The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘No one ever says, “Do you like opium?” In Paris I had it with Olivier and Jean-Pierre, as they were so hostile if you didn’t; it was really “DO have a pipe.” Smoking it is quite an art. Jean Cocteau was proud that in Le Sang d’un poète the shadow of an arm smoking a pipe is him; he was a very good smoker, he would boast. When I was with Caroline I had it occasionally, specially when we took the house, Le Pilat, at Arcachon: it’s delicious, but you can’t really work with it. You get paranoia.’

  At Arcachon Freud made drawings of ducks and of Caroline laughing, and they went to bullfights. ‘There’s a kind of equivalent in painting to the matador who waves the picadors away. The picadors make holes in the shoulder muscles so that the bull isn’t quite so dangerous, and there are painters – Manet is the real example – who actually waved the picadors away because they wanted the bull to be itself.’ Marriage did not suit Freud, who told Frank Auerbach at the time that he and Caroline didn’t have sex much. ‘Lucian said it didn’t work.’ Here was a case of the painter wanting the bull to be itself, not hemmed in, let alone tormented by the picadors of polite society. Throughout the marriage there was a price to be paid for access to unearned income. Even the interludes – getting away and going south together was what one did in the appropriate season – were trying, for then whatever work he did had to be, to some degree, extempore. ‘We went one winter to Pedregalejo, near Málaga – black sand and a tiny railway and a very small train – and had half a fisherman’s cottage.’ There he worked a bit. Girl by the Sea (1956) was Caroline in profile, as Kitty had been in Villefranche set against the siesta shutters; this one, head on bare shoulders, showed signs of recalcitrance, the hair tangled, the eye downcast and the sea below and beyond, scumbled into a tepid calm. ‘It’s the last one I did of her: a bit druggy. I avoid doing profiles: Italian (Renaissance) profiles annoy me.’

  The holiday was interrupted. ‘Cyril Connolly appeared, to seek us out. He was staying with his American brother-in-law Bill Davis at La Consula, an old house in the hills outside Málaga. It was luxurious and horrible, but he collected Giacometti. Connolly had a close hostile relationship with Bill Davis, who had known Hemingway.’ Davis had been a leading collector of Jackson Pollocks, second only to Peggy Guggenheim. ‘I couldn’t quite understand his link to art and culture; I never got to know him. Or wanted to.’

  According to Barbara Skelton, Cyril Connolly was already infatuated with Caroline in 1953. Dan Farson, Soho chronicler, photographed the two of them outside Wheeler’s, he smug, she studiously detached. By the spring of 1956 Ann Fleming was remarking that Connolly was ‘hammering nails into the coffin of the Freud marriage’.4 Freud had always been struck by the way Connolly looked at people. ‘His dead malevolent eyes’.

  ‘You are a mirage of happiness,’ Connolly wrote to his unresponsive chosen one.5 Such avowals irritated her, and particularly the most presumptuous, which was: ‘I know you really want to settle down and have a child as much as I do.’6 He even rejigged his cuckolding by the publisher George Weidenfeld into a boast that he had engineered it himself for her sake and his: ‘I helped Barbara to marry Weidenfeld to free myself for you.’7

  Connolly had a high regard for his own writings, taking them to be literary history. ‘He wrote love letters to Caroline which he insisted would be worth something later. He made her go to the bank and take them out. The ink had completely faded.’ By then Freud had come upon him loitering outside the Dean Street flat and had felt this to be a good moment to kick him in the shins. ‘The reason I kicked Cyril wasn’t to do with that really. The reason was a letter about him having me followed, and lots of evidence.’

  Kicks or thumps: Freud’s violence was part reflex but more retort, stimulated when provoked and unthinkingly pursued. ‘I did used to get into fights under drink; I didn’t know when I’d lost.’ Frank Auerbach remembered an occasion in a pub at that time where a drunk came up to Freud from behind and kept pawing his shoulders. Freud went outside with him and the man stumbled back into the bar a while later, his face covered in blood.8

