The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Minton’s despondency had been aggravated by changes imposed at the Royal College where the Rector, Robin Darwin, had decided to improve its image and strengthen its standing by promoting the industrial design departments and cladding the teaching structure with Oxbridge pretensions. There was, said Freud, a depressingly managerial aspect to all this. ‘They sacked John Skeaping as he was too fond of girls according to Robin Darwin who, in a mumbling fumbling way, went after girls too. Skeaping would give us tips for greyhounds.’ The shake-up had repercussions. Rodrigo Moynihan left (he was to go abstract for the second time in his career) and students took to reacting against the perky-but-insular Festival of Britain style, with which the College authorities were identified. For the venturesome, New York not Paris was now the place to reach out to and, in a few instances, actually reach during the summer vacation. America, they assured themselves, was where art’s future lay.

  To Freud, Minton’s death was half expected. He heard about it only a few days after he himself had suffered a reversal so shattering that – as Bacon told people at the time – he too for a while seemed suicidal.

  The story went that he had arrived back from Ireland, where he had been working on a portrait – Garech Browne again – and Caroline, by her account, had welcomed him home with lamb chops with mint sauce, petit pois and potatoes dauphinoise cooked specially for him and Bacon. He looked at it and, without even tasting it, lit a cigarette and pushed the plate away, whereupon she went to the bedroom, packed her bags and left.4

  There was no conciliation, no meeting even to be had. Frantic to find her and persuade her to return, Freud felt injured as well as distraught. Not so much because it was she who had left but because, ultimately, she had gone even further than he in nullifying the marriage. ‘Things could have been better for her with different behaviour on my part. I wanted to talk to her. She was all mixed up with this friend of Oonagh’s, someone called “Deacon” Lindsay, partly Italian, supposed to be dying of TB, and never did, who wrote a famous novel about a sanatorium called The Rack under the name of [A. E.] Ellis out of sympathy for Ruth Ellis.’5 He searched the Dean Street flat for clues to where she had gone. ‘I remember – not that I’m a reader of letters – looking at a letter from Deacon to Caroline which said, “Have you never wept, woman?” Sickening. I felt completely murderous. I didn’t really know him: he was very very literary, interested in Proust, a very difficult prig; lived in Mount Street, in chambers, near the Connaught Hotel. She may have stayed with him. Made himself responsible for hiding her.’

  Learning that Caroline was in Rome, he went after her. ‘When she was on the run I went to see her, went for two or three days. I went to her room, and to the horrible museum in the park – Raphael and things – dry and dusty. I’ve always been wretched in Rome. All these statues every time you go out: statues standing in fountains. Rome has a silly atmosphere of people wearing ties to match their eyes and cars to match their shirts and driving on pavements to show off. I remember staying in this hotel below the Spanish Steps, on the balcony floor, and an American walking along the balcony into my room, a dealer talking about pictures, how he bought Keith Vaughan and how my things weren’t buyable.’

  Sigmund Freud’s Libidinal Types (1931) divided the ‘amorous’ into ‘erotic’, ‘narcissistic’ and ‘obsessional’. The need to know, compulsively pursued, prompted the foray to Rome, a miserable sequel to the trips to Madrid in search of Caroline four years before. Unsatisfied, unrewarded, the obsession ebbed. There seemed no point in travel elsewhere. Paris dwindled in attraction. ‘I went less and less. I was less and less avid to go away. I was in a very agitated state. Not many hours painting. A period of chasing about a lot.’ Besides his pride being injured, the loss of control, Anne Dunn thought, confounded Freud. ‘I don’t think that he believed she would go.’ Michael Andrews remembered that in all the years he knew him this was the one time he saw Freud in tears. As did David Sylvester, who was disconcerted when Freud, unaware as far as he knew that he himself had been ‘going out’, as he put it, with Caroline, talked to him about his unhappiness. He told people that he had never really known Caroline that well. That she had left him, not he her, was only part of the misery. At a party given by Sonia Orwell Freud turned up and found that, tactless as ever, she had also invited Caroline. ‘Do you think I’m made of wood?’ he said.

