The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

Before Freud was finished with the painting, it had to be photographed for the 60 Paintings for ’51 catalogue. Subsequently he aged the palm stem, added a crack to the plant pot, accentuated the carpet pile and filled in the floorboards. Harry Diamond remained unaltered, but a shadow disappeared from between his legs leaving a splash of sunlight on white skirting board to shove him forward a little. It pleased the painter to know that a catalogue illustration could lag behind the real thing. ‘I always thought how exciting it was for the photograph to be different from the picture.’

  The painting having been submitted, there was a wait while the jury decided which the Arts Council should buy. ‘I remember being in the Gargoyle at Festival of Britain time and Lawrence Gowing was there. He was always very sour to me. I used to make for downstairs, where the high life really was, and he was upstairs and said, “You are one of those persons who’s going to win one of those prizes.”’ On 18 April a telegram arrived from Philip James of the Arts Council saying that his had been one of the five chosen for a purchase prize, followed by another from Kenneth Clark: ‘Thank heaven judges had sense recognised yr flair masterpiece which now looks better than ever congratulations.’13 There was nothing like the Freud among the other prize purchases (£500 each to Robert Medley, Claude Rogers – both of whom taught at the Slade – Ivon Hitchens and William Gear) or, indeed, among the rest, most of them School of Paris cover versions or doggedly celebratory romps. Gowing had no luck with his Intruders in a Wood, a flirtation with Neo-Romanticism in dappled sous-bois. The most controversial prize winner was William Gear’s Autumn Landscape, an abstract masquerading as camouflage (or vice versa) inadvertently reproduced upside down in the first edition of the catalogue. Bacon, who was in South Africa for the six months before the exhibition, submitted a pope but, once it had been approved, withdrew it.

  ‘Francis had a good picture and destroyed it. It was in there and then it wasn’t; he said he hated it; he was really upset.’ Coldstream had been invited to take part in the exhibition but refused: the scale was too big for him. Johnny Craxton, preoccupied with sets and costumes (contemporary tavern wear) for Daphnis and Chloë (Covent Garden in April 1951) was to complain in later years that he and Freud decided not to put themselves forward for the Arts Council project but that Freud completed and showed his painting after all. Frank Auerbach’s view of this was that Freud was hardly surreptitious given the many months he spent on the painting while Craxton was otherwise occupied. Though it was true that a Craxton would have suited the general run of entries, which tended towards mural statement. Grudge to rift to feud: the Freud–Craxton friendship was ended. Freud, slightly younger than Ayrton and Heron, was the youngest exhibitor.

  Fifty-four of the 60 Paintings for ’51 (six failed to show) went on tour around the country, starting at Manchester City Art Gallery in May after a two-day preview at the RBA Galleries in Suffolk Street. The collector Colin Anderson noted in his catalogue of the Bacon (not yet withdrawn) ‘not a good example’, of the Gear ‘good’. As for Interior in Paddington, he thought it ‘Very good indeed – vision, design and craftsmanship’.

  The liveliest thing about the catalogue was the Sutherlandish red, black and green cover design by Gerald Wilde (Sutherland of course, Wilde relentlessly maintained, had pinched his ideas in the first place). Looking through the illustrations fifty years later Freud marvelled at what those involved had seen fit to produce: a Duncan Grant (‘so horrible’), Edward Burra’s comically blood-curdling Judith and Holofernes (‘hopeless’). Michael Ayrton’s The Captive Seven, a family group glumly representing the seven deadly sins, elicited a sigh.

  Interior in Paddington was reproduced opposite Still Life by William Scott, a spread of ovals: office foyer material. Freud murmured approvingly over the Lowry and he quite liked Victor Pasmore’s The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White, the painting in which he formally abandoned the figurative baggage of the Euston Road School. ‘Peter Watson told me in ’46, “You know Pasmore has gone into Zwemmers and ordered every book on abstract painting”; it holds up (if you think on the other hand of William Scott or Ben Nicholson); it’s got a very odd, individual insistence; his things were made for their own sake, not done for a gallery or show. Better than Ben Nicholson keeping up with Europe.’