  Friendships with the painters who, after Bacon, were to mean most to him were established meanwhile, most notably and longest lasting with Auerbach who thought him exceptional right away. ‘When I first knew him, in the fifties, we were all nervous and careless but Lucian was quivery and feverish in a way; he seemed to be in a continual tizzy all the time and I had a sense that the act of painting calmed him down. For instance he said to me that when he asked Mike Andrews to stay with him in the house he had with Caroline in the country and suggested that, because he, Lucian, was restless, they should drive somewhere for tea or something, Mike said, “No, I don’t think so, I’ll stay here,” and that impressed him.’9 Andrews had progressed from student to colleague and friend; Auerbach on the other hand was not an ex-student of his. Freud had first noticed his work in 1955 and had been struck by the weight of paint involved. ‘I got to know him gradually. Four pictures in the Daily Express Young Artists Exhibition were by Frank. I thought these were the most ludicrous things I’d ever seen, but they certainly stayed in my head; they looked like the most appalling threatening kind of mess. I remember going back and looking at them and thinking, “What on earth is this?”’

  Auerbach had been aware of Freud when he was still a student at the Royal College. ‘He would sometimes lunch at the college and I would occasionally see him near the common room, occasionally with a little girl on his shoulders. I probably spoke to him once or twice in Soho, but it cannot have been in a terribly familiar way, since I remember seeing him at the Beaux Arts Gallery, at my first exhibition, in 1956; Lucian bowed (slightly) and said “thank you”!’10 In his review of this show for the Listener David Sylvester lauded Auerbach’s ‘fearlessness, profound originality; a total absorption in what possesses him’.11 The paintings were densely grounded, accumulatively encrusted. Lack of money for expensive paint largely accounted for their subdued colour, but in every other respect they were dramatic in their concentration of impulse. Almost immediately Freud recognised the elation involved and, essentially, a lightness of touch. Not many did. ‘Mesens said, “I went along and looked and looked and realised it was Rembrandt and not interesting, no advance. It had already been done.” Not interesting for him, maybe.’

  Auerbach for his part was struck by how constant the friendship was between Freud and Bacon. (As it happened he and Freud were to be friends much longer.) ‘They saw a great deal of each other and Lucian had an enormous admiration for Francis and Francis – someone with a fairly low boredom threshold – said, “You’re never bored with Lucian.” They were close friends and understood each other. In those days I never quite knew why Francis should have his pockets full of fivers. People said at his first show at the Marlborough Gallery, “What have you done with all the money?” “I haven’t any money, haven’t even bought a suit yet,” and they said, “But you’re earning more than the Prime Minister,” so Francis said, “But I always have earned more than the Prime Minister!”’ There was a sort of understanding that, after meals, they would spar with one another. ‘Both of them would pull wads of five-pound notes out of their pockets and fight over the bill as to who should pay. Lucian’s was Caroline’s money, yes; but possibly on occasion from the track. More often than not I would meet Lucian and Francis and far more often than not they would go for a meal somewhere and ask me along.’12 Auerbach appreciated Freud’s tact in addressing his extreme lack of money by appearing not to notice it. In the early years he would get a bottle of fine brandy from Lucian at Christmas: far beyond his means and all the more cheering for that.

  ‘In those days I don’t think he would actually work for more than three or four hours a day and gradually, as he got older and as his restlessness began to abate, he became slightly calmer in his behaviour and got a terrific lot into a day; but I always had a sense that here was somebody volatile in life. As soon as he had a brush in his hand he had an extraordinary magisterial sense of cause and consequ
ence, and a sort of intellectual sequence of thought that made total closed sense that wasn’t present in his life at all.’13

  During a Spender dinner party in the early summer of 1956, at which Freud was not present, W. H. Auden, by then well into his Testy Great-Uncle phase (and newly elected Oxford Poetry Professor), displeased Bacon by pronouncing Freud a crook. ‘He just isn’t straight about money and I don’t approve of it,’ he boomed. Spender agreed. However, realising that Bacon (‘who happens to be very fond of Lucian’) could turn nasty, Auden then backtracked, muttering that ‘Lucian was very nice and he liked him very much etc.’14

