The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Freud suspected that Litvinoff had been a boyfriend of Ronnie Kray; certainly he lived hazardously. ‘He talked and talked and was sarcastic,’ Auerbach remembered. ‘So much so that the Krays threatened to slit his tongue, it was said.’4 When George Melly gave a lecture on ‘Erotic Imagery in the Blues’ at the ICA, Litvinoff put his hand up and asked if it was permitted for members of the audience to wank. Melly hailed him ‘a dandy of squalor, a face either beautiful or ugly, I could never decide which, but certainly one hundred percent Jewish, a self-propelled catalyst who didn’t mind getting hurt as long as he made something happen, a sacred monster, first class’.5 His tirades were famous for their unstoppable venom and flow.

  The vicarious self-portrait went ahead until Freud decided that Litvinoff’s outrageous carry-on was too much for him. ‘Every time he came round he brought girls along and I used to mock him about it. Procuring gives people strange pleasure; it’s actually a sexual thing and it was absolutely maddening. Once he brought a girl I really liked and I made a date with her behind his back. Anyway, it was impossible for him not to procure and I have a terrible snobbery about being procured for: I like the illusion of romantic meeting – chance or something – not the idea of this awful, unasked-for service.

  ‘I said to him, “I’d like to call this picture The Procurer, but, knowing what you are like and I don’t want any trouble …” (He told me he did not even trust himself not to sue.) I got him to give me a statement. So he wrote me a note saying he wouldn’t sue me and then did. He went to the newspapers but he couldn’t do anything because I had this letter.’ Thinking back, Auerbach suspected that Freud himself thought The Procurer would make good copy and that news of a possible lawsuit could provoke advance interest in his show at the Marlborough Gallery in 1958, much as Sickert had won headlines with eye-catching titles like The Camden Town Murder. Consequently the William Hickey column in the Daily Express of 25 March that year featured the painting together with mugshots of the two of them side by side and a report of Freud’s ‘smart Bond-street opening’ in which Litvinoff (‘independent, and one of the smart Chelsea set’) featured as a wronged innocent, his flow of contributions to the Express as a William Hickey stringer going unmentioned. ‘Mr Litvinoff, who was not at last night’s preview, used to be Mr Freud’s secretary. Mr Freud’s painting of him was originally to be called “Portrait of a Jew”.’

  One Easter weekend several years later Litvinoff answered the door at his High Street Kensington flat only to be punched in the face and have his head shaved after which, tied to a chair, he said, he was hung out over a balcony, regaining consciousness to the sound of ban-the-bomb Aldermaston marchers passing below singing ‘Corrina, Corinna’. True to form Litvinoff, whose accounts of this ducking-stool outrage varied from telling to telling, let it be implied that it could well have been Freud who had set the presumed heavies on to him. Freud always liked the idea that he could deal with problems by threat, direct or directed, but this incident, so swiftly elevated into legend, smacks more of Kray reaction, say, than Freud over-reaction.6

  ‘My dealings with him weren’t for very long. Michael Astor had the painting: he thought The Procurer was improper and retitled it. Litvinoff killed himself later.’7

  Accusations and counter-accusations propelled gleeful if exasperated legend. Ten years after it had last served him as a motif, and shortly after Cecil Beaton photographed little Annie playing with it on the landing at Delamere Terrace, Freud lost his zebra head. ‘I had it a long time and then in the end I had it outside my room as you walked up the stairs and David Litvinoff or somebody took it. It was a bit tiresome and quite heavy. The impetus of theft would give extra strength.’

  In his Romanes Lecture on ‘Moments of Vision’, delivered in May 1954, Kenneth Clark examined the phenomenon of sudden insight. ‘We can all remember those flashes when the object at which we are gazing seems to detach itself from the habitual flux of impressions and becomes intensely clear and important to us.’ Clark singled out Graham Sutherland as someone good at spotting such moments of vision, when things ‘will suddenly detach themselves and demand a separate existence. His imitators think that they can achieve the same effect by going straight to the thorn bush and painting its portrait; but it remains inert and confused, like any other casual sitter.’8 In other words Neo-Romanticism, or whatever one chose to call the inky excesses of the previous decade, was now dead. No more thorn-girt coves.

