The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Paris Tuesday 18th Jan:

  Dear Lilian thank you for your letter and the very helpful list! I am rather depressed by the recent activities of the selection committee as concerns my work. I realise of course that they/it are/is quite within their rights to reject my work when it fails to please them but why did they chose me at all if they then reject so much that is representative of my work? In view, then, of their recent purge, there are some small changes that I would like to make: (1) withdraw ‘Leaf and Head’ (2) include ‘Kitty with Cat’ after all.

  ‘Kitty with Cat’ is medium size so to replace ‘Leaf and head’ from a size point of view I want to include ‘Balcony still life’ 1949–50, owned by Kenneth Clark.

  The size of the painting on which I am working is 36x24. I definitively [crossed out] definately want to include this painting and will bring it to London as soon as it is complete. I think it will take 3 more weeks. There are various mistakes in the titles and dates on the list you sent me but I better correct these for you when we next meet.

  Love Lucian

  p.s. It is hard to make further suggestions to the committee when they reject paintings I know to be less bad than those I have not yet suggested! L.5

  Asked to lend Woman with Carnation, Lincoln Kirstein replied that he no longer owned it. ‘The picture is by no means an important one,’ he added. Alfred Barr was unwilling to lend because of the Museum of Modern Art’s 25th Anniversary. ‘A rather devastating blow to us,’ Somerville wrote to Barr,6 though she was concerned more about their Bacon, Painting 1946, as she had decided that it should be the centrepiece in the main room of the pavilion. If the painting could not be borrowed Bacon might withdraw entirely, she hinted; in the end Barr agreed to make it available, together with Freud’s Woman with a Daffodil for the first two months of the Biennale only. The woman with the daffodil herself, Lorna Wishart, was asked if she would lend The Painter’s Room (‘without this, any important exhibition of his work would be very incomplete,’ Somerville wrote)7 but she did not reply and the painting was dropped from the list.

  Somerville to Freud, 26 February:

  I was very glad that Roland Penrose was able to see you when he was in Paris, as he was able to refer to his conversation with you when I told the Selection Committee at their last meeting of your disappointment at their not choosing certain of the paintings you had suggested for Venice. They have, however, agreed to withdraw ‘Leaf and Head’ and we are writing to Sir Kenneth Clark to ask him to lend ‘Balcony Still Life’ instead. As you may know your brother has kindly agreed to lend ‘Kitty with Cat’.

  The Committee fully understands how anxious you are to include the painting you are working on at the moment, but they do hope that it will be possible for you to let us have this in about two weeks’ time. Roland Penrose described it as it was when he saw it and it sounds a very exciting composition.8

  She offered to frame it. ‘Time is running rather short.’

  Anxious to settle titles and dates, Somerville wrote again a week later, also suggesting that Frank McEwen of the British Council in Paris bring to London Princess George’s (Marie Bonaparte’s) picture of lemons which Freud had collected from her. She wondered whether she would be able to show the painting to the committee before sending it off to Venice in mid-April. Freud replied to the effect that Hotel Bedroom was taking longer than he had anticipated and that the committee would have to wait.

  Alas your list never reached me I think you have not got my London address quite right … I am in the middle of a large painting and will return with it when it is finished. Love (and to the man in the green tie) from Lucian.9

  The man in the green tie was Major Somerville, whom Freud remembered as ‘a musician, who had a studio in Abercorn Place and used to wander round St John’s Wood. She kept him in ties.’

  A week or so later, in mid-March, Freud reported that the painting would be ready, he thought, in ten days or a fortnight. ‘The moment it is dry enough to travel I will bring it to London.’

  Brassaï photographed the Freuds in their room for French Vogue, which published a short piece by Cyril Connolly that April in advance of the Biennale. He decided to have them adopt the same pose as in the painting. For Freud this was disquieting. ‘I was slightly aware of the drama in the photo and was a bit dismayed, rather naively. Isn’t it odd how the most convincing photographs are staged? I asked Brassaï about the brothel photos he had taken. He said, “I set it all up, of course. They were very cooperative with me.” Brassaï was charming and friendly.’ He gave Freud a copy of the photograph, of which only the Caroline half survived. He snipped himself out of it some time later.