  On 3 May 1956 Peter Watson drowned in his bath. The verdict at the inquest, ruling out suicide or heart failure, was ‘accidental death’. Latterly Freud had seen little of him. There had been a cheque or two and he had done his portrait. ‘He was more keen on philosophy and ideas. I remember a mocking letter from Cyril. One of his boyfriends did a burglary and blamed it on me.’ The boyfriend was Norman ‘Digger’ Fowler, an American ex-sailor. Fifteen years later he too died in a bath. Cecil Beaton aired the suspicion that Fowler had been responsible for Watson’s death. Evidently there had been a row. When told that Watson had died, Beaton’s first thought was that he had neglected himself in recent years. ‘Awful mackintoshes. His hair, once so sexily lotioned, was on end. He was a real bohemian – gone the elegant clothes and motor cars.’15 He composed an obituary: ‘With his feet in the gutter he had indulged in every vice, except women, but he was really like a saint.’16 To Freud, Watson had been the patron rather than the saint and he remembered him with gratitude for his unfailing generosity. He left money to Connolly and Sonia Orwell but not to Stephen Spender, who felt hurt, given that Watson had been his longest-serving backer. ‘No one was more exploited,’ he wrote. ‘And yet, although this depressed him sometimes, he expected it and could see beyond the motives of the exploiter to the person behind … Peter really lived for other people.’17 In the New Statesman he remarked that ‘no other patron was so individual, so non-institutional: even the word “patron” seems wrong for him – perhaps a better word would be friend.’18 Spender attended the cremation at Golders Green in a throng of trustees and lawyers, together with Cyril Connolly, Graham Sutherland and Roland Penrose. Not Freud.

  Spender was lunching in the Perroquet (‘popular with theatrical people’) on 12 July 1956 with the young poet Dom Moraes. Enter Freud. ‘With his friend Charlie. They were both dressed like workmen, Charlie almost in rags, without ties. The restaurant was appropriately shocked. I thought: this is part of the war of bohemians against bureaucrats.’19 It was more Freud’s old urge to be conspicuously anonymous. Anyway, small world: Freud came over to him and complained about Auden.

  In August 1956 the Whitechapel Art Gallery staged ‘This is Tomorrow’, a set of installations devised by members of the ICA’s Independent Group demonstrating, in the words of the Whitechapel’s Director, Bryan Robertson, ‘painting, sculpture and architecture in an integrated relationship’. They included Patio and Pavilion, by Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson – a mocked-up East End backyard with scrapheap adornments – and a fairground attraction put together by John McHale and Richard Hamilton in which Robbie the Robot, with headlamp eyes, a lifesize cut-out of Marilyn Monroe from The Seven Year Itch and a giant bottle of Guinness featured: key images from popular culture slotted into billboard perspectives. Two exhibits had some relevance to Freud: a photo-collage head by Henderson, its meltdown deformities making it representative of the nuclear age, and Hamilton’s small expository collage Just what is it that makes today’s home so different, so appealing?, a scene composed of clippings of consumer desirables, among them a pin-up laid on a sofa and a Charles Atlas hunk pumping his pecs. This squib collage was to serve as a frontispiece to almost every catalogue of what came to be labelled (British) Pop Art. In retrospect, long after the exhibits had been dismantled and dispersed, the project gained in significance, serving as a prospectus for things to come, particularly those relating to mass media. It made for great claims as to the redundancy of old media in the new age of popular demand and jukebox choice.

  In May 1956, three months before the opening of ‘This is Tomorrow’, John Minton was reported in the Daily Express bitterly downcast, saying, ‘Painting is outdated like the horse and cart. Modern art is getting nowhere. Traditional art – it’s all been done before. The cinema, the theatre, possibly television, are the mediums in which painters must express themselves.’20

  Freud did not bother to go to ‘This is Tomorrow’. ‘I think I was aware, but didn’t see it: I’d have remembered it.’ The creaming of motifs from mass culture was too appreciative to count as slumming; even so it was essentially second hand and as such it did not appeal to him. If anything it provoked a greater certainty that painting was an urgent pursuit, one in which temporary devices had no place. His ex-student, now friend, Michael Andrews had taken part in a film Together, made by another Slade student, Lorenza Mazzetti, in which he and Eduardo Paolozzi played deaf and dumb labourers adrift in dockland, but for him, as for Euan Uglow, paintings were monuments ‘to [an] inexorable approach, based on measured observation’. So said Andrew Forge, a lecturer at the Slade, who in January 1956 published an illustrated article in Encounter, ‘We Dream of Motor Cars’, commissioned by David Sylvester, in which he tentatively pursued Sylvester’s line that the coming thing was to be receptive to the marketing of consumer goods, cars especially: ‘Watch for the characteristic unfolding as it travels, the three-quarter view of its approach wheeling into full length, and the final closing of the form as it passes us.’21

  ‘A difference’, Forge wrote, ‘between US models and English is that the former range over a wide field, drawing on many sources while the references of the latter are almost exclusively concerned with cars.’ Extrapolating from this he preached the get-up-and-go of new American art. Pollock had killed himself in a crash the year before but de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were now engaged on reconstituting the figurative.