  Accordingly, Lawrence Alloway told the mainly American readers of Artnews in November 1954 that there was a ‘terrible casualness’ in Bryan Robertson’s choice of ‘British Painting and Sculpture 1954’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. His omission of Nicholson, Sutherland and Bacon – and Freud – was deliberate, it could be assumed; not so his parade of what Alloway took to be ‘evidence of the collapse of artists who developed in the 1940s’. That generation, he argued, had exhausted themselves. ‘Colquhoun and MacBryde seem to have painted themselves out, John Minton is no longer able to hold apart his fine art and his commercial art styles and John Craxton’s lyrical glimmer has gone out, behind tedious and inflated Ghika-like patterning.’ The prevailing style was ‘still rather Festival of Britain – spindly, whimsical and bright’.9 Alloway was the coming critic associated with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, tuned into the urban, the progressive, the colourful and the consumerist; David Sylvester, by contrast spoke up for a more seasoned Realism, reflecting not the allure of things American but the shortcomings of a penny-plain Britain. The time had come, he sensed, for a new movement to be identified and labelled by someone such as himself. Stung to barracking cynicism, John Minton, writing in Ark, the Royal College student magazine, coined the term ‘pre-Sylvestration’ for ‘the period before one’s ideas were pinched by David Sylvester and the bandwagons rolled on’.10

  In the December issue of Encounter Sylvester came close to deploring the dingy tonal look yet inadvertently helped give it currency by remarking that the painters dumped everything they had in their pictures, including the kitchen sink. ‘The dreary greys and browns of the pictures and their general air of depression had little to do with the observation of working-class life as it is, but were the products of a sentimental preoccupation about working-class life.’11

  Typical of what caught on as the Kitchen Sink School was Jack Smith’s Child Walking with Check Tablecloth (1953), a domestic scene featuring brown lino and nappies strung up to dry. Smith protested at the label and later repudiated what was, to him, a novice’s straitened phase. ‘I didn’t find a language to suit my imaginative needs until the early 1960s.’ He particularly resented being assigned a role in the class struggle: ‘I don’t identify with any class. The artist is classless and any identification of that kind is creative death.’12 Rising above such concerns he later devoted himself to abstract scintillations. However, in the years when Jim Dixon, Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, became a byword for cheerful truculence, many took Smith and others to be similarly motivated, railing in their duffel coats against the intrusion of chic Parisian miserabilism and Yank Abstract Expressionism. Lavish spreads of household goods cluttered John Bratby’s tabletops: packets of cornflakes and canisters of Vim lumped together hugger mugger in profane emulation of seventeenth-century Dutch still lives, motor scooters parked in the hallway, Mrs Bratby driven mad and he himself in horn-rimmed specs squinting through cigarette smoke at his own chaotic profusion.

  The place to see Kitchen Sink painting was the Beaux Arts Gallery in Bruton Place, a former mews off Bond Street, run by Sickert’s sister-in-law, Helen Lessore, who had taken over when her husband died in 1951. She showed Bacon in 1953, John Bratby in 1954, Frank Auerbach in 1956, Leon Kossoff in 1957, Michael Andrews in 1958 and other Slade graduates, such as Euan Uglow, Craigie Aitchison and Jack Smith. Having bought and sold Nicholas de Staels in order to pay Smith’s stipend she then dismissed him for producing work she considered ‘non-realist’.13 She had strong views on the canon of Realism. Bratby startled her with h
is output and for a while she welcomed it. He painted, she declared, ‘with almost incredible speed, with something like the torrential passion of Balzac’.14 No Balzac he: his novels, a sideline, were as headstrong as his pictures and as indiscriminate. With what she came to regard as ‘stupidity and arrogance’ he told her in 1960 that he planned to stop painting completely to give his pictures rarity value. In 1958 he was the obvious choice when someone had to be found to supply turbulent Gulley Jimsons for a film version of Joyce Cary’s novel The Horse’s Mouth. Already by then this Angry Young Painting phase was obsolete. The Kitchen Sink fad irritated Freud. Not least, he admitted, because Sylvester had supplied the label. ‘I felt none of it was especially good. It was obsessive in a rather mindless way. Especially Bratby. I knew it was knitting.’

