The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘At half past eleven or so Eduardo and I felt it was time to go home and we shared a taxi. But Matthew Smith had just got going and he said, “Are there any clubs we could go to? Where can we go on to?”’12

  ‘Everyone got plastered and wilting,’ Freud remembered. ‘But Matthew Smith got really perky and said, “Where shall we go now?” His daughter wrote to thank me. She said that it was a great thing for him.’

  Matthew Smith’s habitual self-effacement, his instinct for privacy, had meant that he had sheathed himself in diffidence. He bequeathed his unsold paintings to his favourite model, Mary Keene. ‘Like all great painters, Smith cannot and will not be tied down,’ Henry Green (Yorke) wrote in the catalogue of the Tate’s Matthew Smith retrospective in 1953,13 to which Bacon too contributed ‘A Personal Tribute’, describing the paintings as ‘a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa’. For him, for Auerbach and – particularly then – for Freud, Smith was a painter of true conviction. ‘Every movement of the brush on the canvas’, Bacon wrote, ‘alters the shape and implications of the image.’14

  ‘George Barker thought it was a matter of morality,’ Auerbach said of the notoriously philandering poet. ‘If a girl expressed a desire to have a baby, the thing to do was let her have it; and given that Lucian only very sporadically and later (unlike George Barker) had the means to support these, in a sense his was a religious faith that these babies would be all right.’15

  For Freud the dwindling of his second marriage more or less coincided with the period during which his ‘gadding about’, as he put it, resulted in births and related complications.

  There was Katherine McAdam. ‘I met her at a party. She was at St Martin’s and worked in a milk bar in Charing Cross Road.’ Born in 1933, Kay, as she was known, had been educated at convent boarding schools; when she told her teachers that she wanted to be a nun they said there were better things for her to do, so she enrolled at St Martin’s to study fashion. Freud pursued her. ‘Her Irish father was a driving instructor. The villains in Delamere had a flat in Maida Vale, which they used as a hideout; they used to stay in her parents’ flat in Stafford House. The father disappeared to America.’ Kay McAdam became pregnant in the summer of 1957 some six months after Caroline left. A daughter, Jane, was born in February 1958 in the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead; Freud saw Kay in hospital and, after mother and child had moved from a flat above Kay’s parents in Stafford House, Maida Avenue, he found a basement for them in Fernhead Road, Paddington, in a house belonging to the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman. He couldn’t understand why she put up with it. ‘People in the ground floor blocked the stairs with junk, rubbish and shit and the few times I went there I was worried about things to be done.’ She told him not to interfere. She had her independence – she had taught a bit and designed Emu knitting patterns – and, recognising that Freud was not someone to rely on, she had learnt to cope. That he was married to Caroline had been news to her when she read about it in the papers.

  When Jane McAdam was old enough to ask, she gathered from her mother that she had taken up with Freud on the rebound. ‘Lucian pushed everyone out of the way. My mother was dreamy, very able, practical: when the electricity was cut off, for instance, she didn’t fuss. She would never have wanted to be full time with Lucian. She didn’t want babies, but having been brought up a Catholic she didn’t want contraception or abortions. They never argued, she told me. And she never modelled for him. She never talked about anything “personal” unless pushed.’16

  Though detached from Freud and not publicly linked to him, Kay McAdam became, as he saw it, an object of contention. ‘A man, her boyfriend of some sort, came and attacked me at Delamere once and I threw him out and he was always hovering round the car. I had an accident going down to the country with Caroline: he had slit the tyres and they exploded.’

  Freud had given her a small self-portrait, ten inches by six, done in 1949. She told her son Paul (born in April 1959) that this man, John, who ran a screen-printing business in the Edgware Road, had brought out a knife and pinned the picture to the wall together with a pair of knickers. ‘They had a fight and Lucian won.’ Later the painting was stolen, Freud heard. ‘The man who thought she was his girlfriend made a slight hole through the eyes. It was found by someone on a barrow in the Portobello Road: she’d left it in a rooming house and someone at the Slade bought it.’17

  Around this time – in 1957 – Alexander (‘Ali’) Boyt was born. His mother was Suzy Boyt, a student at the Slade whom Freud had taken up with in the course of his duties there. ‘She did nice pictures,’ he said and he told Coldstream that coming upon her there had made teaching obligations finally worthwhile. He painted her as Woman Smiling: not so much smiling as happy to sit thinking to herself. Her robust appearance – lank hair, reddened eyelids – was good to work from not least because she looked complicit. Standing over her, he attended to her with scratchy emphasis, roughening yet blending what he saw, using the springiness of hogshair bristle to realise touch and denote familiarity. ‘A turning point rather.’

