The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘She stayed quite a bit, but she left because I was so promiscuous. She was casual in her degree of involvement, liked scoring but had a funny temperament. Sometimes when we were out, a bad lot, David Milford Haven, the Marquis of Milford Haven, friend of Prince Philip (his best man), would follow us and obviously she was carrying on with him. Henrietta liked quite a lot of angles to these things, and one thing I realised: there was this very odd thing with mothers. She took up with people she said were tricky and dangerous, young men who had affairs with their mothers, and she had to get in their way. She was a devil for a threesome: a terrific rivalry with the mothers. This wasn’t fantasy: some people make their inventions. She was good-looking for a very long time.’ The relationship did not end with the last sitting. ‘It drifted on a while in a fairly spasmodic way long after the picture. She came to Paris.’ Her second marriage – following the one to Michael Law – was to the actor/body-builder Norman Bowler and her third, in the sixties, to the poet Dom Moraes. Bacon’s portraits of her, worked up from photographs by John Deakin, upstaged Freud’s laborious picture.

  Among the alternatives to Henrietta was Caryl Chance (Girl in a Dark Dress painted in 1951), blonde and determined-looking. ‘She was more fastidious, rather amazing, and was around Soho a lot.’ Once, at the Gargoyle, someone tried to rob her. ‘Don’t be so silly, darling,’ she was said to have said. ‘You look absolutely lovely and I’m going to dance with you.’ She too went to Paris with Freud. ‘During the night, in a hotel on the Île Saint Louis, someone came and took her handbag. No one can do these things with me about, I thought, and I told the landlady. Tears started running down her face. “We’ve had a thief here for years,” she said, “and it’s so awful: because we have seven residents and it’s one of them and we don’t know who.” I did go with her, but I never lived with her. She was loud and tiresome, lovely-looking, and never stopped talking; could be funny, but not brainy. I’d ring a number and get her. She was very much about.’ She had her eye on Tony Strickland Hubbard, the Woolworth’s heir.

  Kitty went round to Delamere Terrace one day, saw Girl in a Dark Dress on the easel and reacted. Freud regretted this. ‘Kitty smashed it.’ The painting was repaired and Caryl went on to become, briefly, a cat burglar, enjoying the buzz and initial success. This did not last. Her partner in crime, Henrietta Moraes, fell out with her. ‘“My idol had feet of clay,” she said.’

  When in the spring of 1951, after some months in South Africa, Bacon returned to England it was to be devastated by the death of Jessie Lightfoot, his nanny, housekeeper, surrogate mother and, on occasion, bouncer. Freud heard him out. ‘He told me the sort of things that were happening to her, shitting herself in the bed. And about his making things easier for her. She then got much worse. After she died he painted me.’ This was the first portrait from the life that Bacon attempted; that’s to say, the first to enter the oeuvre. It was done at the Royal College of Art where, for a year or so, Rodrigo Moynihan gave Bacon the use of a studio. Freud expected to have to be there, to make his presence felt as Harry Diamond had done for him. ‘He asked me to sit and when I came the first time this painting was already virtually finished.’ Bacon never normally worked with someone else in the room. He talked, mainly to himself – ‘exasperation, explanations, self-criticism, unselfconscious’ – and there was ‘a lot of movement and noise and lots of mixing colour on the forearms, very, very, strenuous. And a lot of irritation, but not for me though: he’d got such good manners, making it clear that him and it, not you, were the problem. He had a photograph of Kafka leaning on the doorway and he had been using that. I was amazed; it looked terribly good to me. First time he just did the foot. Then I came and stood about four or five times and it got worse and worse every time and then, at the end, not very good. It isn’t very good, but it’s lively.’

  The Bacon Portrait of Lucian Freud (1952), in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, bears no resemblance to Freud and little to Kafka. A coltish young man enters through what could be a revolving door into blinding glare. Soon after this Freud rejected an approach from a Slade student, Lorenza Mazzetti, for him to play the lead in her film adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It would have been, he thought, an impersonation too far. Another Slade student, Michael Andrews, took on the role.

