The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Slade students too had stories to tell about their intense and evasive tutor. The cartoonist Nicholas Garland, a painting student in the mid-fifties, said that they found him alarming. ‘You could sense his presence in the corridors of the Slade before you saw him. He always wore grey suits and white shirts and his belt always looked very tight around his slim waist. Somehow or other he managed to be almost painfully nervous and menacing at the same time. When people imitated him they raised an imagined Gauloise to their lips while murmuring, “It’s rather marvellous,” rolling the R of rather in the back of their throats.10

  ‘I was a hopeless student at the Slade,’ Garland said. ‘And Lucian, who was a visiting tutor at the time, never spoke to me as a tutor. But he became a close friend of Tim [Behrens], my flatmate, so I got to know him a bit.’ One day Garland went to the National Gallery to look at the Rembrandt self-portrait and found Freud there, gazing at it. ‘I walked away and returned a little later to find that he hadn’t moved. There was something tremendous about the intensity and concentration of his look. That painting always reminds me of Lucian. I wished I could have talked to him about it and found out what he was looking at so hard.’ Garland was envious of Tim Behrens being taken up by Freud. ‘I was terribly jealous of Tim’s very close friendship with him. Once I went to join Tim at the bar of the French Pub where he was drinking with Lucian. Lucian smiled and said, ‘Here comes the tallest living pixie.’ His words, drawled so contemptuously and comically, amused Tim who laughed and repeated them. I can still feel the awful shame of the would-be hanger-on who has just found himself outside. So I was scared of Lucian.’11

  Freud’s Slade teaching ended, for the time being, in 1958. ‘I went less and less and less and less, and then I thought I’d better resign, and when, finally, I resigned, Bill Coldstream said, “Oh good, I was going to have to ask you to resign as you are so irregular. And I’ve never asked anyone to resign ever.”’ He went with the Willoughbys to pick up his things. It was a relief rather than a retreat and, given gambling odds, a not necessarily serious loss of income.

  ‘Lucian may have felt that he was simply too lucky, too good-looking, too extraordinary,’ Frank Auerbach reckoned. ‘Athletic, too. Really clever. Géricault was the same: had a lot of money and gave it all away to put himself in a situation where he thought he might paint better.

  ‘The funny thing is, once people have been a bit spoilt their whole attitude is utterly different, they have a sort of freedom the rest of their lives. They’re not as cautious as people very poor from childhood. Francis had that famous thing of a tiny, tiny allowance; Lucian had that thing too – an allowance – till he gave it away. He gave far more away and spent far more and gambled far more. It must have helped that Lucian was one of those painters, and they are pretty rare: dropped into Ecuador he’d start painting flowers in the town square and people would immediately recognise that he was remarkable.’12

  Ken Brazier (A Young Painter, 1957–8) qualified as remarkable and Freud tried helping him out. ‘I liked him and never asked myself why. He was a friend and in a bad way. I met him in Robert Street, a boarding house that belonged to a Pole or Czech where Tim Behrens and Ann Montagu lived as students. I took great trouble with Ian Tregarthen Jenkin – Bill’s deputy – to get him into the Slade. He’d been at an approved school and since that meant supposedly that he’d already been supported by the state we had to make up a new life for him, which worked. He was desperate but he was interesting. Came from a very broken home, mother French, father a violent workman. He was a really good Vorticist: it was as if he worked with shovels and drills to discover something that had been discovered before. It had graffiti-like urgency. Coldstream said there were only two people he took against to do with me (he didn’t know about how Jenkin and I had played this trick). One was Ken.’

  Some years later, when Freud taught for a while at Norwich Art School, he wangled some teaching work for Brazier. ‘It didn’t work. He dossed down in the art school and borrowed money from students – 2/6 – and the head rather meanly stopped him. Ken was just very touchy and went completely mad and married Nina, a girl I knew who then married an abstract painter and he [Ken] went off to become a professional beggar. He used to ring bells and run away. When I moved I made sure he didn’t find out where I was. “I’ve painted a picture,” he said. “I buried it on the South Downs.” He was desperate and interesting and a bit talented.’

  Women students such as Nina tended to have promise unfulfilled, Freud noticed. Too readily distracted, he rather thought. ‘They fizzled out. Brilliant ones fizzled.’ Schoolteaching, if not marriage, was their most likely prospect; indeed, one of Coldstream’s predecessors, Professor Tonks, used to tell well-heeled women students that they should marry poor but talented male students and thus keep them going. Some women students were sidetracked. Suzy Boyt, in her time at the Slade considered a promising painter, had more children by Freud after Ali: Rose in 1958, Isobel (Ib) in 1960 and Susie in 1969.