  In late 1954 Ernest Brown of the Leicester Galleries invited Freud to exhibit in his annual New Year show, ‘Artists of Fame and Promise’, the thought being that, following Venice, his fame was as great as his promise had been ten years before. It was agreed that the four paintings of Caroline were to be shown; agreed that is until the possibility arose of winning a sizeable amount of prize money.

  The possibility was complicated. A South African con man, LeRoux Smith LeRoux, who had recently left the Tate – where he had been Deputy Director – having waged a vicious campaign with Douglas Cooper to dislodge the Director, John Rothenstein, had immediately – on Graham Sutherland’s recommendation – secured a job with Lord Beaverbrook buying paintings for him and organising a Daily Express Young Artists competition and exhibition to be held at the New Burlington Galleries in April 1955. Freud had nothing more suitable than Hotel Bedroom to enter for the competition but had already promised it to the Leicester Galleries along with the other Caroline paintings. He decided that he would have to have some assurance from LeRoux that he was likely to win. ‘“Unless you can guarantee a prize,” I said, “I won’t enter.” “I think I can guarantee you’ll get one of the prizes,” he said.’

  Trust LeRoux Smith LeRoux? In the circumstances it seemed a safe bet and Freud decided to pull out of ‘Artists of Fame and Promise’. ‘A letter came from Mr Brown and he was very angry. “We are used to dealing with English artists who keep their word,” he said.’

  With or without the LeRoux guarantee, Hotel Bedroom was an obvious potential winner. Like Interior in Paddington in 1951, it stood out as different. If in Venice it had gone more or less unnoticed, in the New Burlington Galleries it stood to appear more focused and more testing than anything else submitted. ‘Being done for a competition meant aimed rather than painted; the reason to work in that tiny detail way was that it had to be substantial.’ In the end ‘that tiny detail way’ proved substantial yet stifling.

  The judges, Sutherland, Herbert Read, Anthony Blunt and LeRoux, deliberated. Freud was awarded a second prize, of £300. ‘I had an odd note from Graham Sutherland. “We wanted to give you first prize but it had to go to an unknown.”’

  Two unknowns in fact each received the first prize £750: Bryan Kneale from the Isle of Man, brother of Nigel Kneale (the creator of Quatermass, television’s first documentary-style sci-fi drama), and Geoffrey Banks from Wakefield, for his painting Street Scene with Tram. A £100 prize went to Edward Middleditch, for Dead Chicken in a Stream. ‘No responsible painting master in any art school would agree with the award of the two first prizes,’ John Berger commented in the New Statesman. ‘The exhibition as a whole is of a low standard, full of easy tricks.’15 He didn’t mention Freud who felt cheated somewhat. ‘It was a completely crooked prize: I got this money but they said they’d have to take the picture. “You are very lucky,” they said. “The prize goes to New Brunswick.” Beaverbrook was setting up his collection there. I’d have got £400 otherwise, if I’d sold it.’ Two of the portrait heads of Caroline were also on show, priced at £180 and £100.

  The Express declared Hotel Bedroom a mystery picture (‘What does it mean? What is the human story behind it? That is what people long to know …’) and speculated about what the ‘33-year-old grandson of Sigmund Freud’ was up to in the picture, so glum for some reason. ‘Why has Freud painted himself and his wife as if they were overcome by sadness or had had a quarrel? That is their private affair.’16

  The reaction to the news along Delamere Terrace was one of astonishment. A telegram always meant bad news but this one was different. Lu the painter had done it again. ‘When I got a telegram when I won the Daily Express competition, they were amazed. “I hear you had it off,” they said. In Delamere, when pictures were stolen, whatever they were – photos they called pictures – they would ask me to look at it. “It come out of a good home,” they’d say, meaning a doctor’s house.’

  Frank Auerbach remembered Freud telling him that becoming a painter was for him the alternative to ‘going up the ladder’, that’s to say burgling.17

  In June 1955 Stephen Spender went to a party at Ann Fleming’s where, he noted in his journal,

  there were Lucian and Caroline Freud. This began a bit stiffly, Lucian obviously being embarrassed by the presence of John Craxton and myself, towards both of whom he has behaved rather badly. He was wearing a bottle green suit, and as Cyril [Connolly] remarked afterwards, one noticed what an extraordinary rise has taken place in his life since we first knew him. Formerly he was bohemian and poor, now he has a car costing £3,000 and is married to an heiress, has danced with Princess Margaret, is always in the gossip columns and is an expensive and fashionable painter. In spite of his large income he does not seem to trouble to pay debts incurred to his friends before he was so fortunate. He always makes faces, talks for effect, but on this particular evening, he was rather ineffective.18