  Michael Hamburger, who had known and quite liked Freud longer than most, liked him least, he said, when he saw him in Soho with Bacon. ‘He adopted a sort of manner, which I disliked: being very sophisticated and smart and making remarks supposed to be shocking.’29 Bacon, a practised exerciser of charm, urged him to think about how he presented himself. ‘I thought the best thing was to be rude. I don’t mind being on no terms or bad terms. I just don’t want to be on false terms,’ was Freud’s response. But Bacon insisted that good manners were useful. ‘Francis opened my eyes in some ways. His work impressed me, but his personality affected me.’

  During the war, when he was summoned to a tribunal to assess his fitness for military service, Bacon had hired a dog from Harrods and spent the night with it knowing that this was a good way to bring on an asthma attack. ‘He had got this idea about Harrods: if he was near Harrods he couldn’t go too wrong, he thought.’ The store was his universal provider. ‘Everything was linked to Harrods. At first, early on, the bills came and they got more and more nasty but he took no notice and eventually they just pretended that they had been paid. He had a little man there who made these round-cornered suits for him that suited nobody but him.’ And he used to filch from the Food Hall, initially out of necessity, then out of habit. It was, Freud thought, simply a case of him helping himself rather than exercising sleight of hand.

  ‘Francis made a great thing about the sensuality of treachery (which wasn’t original) and he used to go on about the cult of the hands, which, in his pictures, he tended to miss.’

  Bacon turned to advantage his lack of conventional expertise. To adapt William Empson’s phrase, he learned a style from a despair.30 Or, in John Berger’s equally arresting phrase, ‘horror with connivance’.31 It obliged him to be summary, to skirt formal difficulties, exaggerating to disguise incapability, swiping in the hopes of hitting it off, passing off anguish as hilarity and, occasionally, hilarity as angst. He said, ‘We live our life through our whole nervous system’; he thrilled to violence, or to the image of violence. Orwell’s image, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of the fascist state ‘stamping forever on the human face’ is verbal Bacon. The paintings were as showy as figures of speech, as impressive as the ludicrous warning from Mrs Joe in Great Expectations when Joe and Young Pip hurry off to watch convicts being recaptured: ‘If you bring the boy back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don’t look to me to put it together again.’

  Where, intuitively, Picasso used to slice profiles and reposition eyes, Bacon, relying on reflex, made faces that loomed blurrily: ghostly monoprints lifted from the sticky tonalities of photo culture. Like André Gide not knowing ‘whether I feel what I believe myself to be feeling’, Bacon found expression in having a stab at things. ‘Art is a method of opening up areas of feeling rather than merely an illustration of an object,’ he told a reporter from Time magazine in 1952. ‘Real imagination is technical imagination. It is in the ways you think up to bring an event to life again.’ Matthew Smith, he stressed, in the introduction he contributed to the catalogue of Smith’s Tate retrospective in 1953, had this essentially painterly imagination. ‘He seems to me to be one of the very few English painters since Constable and Turner to be concerned with painting – that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable.’32 What was true of Smith was even more true of himself: ‘I think that painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.’33

  Suspicious of such notions as happy accident, Freud baulked at this. ‘I don’t know with Matthew Smith. It’s impossible not to like it, but you don’t feel that truth plays much part in it.’ Listening though to Bacon, seeing him mos
t days, he found himself echoing his words. ‘I used a phrase, “memory-trace”, to Colin Anderson. He said, “You’re talking like Francis: is that right?” Sort of bitchy.’

  Bacon, Freud found, was better to talk to than anyone else he knew, deft and provocative, always stimulating. And he even agreed to be painted. ‘It took two or three months. He grumbled but sat well and consistently.’ Bernard Walsh, who ran Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street, their favourite eating-place, used to go on at them to do portraits of one another. ‘What I want is a Bacon of Freud and a Freud of Bacon,’ he said, so it was a virtual commission. Freud saw it as a favour rendered. ‘That little picture I really did for him; but when I left Kitty and married Caroline he was so unpleasant. “I didn’t know Lucian was a ponce,” he said, and I was so depressed I fell off the bar stool on to the floor. I couldn’t do anything else as he owned the place and was thirty years older.’ Otherwise, he said, he would have thumped him.