  ‘Six months or a year after Caroline left I read a thing in an Italian paper that I’d stopped her writing. I don’t think that was so. I don’t think so because she was so spastically untidy and hopeless. And she had been living in Rome for quite a while.’ In Rome she took up with Ivan Moffat, whom Freud had known at Bryanston. ‘I always despised him. Quite friendly. Too boring.’ Moffat had become a scriptwriter in Hollywood and was friendly with Christopher Isherwood, who mentioned in his diary the following February that Caroline was getting a divorce. ‘Only capable of thinking negatively,’ he wrote. ‘Round-eyed as usual. Either dumb or scared.’6 In Los Angeles Caroline tried to get into films, underwent therapy and doses of stuff called LSD, Freud heard. ‘Had dinner with Sinatra. It didn’t work.’

  She was also linked to the photographer Walker Evans (who was ‘inclined’, she said later, ‘to boast about sexual conquests that may or may not have taken place’).7 This did not rile Freud. ‘He said – and we’d been apart for a bit by then – “I want to tell you, my intentions towards Caroline are strictly honourable.” Very American in a way, a mixture of noble behaviour and alcoholism.’ Evans, who was working for Fortune magazine at the time, nosed around Delamere Terrace with his camera and photographed Freud in his room, lounging on the bed and standing beside his Dutch cupboard in a sharp suit with ex-Crimean War soldiers’ quilts hung behind him. Freud remembered Evans as nervous, not knowing whether he was aware of his affair with Caroline. He was happy, he told him, to have someone take her off his hands.8 The sexual side of things had never been satisfactory during the marriage.

  There was talk of a financial arrangement to tide him over, but he shied away from that. ‘I think when we parted she wanted to give me an allowance and Dean Street. A bad idea. Made me a slight concierge.’

  The end of the marriage was news, briefly, after which Freud found himself to be of no great interest any longer. ‘Maybe because she was so glamorous we were always hounded a bit by papers, but it wasn’t that when she left.’ Some people dropped him. ‘Naturally. I think nothing was closed to me, but I didn’t want to see Oonagh, Garech and people. It made no difference to my life, in that I never went anywhere except where I wanted and it didn’t stop me working. I was at Delamere. Feeling very solitary you quite like to isolate yourself and I always had Delamere Terrace. I seldom didn’t work during the day, but I did very little night work then.’

  Sitters were few and the money went. He only had what he could get by selling work – what little there was – and by gambling. ‘I always went all out at that.’ He now lacked such credit as marriage to Caroline had afforded him. ‘I [had] bought Le Repas frugal, the Picasso etching, which Caroline, in her crazy way, left at the airport. (She always left her clothes behind; she left everything everywhere; I quite liked it; it impressed me in a funny way: it was so anarchic.) The etching was sent back to the Redfern and they sold it for eight or nine thousand pounds. They knew whose it was but, since it hadn’t been paid for, they (not quite properly: they should have given it back) repossessed it. Caroline had quite a lot of pictures of mine and they’re all lost. Then afterwards, long after, she bought some things and kept them, and her other treasures, in a bank vault. I never really knew her that well.’

  She wrapped the paintings of her in newspaper, put them in a cardboard box and deposited them in an office cupboard in the basement of a West End bank. ‘To be married to Lucian’, Debo Devonshire remarked years later, ‘would be a killer.’9

  In January 1957, the day after Minton’s death it so happened, Fritz Hess wrote to Freud taking him to task for his irresponsible, not to say deviou
s, financial dealings and for having the temerity to accuse him, of all people – old family friend and patron indeed – of wrongdoing, and reminding him that he had had the nerve to ring him up in 1951 asking for another loan when he already owed him £60 from 1948.

  Because you were not in a position to pay the money back, you agreed to offer me one of your new paintings. You never kept that promise, nor that you would paint Yvonne in the garden.

  What particularly annoyed him, even more than the slighting of his wife Yvonne, was Freud’s demand that he should return the Delacroix drawing that he had bought during the war for £10 and had placed with him as security on a loan. What Hess assumed to be a purchase was to Freud (never one to regard such transactions as conventionally binding) a pledge. This, Hess argued, just wouldn’t wash.