  Woman Smiling (1958–9) was a venture into animated expression. Previously drawing had been the means, now he wanted to achieve in paint not so much the look of life or – more subtle – the breath of life, more a sense of thought and weight of mood. ‘Something that impressed me was the thing Walter Trier did, illustrating a poem in Lilliput, a German poem about a man on the Tube. It suddenly occurred to him that it was a very long time since he last laughed so he considered how it was done and, travelling on the Tube, he made a very loud noise. It was really about existence. It appealed to me because of that.’

  Working the paint he tried a marbling touch, pressing the flesh, as it were, to establish the terrain of a complexion. Once embarked on and intently studied, everything experienced could come to be realised: the puckered flesh of a strawberry, fretted palm leaves, greasy hair, the tightening fold of skin over a collarbone, the glint of an eyelash. Not for him the bullying descriptive passages in nearly every Bratby, or for that matter the narrow range of panic stations typical of Bacon. He inched in effect towards a greater freedom of application: a greater give.

  Moving around as he worked – touch by touch the assiduous barber – he took more notice of the way the head informs the face and the face reveals the disposition. Gradually his expressive awareness quickened. In the late fifties he was still not yet fully charged with the ambition to graft something perhaps of the card-shuffle idea of Cubism on to the sheer fullness of Rembrandt. Achieving ‘dimension’, he said. He also talked of landscape painting being something ‘in which you can walk around’. His hope was that he could lose himself in the effort of making each painting take its place convincingly, indelibly and, with luck, unimprovably so. ‘I’ll know that face again,’ people say. That face will flush in an instant, skin will redden, crack, scab, flake. ‘Skin’s so unpredictable.’

  The late fifties was for Freud a period of floundering and scrabbling for bearings during which painting was a standby, a distraction even, rather than – as it would become – the overriding concern. It was a period of sudden starts and elaborate lunges from painting to painting as he tried for intensifying liveliness in the paint. This at a time of life going haywire and responsibilities left dangling.

  ‘Nice Bill [Coldstream] would sometimes say – of course thinking about himself – “Really, you ought to make a will.” I said, “Why, as I have nothing to leave to anyone?” “Yes, but you ought to think about Ali.”’

  He and Suzy took the baby Ali on a trip to the Scillies once, by air. ‘Flying over you could see the dolphins.’

  In August 1956 Stephen Spender spent an evening with Freud at the Peter Brook revival of The Family Reunion and in his diary the next day recorded at some length what a disappointment it was; he felt that the otherworldly quality of the play was missing and that the choruses were desultory, failing to convey ‘how the spiritually unreal realise that
they are so and that their preoccupations are meaningless’.18 However, some of Eliot’s lines were apposite still:

  We like to appear in the newspapers

  So long as we are in the right column.

  Freud’s portrait of Stephen Spender, worked on in 1957–8, is a thin-skinned study of a face adjusted: the poet, plumper than in the 1940 painting and drawings, now turned academic, his hair grey and receding, his mouth composed for reticence as he sits through the sessions, pondering the grievances that he could well air, were he to have it out with the painter at some less inopportune moment. Spender had settled well in middle age: co-editor of Encounter, a visiting professor on campuses in the United States and still, by perpetual association, the perennial Thirties Poet. He became plaintive, complaining to Anne Dunn that Freud had behaved very badly to him, that ‘things disappeared from the house’.19 Freud on the other hand complained that the paintings he had given Spender in Wales in 1940 had been mislaid. This was more than carelessness; it was evidence of a seemingly vague self-serving self-absorption. He felt that the portrait, softish as it was, indeed borderline bland, was not a success. ‘I rather hated it: a slightly ectoplasmic look. Stephen said it made him look queer, the mouth. Stephen was very susceptible: he liked that thing about Cecil Collins being a genius.’ Freud regarded anyone who had time for the spiritual bent of the poetical painter Cecil Collins, whose works all too frequently involved gingerbread angels and a dunce-capped Holy Fool, as intolerably gullible.