  As with most of the other small portraits he did around that time Freud used a copper plate, small enough to be hand-held if the detailing demanded it. ‘Life-size looks mean,’ Bacon said, whereas shaving-mirror-scale looks intimate. Freud’s Bacon is side-lit, half dour, half sunny, his voluptuous features, nostrils and chin, temples and jowls, uneasily patted together. Sitting knee to knee, within three feet of him, Freud caught the air of unconcern, or diffidence even, the heavy-lidded eyes downcast, blond hair mussed over traces of pencilling, a flicker of disdain crossing his mind possibly.

  Francis Bacon, 1952

  Freud was prompted – shamed even – by Bacon. ‘I got very impatient with the way I was working. It was limiting and a limited vehicle for me and I also felt that my drawing and my making artefacts – graphic artefacts – stopped me from freeing myself and I think my admiration for Francis came into this. I realised that by working in the way I did I couldn’t really evolve. The change wasn’t perhaps more than one of focus but it did make it possible for me to approach the whole thing in another way.’ He appreciated that expression – as distinct from Expressionism, which was pseudo-primitive Mannerism – involved a degree of emphasis bordering on abandon. Bonnard said, ‘Draw your pleasure – paint your pleasure – express your pleasure strongly.’ As Delacroix wrote in his diary, ‘One never paints violently enough.’

  Shortly before Freud’s second Hanover Gallery exhibition in May 1952, John Rothenstein of the Tate came to Clifton Hill to see his latest work and, compensating for having failed to secure Girl with Roses for the Tate, went one better by buying both Girl with a Dog and the portrait of Bacon, which was thereafter referred to by Bernard Walsh at Wheeler’s as ‘my picture of Bacon you sold’. Conveniently, when Eric Hall presented Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to the Tate the following year, Freud’s Francis Bacon could be associated with it as the very head within which the dream of reason had produced monsters.

  Walsh, who had been an actor and at one stage owned the Ivy Restaurant, was a racehorse owner with a family background in oysters. He continued to complain about being cheated of the picture. ‘I thought you were a friend of mine,’ he said. Freud told him that he saw no reason to keep to any arrangement they might have had. ‘No doubt you were drunk,’ he added, to which Walsh retorted: ‘In vino veritas.’ However some years later Freud did a similar sort of portrait of Walsh himself. ‘Done for oysters. It didn’t hold together. He was a big Irishman; his daughter, married to a Maltese man with a restaurant in Charlotte Street, had it on show there.’

  Erica Brausen was furious too when she learnt that Rothenstein had bought the two paintings ahead of the Hanover exhibition for it deprived her of the best potential sales, as the other exhibits, such as Girl in a Blanket, Girl with Beret (Helena), and Portrait of a Girl (Anne Dunn), were all small, except for Interior in Paddington which had been presented by the Arts Council to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. David Sylvester did not specifically mention either painting in his review for the Listener, published a couple of days after the opening. Francis Bacon however was reproduced with a caption dating it 1950–1 and saying that the Tate had bought it. The early paintings, Sylvester wrote, had been ‘hysterically still and airless’, but the new ones had more to them. ‘The impression they make of a presence as complex as that of real people. And as unique. For while Freud’s work might be called affected – as a dandy is affected: that is to say there is deliberation in its unconventionality – it is entirely free of mannerism, of any inclination to impose a preconceived character on the subjects.’34

  Other reviewers aired what had become the usual preconceptions. ‘The tension here is at snapping point,’ wrote Michael Middleton in the Spectator. ‘Or fairly frequently so.’35 John Berger in the New Statesman recommended the mildly Coldstream-style paintings by Martin Froy, a recent Slade graduate, in the upstairs room at the Hanover as ‘well worth investigating’ but did not mention the Freuds. But Robert Melville praised the Bacon portrait unreservedly. ‘For once he has suppressed all his sinister proclivities for the game of out-staring but we are on safer ground if we think of it simply as one of the great portraits of the century.’36

  Bacon appreciated that Freud had caught him all but unawares. There he was: close, guarded, troubled, solitary really, and manifestly private. Unusually for him, Freud was relieved to be told that he approved. ‘He liked it as it went on.’