  Of all Lucian’s girlfriends that he knew of, Michael Andrews told me, Suzy Boyt was the one who had fewest illusions about him, the only one who did not seem to want to change him.

  ‘I’d like to thank you for the children,’ she said to him one Christmas, forty years later, somewhat to his bemusement.

  28

  ‘Actually it’s all I can do’

  In March 1957 Bacon exhibited at the Hanover Gallery six Studies for a Portrait of Van Gogh, variations on Van Gogh’s Painter on his Way to Work: paintings prompted as much by Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life, in which Kirk Douglas lurched wildly around Arles, as by the original painting which had been destroyed in the war. The artist became a haunted figure, ‘a phantom of the road’, Bacon said, mired in the paint like a skier forestalled. Hastily produced to make up a show (two paintings were delivered wet to the gallery), the series was a dramatic outburst, upstaging the colour reproductions that now stood in for the vanished picture. In a way Bacon was repeating what Van Gogh himself had done when, in the asylum at Saint Rémy, he painted studies after Delacroix, Millet and Gustave Doré, livelier than the originals. Bacon then returned to Tangier where Peter Lacy was a pianist in a bar drinking himself to death. For Freud, Bacon remained supremely companionable.

  ‘I saw him most days for a very very long time, obviously when he was in London: he was abroad a lot with Lacy. Francis told me I wouldn’t like it in Tangier. “Not a girl in sight; they’re all in yashmaks anyway,” he said.’

  By the late fifties Bacon had his imitators readily expressing anguish. Freud never troubled himself even to consider moves in that direction. But Bacon talked about ‘the need to deepen the game’ and that was appealing. ‘Francis had an effect. I had never before thought of paint, even though I’d always looked at other paint seemingly freely done, like Matisse for instance. He talked a great deal about the paint itself carrying the form, and imbuing the paint with this sort of life; he talked about packing a lot of things into a single brushstroke. Things which amused and excited me and I realised that it was a million miles from anything I could, or would ever, do.

  ‘The idea of paint having that power was something that made me feel I ought to get to know it in a different way that wasn’t subservient. I wanted to see what it could do. I hardly ever saw a painting of his that I couldn’t really admire or be surprised by. I went round there an awful lot. He only worked in the mornings. I worked longer hours, not obsessively, and we’d meet at lunch: Wheeler’s or the Colony. I always worked fairly long. Not at night. Nor did he. Sometimes he wouldn’t drink and we’d just stay there in his studio and go out locally; it’s not so much that he drank so much but so consistently. He had this marvellous discipline.’

  Bacon despised inhibition and dealt out money and drinks as though honour bound to impress friends and strangers alike. Don Henderson, a former dental technician, Detective Sergeant in the Essex Police, Royal Shakespeare Company actor and General Tagge in Star Wars, was barely a nodding a
cquaintance in the French Pub, yet Bacon treated him, he said, with extravagant open-handedness. ‘His vast generosity (when offering to buy somebody a drink – even a stranger – as often as not it would be a bottle of champagne) and his genuine delight at meeting a friend. His eyes and whole face would light up and actually SHINE in a most extraordinary way until he became one huge grin of sincere pleasure. He was one of the most charming, honest and open people I have ever met.’1

  On one occasion, Freud remembered, the conviviality soured and the grin faltered. ‘Late at night, in a room near the Colony Room, Muriel, Ian [Board] and people were there and Francis had this huge workman with an enormous erection and the man had passed out and Francis was sucking him off, and people were shouting and carrying on, and as the man came he was sick and Francis shook himself and said, “God, I wish I hadn’t done that.” What was good was Francis doing it like an unsuccessful lark. Normally Francis’ exhibitionism hadn’t been of that nature. Though it was probably no more extreme than what often happens upstairs when the pub closes, it was very spectacular. The man was so huge, so unconscious and yet amenable.’

  This singularly untoward act matched the reflexes of retch and spasm graphically rendered in many a later Bacon: as with weaknesses of the flesh, so too with the paint. ‘Those sexual feelings: even if unconscious, you can have them. It’s to do with survival instinct. Like Hitler, or those doctors: freezing people to death and putting glamorous women in with them. The cells are most closely grouped where those senses are. The man was, perhaps, not very wildly alive when he was awake.

  ‘It seemed odd for Francis to do something private in public. Not stylish. I suppose it was a mixture between desire and “let’s go there” and alcohol. When he shook himself, he seemed dead sober.’

  In 1953 the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Nott-Bower, had announced a drive ‘against male vice’, the plan being to ‘rip the covers off all London’s filth spots’. Following this, the conviction and imprisonment of Lord Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers for consorting with airmen was a cautionary stunt. The Wolfenden Committee Report of 1957 recommended that homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence but the relaxation in the law was not effected for some years and when, eventually, it came about Bacon was not best pleased. ‘Francis said it ruined his amorous life because, he said, it took the excitement out of things.’