  As for the painting, it became something of a sequel to the Ill in Paris etching: another room, another marriage, and this time more disturbing. ‘She was so disorientated in every way. I was terribly restless and Caroline was terribly nervous.’ Living in one small room was bad enough without the strain of the relationship itself, Freud emphasised. ‘The picture was at a difficult time. She wasn’t amorous, not very well. She got ill in Spain, lost a terrific lot of blood, anaemic, didn’t have her periods, very run down and never getting strong at all. Smoking day and night. I was conscious of that. If I’d been aware of it being drama, in the theatrical sense, I wouldn’t have …’ There was a fight during which he pushed her naked into the hotel corridor and locked her out.

  Caroline was dismayed by how she now looked. ‘Others were mystified as to why he needed to paint a girl, who at that point still looked childish, as so distressingly old.’ Yet in later life she came to appreciate the sleight of art involved: ‘the genius ability to make the people and objects that come under his scrutiny seem more themselves, and more like themselves, than they ever have been – or will be’.10

  The painting was seen as ‘shocking and violent and cruel’ by most of those who saw it in progress, Freud remembered. ‘There were horrible remarks from Bill Chataway, a sculptor who married a cousin of Kitty’s, lived in Paris, knew Giacometti and drew in the streets, very bitter. He used to push at the door and come in.’ The Cuban painter Wifredo Lam on the other hand (introduced to him by Peter Watson) came to see the picture and, as he left, said, ‘Ceci c’est pour toujours,’ which pleased Freud enormously.

  Bifocal in aspect – half looking down at the head in the bed and half across the bed into the mirror – Hotel Bedroom, like Interior in Paddington, involved sitting or standing, depending on which part of the painting needed working on. Studying himself he stood; for the rest of the picture he mostly sat. ‘I had a lot of eye trouble, terrible headaches, because of the strain of sitting so close, painting so close. So I went to the oculist who said, “Straining so hard, you must focus your eyes on the furthest point out of the window.” My eyes were completely going mad, sitting down and not being able to move. Sitting down used to drive me more and more agitated. I felt I wanted to free myself from this way of working. Small brushes, fine canvas. That’s the last painting where I was sitting down. When I stood up I never sat down again.’

  When William Coldstream saw the painting he said, of the self-portrait aspect, ‘He’s thinking of doing a bunk without paying.’

  Freud brought Hotel Bedroom to London in early April. A telegram awaited him at Delamere Terrace. ‘Essential to have your painting by eleven o’clock Friday at latest.’11 Meanwhile the commissioning of a catalogue essay had become contentious. He did not want one, but Lilian Somerville was adamant. ‘You will remember we discussed it when you were last in London and you liked the idea of Robert Melville doing it, who had been suggested by the committee. He has now written a very good introduction and I enclose a copy in case you would like to see it.’12

  ‘Freud has affinities with Balthus and Otto Dix,’ Melville wrote. ‘But every so often energies play like lightning around one of his automatons, and at such times he is in the exceptional company of Rousseau and the early Chirico.’ Such energies were distracting maybe. ‘The uncertainties of his spatial and
volumetric illusionism do not decrease as his ambition to paint like David expands, and in England we look upon him as the finest of our living primitives. His art has the exquisite laboriousness of Sunday painting relentlessly pursued throughout the week.’13

  Having returned to Paris Freud objected to this. ‘The thing was unappreciative; and I found offensive the fact that he said “he’s a naive painter”, and I thought he suggested that Rousseau is a naive painter. (That he said I couldn’t paint, I didn’t mind.) “I can’t have this,” I said.’ His response – written out by Caroline at his dictation – was to say that he had been told that no such essay was required. ‘I do very very strongly wish it to be confined to a biographical note. Robert, as a good friend of mine, would I am sure be the first to understand my reasons for not wanting a preface.’14 He suggested asking Cyril Connolly instead. In reply Lilian Somerville telegraphed him at the Hotel La Louisiane:

  agree new biennale foreword unfortunately connolly cannot accept owing other article on yourself stop suggest asking peter watson or james pope-hennessy or stephen spender stop cable or telephone agreement and order of preference.15

  ‘I said there was an article by Noel Annan – who I just knew as the husband of Gabby [Ullstein] – in which he said that apart from me there was no other good artist of real distinction except Benjamin Britten, which I liked. Annan refused though. He sent a note saying, “I know nothing about painting.” And I had a letter from Kenneth Clark and he said, “Please don’t think badly of this, but I feel this article of Noel Annan’s is intolerable.” That was because how could he not mention Moore and Pasmore. “We can’t have Henry left out.” So Rothenstein did it. It irked me a bit.’