  Later in the same year 1951 you won your £500 prize from the L.C.C. [sic] or they bought your exhibition picture for £500. When I heard of it I visited you and you gave me your cheque for the settlement of your debts. This certainly would have been the occasion to offer me that small sum of £25 – to get the drawing back, if you would have thought you had a right to it. But no – not a single word, not even as much as a hint. The reason is quite simple; your memory was quite fresh so shortly afterwards, and you knew you had no right to it. Since you paid your debts in 1947 we had not the slightest sign of life from you until you rang up last month after nearly 6 years telling this strange story. There must have [been] certainly hundreds of occasions during these years when you were in a financial position to claim the drawing if you would have thought you had a right to it …

  I think you are a great painter, but I must say as a person and a friend I feel very hurt because when I look back over the years we have known each other I realise that I have only been visited when you thought I could be useful. I feel most wounded, that in the end I had to listen to your offensive remarks over the telephone.

  I can and do forgive you because I have always liked you and know you are going through an unhappy period.

  With my best wishes and may this year bring you good luck.

  Yours sincerely

  F S Hess

  PS Since I value your father’s friendship very much, which I do not want to be disturbed by possible one-sided information, I send a copy of this letter to him.10

  Ernst Freud swiftly responded.

  Dear Fritz

  Thank you for sending me the copy of your letter to Lucian. He had of course told me his version of the incident and you may have noticed that I avoided a discussion about it at Walberswick.

  Both Lucie and I remember that he had mentioned previously that he had pawned a drawing with you – so we must concede him the right to believe you to be wrong.

  But we accept your facts and that you have acted in good faith. Unfortunately Lucian is quite hopeless in all money matters and it is almost impossible to help him. I was glad to hear from your letter that he paid at least his debts to you.

  Kind regards

  Yours

  Ernst11

  Freud was used to farming out such possessions as he had, always assuming that he could get them back when he wanted. Hence his repeated use of the Freud–Schuster Book as a hostage-like form of security. His account of the dispute with Hess was, accordingly, one-sided. ‘I bought a Delacroix drawing – candle and night table – from a framer’s for £10 and pawned it with Hess and two or three years later, when I wanted to get it back, he said I’d sold it to him. I was naive and shocked. He wrote a letter saying I had “some psychological difficulty”. I told my father and he broke with him.’

  Divorce would enable Caroline to remarry and settle in the United States; grounds were already ample enough but Freud obligingly supplied fresh evidence to suit the courts. ‘The divorce was not my chief motive. I went on giving more and more evidence, going off to hotels with women for her. Ivy Nicholson thought she’d be the right person to use so we had some days at hotels, but she had a boyfriend who said we shouldn’t do it. It seemed very hard to manage. I had high-powered advice: don’t go to the very best hotels – Claridge’s, the Savoy – because they are too discreet. Draw attention to yourself by leaving an enormous tip or an ostrich in the bedroom. I kept on trying. I always told people why we were staying in this hotel in Bayswater Road. And then there was this girl who was ideal but then I found she was under age. “We’ll never get divorced,” Caroline said. It wasn’t straightforward.’

  The marriage was dissolved on grounds of cruelty in Juárez, Mexico, in 1958. Sexual incompatibility would have been a more accurate assertion. Caroline testified that her husband told her he did not care what happened to their marriage. She told friends that while with Lucian her ovaries had ceased to function; LSD therapy in California after she left him had restored them to working order. The following year Caroline married the musician Israel Citkowitz, a former protégé of Nadia Boulanger and twenty-two years older than she; they had three daughters. Citkowitz was voluble and touchy. When someone insulted him, as he saw it, in the Colony Room one day he let out a torrent of invective and abuse, excessive even by late-afternoon Colony Room standards. But he wasn’t, Frank Auerbach remembered, ‘quite as contemptible as Lucian made him out to be. Actually he looked like him: a brutal anti-Semitic caricature of Lucian though with hair dyed dark, possibly. I said, “What does he do?” And he said, “Oh, he plays with stocks and shares,” which wasn’t entirely true: he was a pianist and a sort of psychological teacher of pianists. One of Lucian’s terms of contempt when you asked him about someone was: “Oh, he plays in stocks and shares.”’