  Leaving the Slade in the Alvis one day in February 1958, with Stephen Spender in the passenger seat, Freud drove headlong through the gateway of University College out into Gower Street. ‘It said, “Proceed at no more than 3mph.” Went right into a passing car. Collided.’ No one was hurt but the driver of the other car was abusive, Freud maintained, so he and Spender left the scene. The case took nearly a year to come to court because Spender, his witness, was absent for some months in Japan and Freud told Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court that he too was abroad. Summonsed the following January for failing to stop after the accident, he pleaded not guilty. Spender was called to give evidence. Thinking to be helpful, he assured the magistrate that Freud had been going at under fifty.

  The Times reported that the man in the other car, a dress manufacturer from Finchley, told the court that Freud had driven his large black Alvis out of the quadrangle, crashed and vanished. ‘When I asked him for particulars,’ Mr Lawson said, ‘he pushed me aside, hailed a passing taxi, jumped into it and made off.’20 Mindful that Freud was grandson of the Freud, the magistrate said ‘What an extraordinary thing to do. Did he seem to be in a dream?’ ‘He seemed very agitated,’ Mr Lawson replied.

  Freud maintained that when the other car came into view he was stationary. ‘He abused me almost non-stop until I decided to reverse the car and clear the entrance. Mr Lawson continued his abuse and it was almost impossible to exchange particulars so I took a taxi along with Mr Spender.’ Unconvinced, the magistrate reprimanded the accused and thought fit to add a personal comment. ‘I think you are temperamentally unfitted to drive a car. I think you ought to see a psychiatrist and having regard to your name I think you will see the point of that.’21 He fined him £5 and ordered him to pay the costs. This irked Freud. ‘Stephen was hopeless. I only had one leg at the time, so I could not drive at any speed. Unfair. Shockingly unfair.’

  He pleaded guilty to a further summons: failure to accord precedence to a pedestrian on a crossing in Fitzroy Street on 13 October. He was fined £1 for that. ‘If you are not careful, Mr Freud,’ the magistrate said, ‘you will be up for manslaughter one of these days.’22

  The Bishop of Lincoln was reported on the same page of The Times for speeding. But the records differed. It was revealed that Freud had fifteen previous convictions.

  ‘I used to be banned quite a lot.’

  Stephen Spender and The Procurer were bought by Michael Astor, with whom Freud stayed once, in the early sixties, at Bruern near Oxford. ‘One weekend only. Michael Astor, married to Pandora [the former Pandora Jones], was very friendly with Stephen: the Spenders had a cottage on his estate. Staying there was so awful I started wandering in the woods, but a servant came and said, “Sir Martyn Beckett is playing the piano, really well.”’ Being told that Beckett – an architect – was at the piano seemed all the more reason not to go back into the house. ‘In the rooms there were basins in cupboards and a light went on in the mirror; I loathe mirrors, except for self-portraits. So I tried to shave with the door shut.’

  27

  ‘Brilliant ones fizzled’

  Frank Auerbach ascribed the change in Freud’s work around the time Caroline left him as being triggered by his unhappiness rather than by purely technical concerns. Certainly he was at a loss. Casting around, his instinct was to strike out and take chances, be the prodigal and make opportunism (‘potential’, as he saw it) prevail over timidity or prudence. Accordingly he maintained that it was no good taking on commissions for these came larded with unacceptable considerations: the cosmetic perjury associated with bespoke portraiture. Occasionally however, when debts became unnervingly pressing, he found himself detecting potential in individuals accustomed to regarding themselves as patrons. One such was Charles Clore, the shoe mogul and property magnate. And Judy Montagu was the go-between. ‘She said, “He’s always wanting you to.” And he had quite an interesting face. He owned a roller-skating rink in Cricklewood and he got the rights to the Dempsey–Sharkey fight at the age of twenty-two, which was pretty extraordinary.’ A maroon Rolls would wait outside Delamere while he painted this phenomenal tycoon. Twelve inches by twelve, Man in a Grey Suit (1960) has a time-is-money look: yellow eyes wary, silver hair swept back. ‘It was all too busy and formal.’ Not that much bigger than a passport photo, Freud’s Clore was, quite obviously, the least he could do.