  On 16 April Matthew Smith, whose ’51 painting Freud thought ‘a bit good’, took him and a girlfriend out to tea. Freud, he reported to his mistress Mary Keene, ‘could not bring himself to say anything about my effort so I assumed he did not think much of it’.14 Freud remembered that when asked about the exhibition, he told him it was awful. ‘In that case I won’t go,’ Smith said.

  News of Freud’s success got around. A Delamere neighbour, passing him in the street, said, ‘You ’ad it off, Lu. Don’t know me now do you?’

  The Arts Council presented Interior in Paddington to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Harry Diamond, whom Freud was to paint again, several times, went on walking for hours daily and took up photography. ‘It was like someone finding Jesus. He did some shocking and extraordinary ones in the French pub. And weddings.’

  As for the palm: ‘I had it a very long time. Then it became a stump left on the balcony in winter, and then it died.’

  Talking to me about Girl with a White Dog, Freud quoted William Blake: ‘When a man marries a wife he finds out whether her knees and elbows are only glued together.’15 The painting, begun towards the end of 1950 and half the size of Interior in Paddington, turned out to be his last portrait of Kitty. ‘I thought of it before getting the canvas.’ Kitty sits resignedly in what others would have used as the dining room, overlooking the garden at 27 Clifton Hill. The setting is neither boudoir nor a genteel salon like those where Balthus girls preened themselves and dozed. It is a contrived shallow space, reasonably comfortable, with the mattress pushed against the wall and a grey blanket draped behind, in which Kitty is a living effigy at floor level, one breast bared, the other cupped through the towelling of her bathrobe. ‘It’s not a nude at all. The breast is a feature.’ Statuesque but nervous, attended by their watchful terrier, she displays her birthmark on one hand, her wedding ring on the other. Her shoulder rests against the woodwork of the unseen window; her foot points towards an unseen fireplace. This is an ordeal.

  Initially the dog was black. ‘I had a pair of dogs: bull terriers. One was white and one was black. I preferred the black, which was in the painting, but it got run over and so I painted the white one over it.’ The dogs had been a wedding present from Joan Bayon in Cambridge. Kitty said that his grief over the dog’s death was the only time she had seen him so upset.

  Where Interior in Paddington was to do with Harry Diamond’s intrusive impatience, Girl with a White Dog is resignedly composed. This is how things are: stripes and folds, panelling and pelt, muzzle, mouth and exposed shoulder, every form and texture meticulously filled out. Where Sleeping Nude was a tryst with the unconscious, Girl with a Dog (as it was initially called) was on the defensive. ‘Different, very, very different. Slightly Greekish.’ Freud wasn’t quite prepared for this: the painting became a testimony. ‘If you focus on their physical presence you often find that you capture something that neither of you were aware of before.’ Freud sat facing Kitty, looking down slightly, giving the same degree of attention to heads, hands and foot, to the sour yellow bathrobe, the plaited belt, the sag and pallor of the breast.

  To their daughter Annie, speaking when she herself was twice the age her mother had been at that time, the painting is especially telling. ‘The other ones [portraits of Kitty] are girls-legend-reverential-madonnas: “all of her loveliness”. This one I feel phooor it’s almost like defiance: “Do what you can with me while you’ve got me.” And also you’ve got to remember England and the nude and obscenity and it went on being very big until the mid-sixties and even then, when Yoko Ono and John Lennon took their clothes off, it was huge news. Henry Moore’s naked people are not really people, they are all sort of lumps. That’s a real breast with prop
er skin that someone’s kissed and touched and felt and worn a bra. It’s a real person. My mother was very very proud of this painting. Terribly proud of it. To the extent it was an ingredient in difficulties in later life.’16

  Looking back Freud himself saw in it ‘a sense of sadness, even some anger. I think a more complicated person is being portrayed here.’

  Marriage put years on Kitty. Still, she had agreed to pose and that was all there was to it. Conversation, once begun, would be bound to end in reproaches. She, ‘the consistent critic, the patient misunderstander’ of T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, sits there, studiedly remote. ‘All there is of you is your body and the “you” is withdrawn.’ The canine stare and human demoralised detachment are all the more acute for being couched in what could be the makings of a padded cell. Expressive in its restraint, the painting is an exposure. ‘Finally’, Freud said of it, ‘you only want people to understand what the point is.’