  Rothenstein’s preface was unobjectionable. Where Herbert Read referred airily to ‘the range and beauty of the visual poetry’ in Ben Nicholson’s work,16 Rothenstein drew attention to a ‘wide-eyed penetrating stare’, describing Freud as a ‘coolly eccentric, ruthlessly observing young man, the subject of a modest legend’ even before becoming known as a painter. Briefed, no doubt, by Lilian Somerville, he added that it was a mistake to think of him as a ‘sophisticated Sunday painter’ or as ‘a wilful prickly follower of Ingres. He is neither a painstaking embroiderer nor an aspirant after classical laurels: he is, in fact, a man of feeling.’17

  The 27th Venice Biennale opened in June. Ben Nicholson had just received the Belgian Critics’ Award for the best show of the year and, as the main British contender for the Golden Lion for best artist, had fifty works in the British Pavilion, a neo-Palladian former tearoom, sharing the high ground in the Public Gardens with those of France and Germany. Freud considered Nicholson too concerned with ‘keeping up with Europe’. Bacon, ‘trapping a reality without naming it’,18 according to David Sylvester’s catalogue essay, dominated the main room along with Reg Butler, a late addition, exhibiting the drawings and maquettes for a towering scaffold that had won him first prize in the ICA competition for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. Both were better attuned to the Europe of 1954 than Nicholson, for 1954, effectively the last year before American art arrived on the European scene, was the year for salutes to Surrealism at the Biennale. The Golden Lion went not – as had been widely anticipated – to Miró but to Max Ernst. (When, around this time, Freud met Max Ernst the only thing he could think to say to him was ‘Are you working hard?’ To which the reply was ‘No, I never work very hard,’ which Freud considered gratuitously flip. He thought him ‘rather German but with a malevolently French streak’.)

  Alfred Frankfurter, editor of Artnews in New York, visited the Biennale and was pleased to note that ‘this year’s Biennale is the first one to indicate an influence on Europe of how Americans have transformed what came originally from the European abstract idea.’ He commented on a sort of Realism still abroad in Europe (witness a Courbet show in the central pavilion) ‘completely diluted with ice water and drained of all vitality’.19 A reference to Freud, possibly, though more likely the epic anti-American compositions of Renato Guttuso. Ben Nicholson he barely mentioned. Herbert Read, who considered Nicholson a crucial artist in the modernist cause, saw nothing but irrelevance in Freud’s efforts (‘objective naturalism’) and, mindful of having been one of the selectors, took to alluding to him with a touch of sarcasm: ‘What are we to make of Lucian Freud, the Ingres of existentialism?’20 A decade later he was to reshape the remark for a freshened edition of his Contemporary British Art into ‘What terms … do we reserve for a Lucian Freud, the Ingres of existentialism?’21 Writing – ahead of the Biennale – in the Architectural Review, Robert Melville gave consideration to Hotel Bedroom. Freud, he wrote, ‘after a period of gloomy realism in which he made great technical strides is now recapturing the sparkle of his early work, and his latest autobiographical study of sleeping and staring almost ranks with the well-known Kitty with a Rose’. Hung as they were in one of the pavilion’s side galleries it is hardly any wonder that the paintings attracted little attention. By 1954 criteria – those of abstract expansiveness on the one hand, dedicated miserabilism on the other – they were singularly out of keeping.

  When Douglas Cooper came to review the Biennale for the Burlington Magazine he was scathing about Courbet and Max Ernst but reserved his fiercest jibes for ‘a central European tradition of nasty illustration for nasty children’s books’, the work of Ben Shahn, of the Austrian Wolfgang Hutter (initiator of the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism) and of Freud. Particularly Freud. ‘His faulty draughtsmanship and his modernistic distortions (contrasting oddly with the naturalism of his pretty-pretty flower and fruit still-lives) produce paintings that are affected rather than forceful.’22

  Freud did not go to Venice. ‘It never occurred to me to go; it didn’t impinge at all.’