  Caroline Freud wasn’t good company, Spender added later: ‘She seems never to introduce a topic of conversation on her own initiative. This seems characteristic of a whole class of girls whom Lucian, Cyril and their friends fall in love with.’19

  The following month, when Spender found himself at a Freud party in the Dean Street house, he noted that the place looked unoccupied almost: shiny white paint, not much furniture and huge ‘Chinese’-looking objects for decor. Freud told him that he had given Colin Anderson the Freud–Schuster Book and then, to his surprise, recited some of the poems that had been his contribution to it, ballads mostly. Undecided whether to be touched by this or irked, Spender could only think that there was after all a bond of sorts between them. ‘I have this feeling of invincible ménage with Lucian, and also with Cyril. A kind of secret relationship which may last throughout life.’20

  A quarter of a century later a note from Freud to Spender went some way towards acknowledging this:

  Dear Steve, Yes – Cyril was rather dishonest, but then, your behaviour was often far from honourable – as for me, I was extremely devious. I hope your mind’s not wandering.

  Love Lucian.21

  The tension so clearly displayed in Hotel Bedroom had persisted. Being together was a strain and the urban life, strung between studio and Soho, never eased. ‘Things were quite hard for Caroline in London and I had this idea that being in the country would be better for her. She was nervous and she wasn’t very well.’

  House-hunting began. ‘We were looking round for somewhere and stayed with a girl who had been at school with Caroline and her husband, who lived in a house that had been [William] Beckford’s Fonthill.’ Clare Barclay, married to James Morrison, horse-breeder, felt that Freud was keen, all too keen, on being the country gentleman. She recollected the arrival of Caroline’s horses from Ireland some time later and one of them escaping on Tisbury station. Freud’s memory was more of his efforts to restrain and calm it, and the further mishap that resulted. ‘A grey filly, two years old, and it panicked being unloaded and slightly hurt itself. I was up with it all night and the next morning went to the station to see it and suddenly I went to sleep. The Alvis – rather a fast car – went off the road, turned over, and back on its wheels again. Lucky. Thank God nobody knew. Incredibly
lucky, I felt, and the nearest thing to feeling ashamed.’

  The house they decided upon, Coombe Priory on the Dorset–Wiltshire border, secluded in its valley bottom, was not excessively large, and not too far from London. Being on the Arundel estate owned by the Roman Catholic Dukes of Norfolk, it had once served as a refuge for Cistercian monks escaping the French Revolution. ‘“Priory” is a nickname: it’s a seventeenth-century farmhouse with a supposed secret passage to the abbey at Shaftesbury.’ If that connection was far-fetched, Shaftesbury being several miles away, there were firmer rumours of a priest hole behind the drawing-room fireplace. The kitchen had a well in the floor and, Freud remembered, a sixteenth-century closed stove.

  Unlike Balthus, who in 1954 bought the Château de Chassy in Bourgogne in fulfilment of his desire to be an aristocrat among artists, Freud had no great appetite for landownership, though undoubtedly – yet briefly – Coombe was for him a throwback to Gross Gaglow, Cottbus. Initially he enjoyed improving the place. ‘Coombe was idyllic, in a slightly maddening way: when you got down to the bottom of the lane you suddenly hit this idyllic end. I planted a lot there and there were some stables and a yard and a small park which was lovely, leading up to a girls’ school (one didn’t see them), trees all around and Austrian oak, sycamore, beech, lime, one of each alternately all along, light and dark, catalpas too (heart-shaped leaves). I had an idea that Caroline would be happy there and didn’t think that her unhappiness was to do with me racketing about so much. She didn’t like being alone, in the circumstances.’

  The house was long and narrow with stone balls on the gateposts and assertive gables. There was fleeting pleasure to be had, Freud found, arranging impressive furniture in the three rooms on the ground floor and, that first spring, placing daffodils one by one in jam jars on the stairs. He also began painting a cyclamen mural in the dining room.22 Spanish carpets were flown in for them by Caroline’s former employer, in his private plane.