  The contrast between Man in a Grey Suit and Woman in a White Shirt was one of scale, commitment and empathy. The woman, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, whom he first met at the Gargoyle, sat for him from 1957; this was no commission though there was never much doubt but that any painting produced would end up at Chatsworth, the Devonshires’ stately home. She was three years older than Freud, the youngest of the six noted and notorious Mitford sisters: among them Nancy, author of The Pursuit of Love and many other novels, Jessica, author of Hons and Rebels, who was ardently left wing, Unity, who developed a passion for Hitler and died in 1948 and Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, and had been interned with him during the war. Deborah (‘Debo’) became renowned as the chatelaine of Chatsworth, largely responsible for turning the place into a great visitor attraction.

  Given the social traversing involved, an activity less taxing than social climbing, the progress of the friendship was, for Freud, restorative. He stayed with the Duke and Duchess when they were still living in Edensor village waiting to move into nearby Chatsworth, which had been unoccupied by the family since the early thirties. His first visit was in August 1957. His hostess wrote to her sister Diana: ‘He seems very nice & not at all wicked but I’m always wrong about that kind of thing. He’s mad on tennis, rather unexpected.’1

  Andrew Cavendish, the 11th Duke, came to believe that Freud owed his interest in horse racing to him. Initially therefore Freud found him exasperating. ‘I thought how affected he was, saying how he wished he had never been born; his elder brother had been killed in the war so he inherited unexpectedly.’ A girls’ school had been installed in Chatsworth during the war and the place needed restoring to what it had formerly been: the Palace of the Peak with its great collections and gardens, and Emperor Fountain 276 feet high. Meanwhile there were 80 per cent death duties to be paid, £7 million, exacerbated by tax payable on Andrew Cavendish’s sudden and unexpected profit in 1950, the year he inherited from his father, when he bought a horse for 500 guineas and won £50,000 with it. Paintings had to be sold, among them a Memling Virgin and Child, Holbein’s Henry VIII car
toon and Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. In 1959, having reopened the house to the public, the Devonshires themselves took up residence. ‘A new visitors’ book was commissioned by Andrew from some very artistic person; Debo said, “I dare you to put ‘By hook or by crook I’ll be first in this book.’” I didn’t as it would have upset Andrew.’ He first stayed at Chatsworth that November. To those whose names filled its pages, Freud’s among them, Chatsworth restored was a post-war Brideshead, on a grander scale and free of Waugh’s sycophantic nostalgia.

  The Duke maintained that there is ‘generally too much talk of sex nowadays’. As he remarked many years later, in an A–Z of English characteristics that he compiled in the first instance for the Sunday Telegraph, dalliances are best conducted with one’s compatriots: ‘The French have their strengths and the Italians are very agreeable but, if you want my advice, stick to English women. They know the rules.’2 This was an informed view. It was – as Hilaire Belloc said and Freud quoted – well understood:

  The husbands and the wives

  Of this select society

  Lead independent lives

  Of infinite variety.3

  Freud enjoyed the company of Woman in a White Shirt, her no-nonsense aplomb. ‘She had just had her youngest when I met her and I saw a lot of her fairly soon after Caroline left. I remember a slight upset and her saying she thought I didn’t like her as much. And she said, “I thought it might help you get over Caroline.”’ Gossip ensued. ‘Debo was seen hopping in a London street with Freud holding up a foot, calling the attention of passers-by to her new shoes,’ Evelyn Waugh was pleased to tell her sister Nancy Mitford in June 1960.4 She asked to be introduced to Bacon ‘The Horror Painter’. Her husband testified to her strong character. ‘She is on the bossy side, of course, but I’ve always liked that in a woman.’5 She had a whippet, Studley, a breed with which Freud was to be associated. He particularly remembered her taking him to Renishaw Hall, home of the Sitwells. ‘Met me at Chesterfield station and we had lunch there. In the hall was a huge, dull, glinting brass pot on a table, been there forty years, with bulrushes in, and poking out of the bulrushes was a dark-looking duck with a beak: a Sitwell joke. Osbert was there, not Sacheverell, who wouldn’t speak to me as I hit Reresby, his son, in the lift at the Gargoyle, as he was rude to me. Nor Edith: Debo told me that Edith had become a Catholic in order not to murder Osbert’s boyfriend. Osbert said, “So pleased you illustrated that book of mine.” I couldn’t think what he meant, then I realised what it was: The Equilibriad, which Sansom had dedicated to him as he had praised him once.