  ‘One night I was leaving a club at two or three in the morning, pretty dark, and I hailed a taxi, opened the door, and on the floor was an enormous snake: Donald Maclean. “Hello, Donald, is this taxi taken?” I said. He said, “You …!” in a fury, so I shut the door. It was just a few days before he left.’ Maclean and Guy Burgess, unmasked traitors, disappeared to Russia at the end of May 1951.

  In July Cecil Beaton’s play The Gainsborough Girls opened in Brighton. ‘Loyal friends went down, Ann Fleming and a lot of people. He got a young man to help him write.’ The play was not a success. ‘Two sample lines: “Grind up the lapis lazuli, boy. We’ve got to finish Blue Boy in the morning.” What fascinated Cecil were the daughters, who went mad through snobbery, which took the form of illusions of grandeur. The costumes were marvellous; one exciting thing was the changes of clothes.’ The next night Lord ‘Grubby’ Gage threw a coming-out ball for his daughter at Firle, near Brighton. Everyone who had been to The Gainsborough Girls was there. ‘I was wandering around and George Gage kept getting people up and setting them down at tables. He came over to me and he said, “I’m making patterns.”’

  During the late summer of 1951, Freud and Kitty went to stay for nearly a week with Anne Dunn and Michael Wishart in a house she rented at Cashel, near the pub. ‘I think she must have known about us (Lucian and I) because I was friendly with Kitty on and off, and she was Michael’s cousin.’

  In November 1951, at a party celebrating the opening of Coward’s play Relative Values, Princess Margaret alternated between Freud and Orson Welles, Ann Rothermere noted.

  20

  ‘True to me’

  For a year or so from 1950 Richard Hamilton lived round the corner from Clifton Hill. Born in the same year as Freud, he had since 1948 been studying painting at the Slade, also trying out as a fashion artist for Vogue and involving himself in the ICA. Painting, he became convinced, was pretty much a waste of time for someone his age. Freud remembered him saying, ‘“You know, I can understand why Francis paints, but I really and truly don’t see why you do it.” He said it quite nicely, considering.’

  They were on neighbourly terms and, looking on, Hamilton found himself, he said, ‘always wide-eyed at the way [Lucian] moved through the art world (and other worlds for that matter)’.1 Where he had left school at fourteen for a job as an office boy and had gone to evening classes in art, Freud had left school early not because he had to exactly but to evade further formal education. Socially Freud had the advantage: name and reputation already. ‘Lucian was a fashionable young painter.’ Hard to believe he was nine months his junior. Looking back he was surprised, he said, that Freud ‘would have noticed, or cared, that I had an opinion’.2 And he could never quite tell whether he was truly as untrained and impractical as he seemed to be. For instance he remembered him saying once that his canvases were ‘difficult to paint on because they flapped around like sails’.3 This from a Slade tutor whose idea of art was founded on technical accomplishments allied to design stimuli and perceptual knowingness. Hamilton couldn’t believe that Freud was so unpractised. ‘When I explained the purposes of the little triangles of wood in the corners of the stretcher he said he didn’t feel up to coping with such a tricky technical problem and asked for help. I went round to his studio one evening with a little hammer in my pocket and was lucky to find him at work. There was a beautiful girl on a dirty mattress who wrapped an equally dirty blanket around herself – more to keep warm than to protect her modesty. I tapped in the wedges. Lucian marvelled at how beautifully taut the canvas had become in only a minute or two and admired my skill no end. I still think he was having me on.’4

  In retrospect, Freud thought so too. ‘I was stroking his leg when I said how clever he was; but I was amazed how handy he was. He lived in Springfield Road, he and his first wife, and they made money doing models that included 400 tiny people. They were making these models of New Towns for the Festival and their baby girl was going round smashing forty people with one hand, and they were so patient. They just said, “no no darling”. They were saints in a way. And very skilful.’ He was curious as to why Hamilton chose not to paint personal things. Why not paint his wife, for example? ‘He more or less implied that it was an improper and unseemly subject.’ When he told Freud that his sort of painting was untenable (‘You can’t work in your style nowadays’), Freud said it was the only way he could work.

  Hamilton synthesised as a rule, working within quotation marks so to speak, slightly aloof. His use of colour was mainly to tint or retouch. ‘Like lipstick on the teeth’, said Freud, who was not interested in illustrative demonstration and, still less, demonstrative technique.