  Freud was unimpressed by such selective adulation and generalised dismissal. ‘I once heard a talk that Andrew Forge gave at the Slade. He said how marvellous art in America is and that there’s something soft in England – “people are so apologetic always” – and I couldn’t bear it, and I actually shouted, “Bollocks,” threw something – blotting paper, maybe – and left.’

  Frank Auerbach, for one, regarded Freud as very much more than a concise heckler. He had such searching powers. ‘When I was at art school in the fifties there was a certain atmosphere of bated breath around Lucian and even when he had a show at the Hanover Gallery, which John Berger rubbished with fairly imperceptive drivel, even then when people went to see it there was an aura about him. I think he was regarded as special because of his extraordinary fastidiousness, from very early on, about what he would let out. I mean Keith Vaughan and Johnny Minton and Colquhoun and MacBryde seem relatively perfunctory: they set the target lower than Lucian did. You couldn’t help noticing that there was always something about his work that stuck in your mind. The few pictures that came out almost all became famous in the time they were done, for example the portrait of Johnny Minton.’

  Nina Hamnett’s second batch of memoirs, Is She a Lady?: A Problem in Autobiography, was published in October 1955, the problem being that she had run out of anecdotes and rattled on with inconsequentialities, such as: ‘Lady Somebody adored charladies and used to have tea parties for them in Yeoman’s Row.’ A year later she herself became the subject of anecdote. She impaled herself on the railings forty feet below her window. Soho talk was of suicide, pointing out that a stool had been placed beneath the window to enable her to climb on to the sill. Freud thought otherwise. ‘She threw herself out of the window, they said. But Cedric [Morris], who knew her, said he was sure she didn’t jump out of the window because, having so often lived in hotels and rooms, when she wanted to go to the loo she’d squat on the window sill and he was sure that
was it.

  ‘I went to the hospital in the Harrow Road, a desperate general hospital, and they took me to see poor Nina and there was this jolly sister of hers from the country. The sister said, “It’s so exciting; so many important people have rung up. You an old friend of Nina’s? Have a look at her. Same old Nina.” So I went through the curtain and saw a triangle, a lump of meat with forty wires sticking out of her, and lots of noise coming out: her harmonica breath. A horror carcass. She died the next day. She had twenties legs, like matchsticks.’22

  PART V

  AT THE MARLBOROUGH 1958–68

  26

  ‘Do you think I’m made of wood?’

  On 20 January 1957 John Minton committed suicide. ‘Down being in, and Hope being out,’ he had said, a disparaging remark about the Kitchen Sink vogue that all too readily applied to himself. Six months earlier he had been reported in the Daily Express as saying, ‘after Picasso and Matisse there is nothing more to be done.’1 He could see his own work go stale, the lanky, hollow-eyed graphic style outmoded, the paintings dulling into academicism.

  Told by Freud while sitting for Man Smoking that Minton had died, Charlie Lumley simply shrugged.

  Under the headline ‘Yesterday There Died a Purple, Melancholy Genius’ the Daily Express reported Minton as having been a wit, ‘given to brainstorms and acute fits of depression. His moments of genius were marred by long periods of alcoholism.’ Freud’s portrait of him was reproduced as ‘John Minton – self-portrait’ alongside a photograph: ‘John Minton by camera’.2 Another newspaper also identified the painting as ‘A brilliant self-portrait … found in a corner of his studio’.3 Freud believed that Minton, having commissioned it in the first place, had intended it to serve as a legacy. ‘Johnny had a plan, I think, to leave it to the RCA. It was a sort of commission.’ It was to hang, ghostlike and reproachful, in the grand new Senior Common Room. Apart from that he had little to bequeath. Freud, MacBryde and Colquhoun were left £100 each, of which Freud received £50, and Henrietta Law got his house in Apollo Place.