  There were for Freud repercussions from the marriage well into the sixties and beyond. ‘I was in Annabel’s and I saw Maureen with one of her walkers. She was sitting there and as I passed she beckoned to me and I, with a vestige of old-world manners, bent down and she gave me a thwack with her handbag. Her man – a Prince Philip sort of person – I saw him later and he said, “It must have hurt terribly.”

  ‘I haven’t connected it, but I think I must have questioned everything much more after Caroline. I’m not gregarious especially, and being unhappy makes me want to see people much less. I either talk a lot or absolutely not at all. That’s why I’m no good at dinner, where you are supposed to turn halfway through: “And where have you been this summer?”’

  At Delamere Freud worked on his portrait of Elinor Bellingham-Smith – A Woman Painter. An older woman, a soup-dispensing painter of wistful figures-in-landscape, apt to be tearful, fond of a drink, she was married to Rodrigo Moynihan and had been briefly involved with Michael Andrews and Lawrence Gowing, though not with Freud. ‘Lawrence said to me: “Tell me, did you have an affair with Elinor?” “No, I didn’t: oddly enough it never occured to me. Why?” I asked. “Oh what a shame. When I was a student I did. And Mike told me that he had been overcome. So if you had it would have been a treble.” I mentioned it to Mike and he said, “Oh dear.” She was terribly nice and she minded about her friends.’ The Moynihans had been a hospitable couple running what amounted to a salon in their house in Old Church Street, Chelsea, attracting Freud and the Slade crowd, also Bacon and Minton. ‘She overdid everything. Adored Rodrigo, who went his own way; Francis said of her, “She’s got real human concern”; she shared a boyfriend with Johnny Minton (a deserter from the Navy who attacked me because of my portrait of her which he thought cruel) and another with Henrietta [Law] and was often in the Gargoyle. A Dr Boyd was in love with her and she cut her wrist so he’d have to come and bind her up, and he did it up especially tight. Elinor overdid everything.’ The Moynihans divorced in 1957 and Freud’s painting of her was to some degree his show of sympathy. ‘She moved to Suffolk and things got rather bad; she was crippled, in a chair.’ Rodrigo Moynihan proceeded to marry Anne Dunn.

  One evening in 1957 Freud, together with Bacon, entertained Matthew Smith to dinner at Delamere Terrace. They thought of it as a late-in-the-day commemorative occasion, rather like the banquet Picasso organised for
the elderly Douanier Rousseau in 1908: a tongue-in-cheek yet wholehearted tribute. Auerbach remembered it as an uplifting event. ‘Lucian was living by the canal in very grotty circumstances and I think the dinner party consisted of Sonia Orwell, Isabel Lambert, Elinor Bellingham-Smith, Eduardo Paolozzi, Matthew Smith, Francis and myself. Oysters first and he had on the landing, down one flight of stairs, the man who opened oysters at Wheeler’s – this is so characteristic of Lucian – opening the oysters and then there was a poussin and then strawberries.

  ‘Lucian had put the picture of Elinor Bellingham-Smith on the mantelpiece for people to see while we were eating and he also brought down a picture by her that he had bought and she saw it and she said, very perceptively, “How nice of you.” It had a very unfortunate fate: Ken Brazier – a Slade student – picked it up (“an old canvas in the corner of your studio” he said it was) and painted over it.

  ‘Matthew Smith was very reserved but pleased to be there (it wasn’t long before he died). I believe he felt a bit like that man in Aldous Huxley who’s dragged out of a cellar where he’s been forgotten and fêted by a younger generation. Francis was brilliant at getting conversation going. He got talking about “genuine abandon” and he said of himself that he wasn’t in the least abandoned, at least not by his standards, and he said, “Matthew, have you ever known anybody abandoned?” And Matthew Smith, sitting there quietly, said, “Well, you know, the word abandon has several meanings.”

  ‘The wine was terrific and the champagne, everything, in these very humble surroundings. Both Lucian and Francis did a thing that was very grand and lovely – Francis too gave a dinner on occasion – they’d go to Covent Garden early in the morning and buy not a bunch of flowers but a whole box of flowers meant for a florist – and they laid the flowers all round the table before we started eating.