  To Hamilton, presentation was key. For him the means of display and delivery were crucial to perception of content; he was attuned in particular to the containment of vision by viewfinder and lens; accordingly he was impressed by Bacon’s framing devices and by his offhand yet celebratory use of photographic images. For ‘Growth and Form’, an exhibition he organised at the ICA in July 1951 as something of a call to order there, following a Graham Sutherland retrospective, he devised a freestanding grid in which were suspended organic and diagrammatic bits and pieces: a variation on Giacometti’s tableau-like The Palace at 4 a.m., a refinement of window-dressing, a twinning of Surrealist legacy with quickening consumer appetites. Though not acting on Herbert Read’s advice, Hamilton held the view, frequently expressed by Read, that the modern artist should be prepared to apply himself to design problems ‘in the most efficient way possible’.5 Trawling for material in disciplines and forms of entertainment other than fine art was stimulating. And there was kudos in art advanced as a gloss on the latest scientific and sociological research. Eventually Hamilton was to be hailed, in England mainly, as the ‘Father of Pop Art’.

  ‘I would not have rated Lucian at quite the level I put Francis [Bacon] but I liked him very much,’ Hamilton concluded.6

  Sir Herbert Read, courtly anarchist of an earlier generation, was all for independent-mindedness, but in his view young Freud could not be said to be more ‘independent of groups or tendencies’ than Francis Bacon. ‘Generally speaking,’ Read wrote, ‘modern art is a personalist art, subjective in its origin and arbitrary in its conventions.’7 In his Contemporary British Art, an illustrated essay published by Penguin Books as a contribution to the 1951 Festival, he found himself in two minds as to the correct label for Freud. ‘Objective naturalism’,8 he decided, was fair enough in that Freud, one of the few notable anomalies in contemporary British art, seemed to him to be enchanted by a sort of depiction disreputable in art since, well, Ruskin’s day.

  Was he a throwback? In ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse’, an essay for Aspects of Form, a symposium published to coincide with the ICA exhibition ‘Growth and Form’, E. H. Gombrich quoted Sir Joshua Reynolds: ‘A history-painter paints man in general; a portrait-painter a particular man, and therefore a defective model.’9 Freud was with Reynolds there, being all for particulars and indeed defects. Particulars gave the lie to nostrums and plati
tudes; particulars defined and informed; particulars led one on. And, as Gombrich said, ‘no sooner is an image presented as art than, by this act, a new frame of reference is created which it can’t escape.’10 For the painter (even Reynolds, in working practice) the frame of reference is not so much ‘art’ as practicalities. Freud, who loathed intellectual carry-on, liked Van Gogh’s idea of a portrait as ‘a complete thing, a perfection, a moment of infinity’.

  There was urgency in this. Bacon told a man he met once in Monte Carlo: ‘You have so little time in life and it is important to make an impression and get it right.’ To him it was axiomatic. ‘Presentation is so important.’11

  To Freud too, the thing was to conduct oneself by instinct, impulsively and resolutely if not calculatedly so. ‘The ancient Aristotelian principle of living by decision, which I think is good. It relates to that: if you allow yourself to follow the way your life goes. I didn’t want my work to lean on anyone in particular. I wanted it to be true to me, and I had an idea – a very mistaken idea – that however much I might look at art I really like and go to the National Gallery, to use it in any way which it had been used by other people couldn’t help me. I felt that what I must learn from the pictures was a way of dealing with things in paint and subject matter, rather than a manner in which to work. I’ve always loved Ingres but I’ve never even thought of in any way working like him – insofar as that’s possible.’

  Picasso said, ‘Ingres drew like Ingres and not like the things he drew,’ and Freud drew like Freud, a lifelong admirer of Ingres. His ‘objective realism’, as Read termed it, wasn’t mimicry and his existentialism, if you could call it that, was – sometimes regrettably – spur-of-the-moment. Once when arguing with a girl in a club he banged her head on the table, explaining that he believed in ‘living by decision’.

  Decidedly, life in Delamere Terrace had more to it than life in Clifton Hill. Freud on the prowl was irrepressible. ‘I used to put on what were then considered de rigueur burglar’s clothes, feed the dog and then start work.’