previously it had been palm and zebra, woman and daffodil, Kitty and roses. Now it was man and palm.

  The stroppy figure standing between fireplace and palm tree was Harry Diamond, employed at that time as a stagehand and there because he was available in daytime. Freud’s first thought had been to use Charlie Lumley, but he was doing his National Service and had been posted to North Wales in a gun battery. ‘Hows the large painting coming along or have you finished it yet I loved the idea of the picture when I was home the palm tree with the figure I wish I could have sat for it, by the way who is sitting for it the drug addict? I think he would be wonderful for the picture,’ Charlie wrote.1

  For nearly six months – late afternoon, early evening, occasionally all day – Harry Diamond stood there in the stance of a pub regular with a grudge against society, or the painter, or the palm. Bloody thing: he feels like thumping it. He breathes resentment.

  ‘Harry Diamond said I made his legs too short. The whole thing was that his legs were too short. He was aggressive as he had a bad time in the East End to do with being Jewish.’ Diamond claimed, forty years later, to still being ‘slightly miffed’ about the way Freud presented him. ‘I don’t really have short legs,’ he contended.2 But he did. ‘With short people’, Freud observed, ‘their bodies don’t vary as much as their legs do.’ Rather than take the bus he often used to walk across London from Whitechapel to the Harrow Road. Freud was to paint Diamond a number of times through into the 1970s. ‘I was born good-looking,’ Diamond said.3

  ‘Everything begins with lucid indifference,’ Camus wrote.4 Interior in Paddington began with the familiar leaves of the palm and developed, with the introduction of the near-stranger, into a confrontation: man versus indoor plant. Freud had known Harry Diamond casually from before the war in the Coffee An’. He worked in the Ferodo brake-block factory, then at various jobs. As a scene-shifter he had watched others perform. Fist clenched, ciggy unlit in the other hand, he doubles for Charlie, whose brother Billy is posted as lookout in the street below, lounging against the canal wall. Freud has him cornered. Were it a narrative painting, Interior in Paddington could represent the moment in Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith is arrested by the authorities. (‘There was a snap, as though a catch had been turned back. The picture had fallen to the floor, uncovering the telescreen behind … “The house is surrounded.”’)5 Under scrutiny, Harry could be about to crack. He and the palm are a match: same height, same dishevelment, both brought in from the cold. The shine on the palm leaves corresponds with the sheen on the raincoat, the nicotine on the fingers matches the frostbitten tips of the leaves. The prickliness is mutual. ‘I’m a person in myself,’ Diamond insisted. ‘My actual existence is a damn sight more important than any painting anyone could do of me. I’m a cooperative sort of person. I don’t usually hold a cigarette in my left hand (I’m right-handed) but it’s as he wanted. One thing he wouldn’t let me do was look at my watch. I thought it’s my time as much as yours; I’ve got as much right as you to know what it is.’ As for the palm, in 1988 he was to see it off: ‘Well, I think I’ve outlived it!’6

  Discussing, in 1951, his Standing Form against Hedge, Graham Sutherland talked of ‘the mysterious immediacy of a figure standing in a room or against a hedge in its shadow’.7 Freud’s painting was more specific than any horned or topiary Sutherland; and while Sutherland admitted that he found it distracting to have someone in front of him while he was painting, Freud could not manage without that someone being there for him. The glints in Harry’s new National Health Service specs are reflections off the window; the seeing reflects off the unseeing while the silence of the canal, behind the wall and below street level, diffuses itself into the pale light of a dull day.

  In his prison cell Camus’ Meursault says, ‘I made a point of visualising every piece of furniture and each article upon or in it, and then every detail of each article and finally the details of the details so to speak: a dent or encrustation or a chipped edge, and the exact grain and colour of the woodwork.’8 The same degree of concentration informs every square inch of Interior in Paddington. The dirt tamped down in the plant pot; the seam of grime where window pane meets window frame. Freud needed a good colour for the floor and found what he wanted in the rag-and-bone shop at the end of Delamere Terrace: a dense red carpet. ‘I v
ery much bought it for the picture; it was huge and dirty and had a burn in it two or three yards square; I cut that out and made it fit into the corner of the room.’ To dress the room was to give it airs. Coincidentally, as another Festival attraction, Michael Weight created (or recreated, believers would have it) in Baker Street Sherlock Holmes’ sitting room; every famous detail was there, down to syringe, violin, half-eaten breakfast and telltale cigar ash. Though less elaborate, Freud’s set-up was a gathering of evidence around, and about, Harry Diamond, whose attitude was once described by David Sylvester in the Burlington Magazine in a phrase that can only sound familiar to readers of Conan Doyle: ‘the pathetic defiance of the stunted man’.9

  The idea of rucking up the carpet – ‘being able to see under the carpet’ – came from a picture that belonged to Kenneth Clark and is now in the Tate: The Saltonstall Family, devised in 1637 by David des Granges who later became miniature painter to Charles II, in which Sir Richard Saltonstall is something of a time lord, seen showing his two elder children their mother on her deathbed and their stepmother, the second Lady Saltonstall, sitting beside the bed holding her own baby, born six years later.

  Interior in Paddington preoccupied Freud in the autumn and winter of 1950/1. It would be wrong to poke around for implications in the rucked carpet, yet the painting does exude a wintry tension. The chill is systematic. (‘The cruel intentness of a frosty morning,’ said David Sylvester.)10 Attention centres on Harry Diamond’s thumb poised on the cigarette end. One false move, as it were, and he’ll press the plunger. The shadow behind his head has slipped to one side. Soft and transitory, it is Lautréamont’s ‘shadow brushing the wall like a gull’s wing’.11 It is a long-drawn-out here and now.

  ‘I did feel I was being drained,’ Harry Diamond said.12