  More so, it may be assumed, than Robert Buhler’s half-length portrait of him in open-necked shirt and jacket, painted in 1950 and exhibited in the 1952 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Buhler’s Bacon sat further away, distant enough to appear to be a fairly average sort of chap acting nonchalant for a fellow painter despite inner uncertainty and a lack of proper training.

  When Nanny Lightfoot died in 1951 Bacon was so distressed he couldn’t bear to go on living in his Cromwell Place studio. Buhler took it over and came upon some discarded canvases there, which, Freud heard, he later sold. ‘Francis was really upset and confronted Buhler about restretching stuff of his and putting it on the market. Buhler said, “You don’t really care so much about your reputation, do you?”’ Bacon didn’t pursue the matter. ‘He said, “These are my drinking companions, Rodrigo, Robert and Ruskin [Spear].” Francis was far too intelligently realistic to make anything more of it.’ Better to shrug it off than make a belittling fuss. ‘Francis had a brilliant gift of finding qualities in people.’ Better to seem to find qualities in people than to be seen to lose face over them. Presentation, after all, was so important.

  ‘Francis would not be photographed in the ordinary way, so when [John] Deakin was photographing several people a day in the Vogue studios in Shaftesbury Avenue and asked him, he said he would only be photographed naked to the waist with sides of beef: i.e. fuck off. But Deakin got sides of beef and Francis’ bluff was called. He had to do it.’ Bacon submitted to being posed between two sides of beef like a peculiarly ineffectual meat porter. ‘If you look, no hand could hold them; the sides of beef were hooked.’ Rather than waste an outlandish pose, Bacon did a painting of Deakin’s photo session, the sides of beef closing in on a pope like two wings of a triptych. Freud told him that he liked it. ‘I don’t,’ Bacon said and not long afterwards offered it to him as a wedding present.

  Freud found Bacon good to draw impromptu. He drew him tetchy, scratching the top of his head like Stan Laurel bemused. Then one evening at Clifton Hill Bacon stood up, tugged at the waistband of his trousers and, wiggling a little, offered himself up as a poseur. ‘He said, “I think you ought to do this, because I think that’s rather important.” He undid his top fly buttons. “Oh, you ought to use these,” he said. His hips: such a good tip. He rolled up his sleeves (his forearms were very well developed) talking about how to edit himself. He recognised the hips were a great feature, part of his allure.’ Three impeccable line drawings resulted, drawings defining the twitch of the pelvis, the roll of the hips.

  Francis Bacon, 1951

  Freud was to paint Bacon once again s
ome years later, ‘a half-picture’, he said, extending to facemask proportions: eyes, nose, mouth and the bulge of a cheek completed, the rest unrealised. ‘Francis got bored, sort of, with sitting.’ There being no likelihood of ever getting it finished, he decided after a while to let go of it to Nicholas Luard (co-founder of the magazine Private Eye and the Establishment Club in the early sixties) to settle a debt of £80. But Luard wrote back saying that he actually owed £280. Offended, Freud withdrew the offer (‘I thought not giving it to him was some sort of fine’) and eventually the dealer William Darby bought it off him one afternoon for an urgently needed £600; he nipped into a nearby betting shop with the money and there lost it.

  21

  ‘Lady Dashwood, sorry to have kicked you’

  When, in 1952, John Minton asked Freud to paint his portrait he was surprised at his working method. ‘He said, “Do you actually look at people when you paint them? You keep looking really really hard.” I did it on a kind of slatey undercoating.’ As with the white dog painted over the black dog, the dark ground gave Minton’s skin a ghostly tinge. Where Freud’s Bacon had been sun-blessed, his Minton was moonstruck, distracted and faintly chivalric, like a doleful Arthurian knight ‘making good and properly absurd camp jokes’, his friend Bruce Bernard said, ‘mostly of mock despair’.1 According to his friend Susan Einzig, the illustrator, the Minton crowd viewed the portrait ‘with shock and anger’, seeing it as a travesty of the Minton they knew. Mercurial, yes, and prone to bouts of depression, but why the feverish melancholy when he was so loudly, and so passionately, the life and soul of the party? A critic spat at it. Minton, however, hung the painting in his house in Allen Street and when, the following year, he painted a self-portrait his mirror image reflected Freud’s painting, with modifications: a straightening of the nose, a firming of the chin and no wistful brimming of the eyes.