  Some weekends he and Caroline took the plane to Paris, though often he went alone. ‘Straight off the plane to the clubs and a room at the Louisiane. We used to go abroad quite a bit in the summer, to stay in Ireland where Caroline used to take houses.’ Flitting around was displacement activity, an exercise of spending power at the expense of sustained work. A photograph of ‘Lady Caroline’ with radiant smile headed an item in the Sunday Express gossip column on 16 May. ‘They have been living in Paris in a small hotel in the Latin Quarter, patronising the arty bistros and cheap restaurants. Now they are in London. The other night they were dancing – in the plushest, costliest night club in town, where the nightly price of their Paris room would just about buy a couple of drinks.’23 Then they went south, to Menton, staying with Caroline’s aunt, Oonagh Oranmore. ‘There were a lot of people, coming and going. I quite like the idea of lying in the sun for a bit. Just for a very short time.’ Disengaging from seaside lassitude, he began a painting of his hostess’s son Garech Browne, sunlit, pensive, like a character out of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s fable of contaminated innocence, published that summer.

  Back in London, after lunch one day at Wheeler’s, the Freuds and Brownes went on to the Gargoyle. Twelve-year-old Garech being too young to be allowed in, Freud shoved him under his overcoat and walked him past the doorman, feet resting on his own feet, just as his father had done with him in Berlin days. Browne, who grew up to become manager of the Irish group the Chieftains (and whose younger brother Tara was the man who ‘blew his mind out in a car’ in the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’), said that Freud in effect taught him to see. Head of a Boy, cropped a little, comes closer than Bacon in the 1952 portrait, the face a sensitive mask catching the light.

  Cyril Connolly’s article in the February 1954 French Vogue, illustrated with Brassaï’s photograph and Girl in Bed, had caught Colin Tennant’s eye. In Menton, where they coincided, he asked Freud to paint him. ‘A brilliant talker,’ he later wrote. ‘Captivating both physically and intellectually to both men and women. His viewpoint was refreshingly original to someone like me with a traditional and somewhat unchallenging upbringing of Eton and Oxford.’24 The painting, begun in Menton and finished in Lo
ndon, was itself unchallenging. Here was the ideal type of youthful aristocrat that Caroline had been bred to marry: polished complexion, receding hair tended by Trumper’s of Curzon Street, tie resolutely knotted. Forget Venice: in England those who counted as friends and patrons were unconcerned about what an editor of Artnews, for one, might decide to deem ‘the most authoritative new style of the mid twentieth century’, namely Abstract Expressionism. Freud’s diversions, in Menton and elsewhere, were taking him on a route set about with compromises into a career pattern strewn with prominent examples from the past, from Augustus John back to Sir Peter Lely, which meant ending up as leading portrait painter of the day. In a matter of months, having succeeded in marrying into the upper class he was, Ann Fleming wrote to her friends Joan Rayner and Patrick Leigh Fermor, in the process of becoming a bit player in high society. ‘Lucian returned from holidaying in Menton with Lady O and B to finish the portrait of Colin. He was arrayed in discreet cotton-striped suits acquired in San Remo and unsuitable for English weather, he was in tremendous spirits and as Colin likes to sit to him from dawn till dark I suspect Lucian of being a strong influence in the royal drama.’25

  This drama concerned the attachment of Princess Margaret to her mother’s equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorced man whom she was not to formally renounce until the following year. In August 1954 Tennant was a guest at Balmoral for the Princess’s birthday, which prompted press speculation about an impending engagement on the rebound. The portrait became part of the news story with Freud involved. He found himself cast in a cameo role: ‘There was a headline in the Evening Standard “To Paint Peer’s Head”. He sat very well. Strange expensive eyes. Princess Margaret sort of ruined him. Caroline really liked him at Oxford but once, when she saw him packing – they were going on a weekend somewhere – she was horrified by his precision.’ The portrait caught his look, more pernickety than dapper.