  In 1958 Sonia Orwell married – briefly – Michael Pitt-Rivers, a landowner, who, having served his sentence, qualified as another of her quixotic ventures. Freud took advantage of the new connection. ‘He had this cottage and I took Anna and Annie for a holiday. Under the rules of divorce I had to have an au pair so I took Kay [McAdam] with us. It was quite nice having her there. Charlie [Lumley] came down and one night we went to Lepe on the coast, near the New Forest, and took a car ferry to the Isle of Wight and drove round the island. He showed me where he was in jail. An army jail.’

  Charlie was available once more to pose for Man Smoking, the cigarette savoured – a contemplative smoke – an air of indifference finally achieved after fifteen years or so of being on call for sittings. Man in a Mackintosh (1958) was another update: Interior in Paddington seven years later and several steps closer, with Harry Diamond older, balder and ever more resentful, re-equipped with black-rimmed National Health specs. His raincoat became him: the coat of a street character, a pub acquaintance, who considers himself put upon but fancies himself to be as fly as they come. Frank Auerbach told Freud that he saw Diamond once in the French Pub with a girl; Harry had a knuckleduster in his pocket to bring out if his ‘fiancée’ was approached by anyone.

  ‘All who were barred from the French Pub went to the Caves de France. Harry and his friends Bruce Bernard and Willy Willetts – a translator who became amazingly expert in Chinese art, unhappy marriage, always in Soho – were in the Caves and Willy said, “I’ve been talking to my publisher who says in some years to come your Chinese book will be indispensable; I’ve been making my will and will maybe leave you the royalties.” Harry left. Then next day he said, “I’ve been thinking about your offer. Leave me out. I’m damned if I’m going to be a butt for your philanthropy.” I thought what an extraordinary thing to say: “butt for your philanthropy”. It cannot ever have been said by anyone before.’

  Freud liked Harry Diamond’s ex-pugilist stance. ‘I remember him saying, “I’m five foot four, I’m a bit thin on top: am I a monster?” Yes, I thought, but not because of that. Harry glassed a lot of people in his time.’ Bruce Bernard stuck up for him as one who ‘understandably felt aggrieved at his lot, and who had to work as a stagehand with what was then a clannish bunch of right-wing cockneys – sometimes nice to know, sometimes not’.2

  In the portraits from the previous few years, most notably those of Stephen Spender and Elinor Bellingham-Smith and now Harry Diamond once again, the handling painstakingly loosened. ‘Learning to paint flesh was a conscious decision and I got very impatient. It is also as Degas reported of Ingres, his visit to his studio when his companion saw Bain Turc and said, “Oh, that is yet another style.” “But”, M. Ingres said, “I have several brushes.” Degas repeated that. “You can’t quote a remark of Ingres’ that isn’t a masterpiece,” he said.’

  Bacon always claimed that ideas dropped into his mind like slides into the projector. Technique – ‘using paint to do things’ – gave rise to style; if an idea worked it did so because it clicked, so to speak, and, with any luck, a sort of effusion occurred. Freud had little versatility; like Bacon, he painted as he did because he had no choice. ‘They think I’m painting in this way but actually it’s all I can do.’

  More brushes: more variety of effect, different strokes for the pull, the sag, the sheen of skin, and the tight whitening where boniness shows through. That said, Freud was not hankering after virtuosity. He wanted to be able to achieve more immediacy, more fullness, more body. ‘A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object.’

  ‘Use the shadows,’ Bernard Meninsky had told his students at the Central. ‘Draw from the shadows. There is nothing else.’ And he quoted a Chinese sage: ‘Art produces something beyond the form of things, though its importance lies in preserving the form of things.’

  This could be construed as exhortation to obfuscate, but it is encouragement to deepen and enlarge. As Cézanne said, explaining why the Beaux Arts Academy of Aix had seen fit to reject his application to study there: ‘a head interested me, so I made it big.’

  Freud admired D. H. Lawrence’s essay on Cézanne, published in 1929, for its acceptance of the idea of painting being intelligent – and restrained – intensification. ‘He wanted true-to-life representation. Only he wanted it more true to life.’ Cézanne would say to his model, ‘be an apple, be an apple,’ and Lawrence had thought this a metaphysical bull’s-eye. ‘He knew as an artist that the only bit of a woman which nowadays escapes being ready-made and ready-known cliché is the appley part of her.’ Such talk was, Freud accepted, ‘impressive and ridiculous’. But what Lawrence had to say about Cézanne’s substantiality had a bearing on what he himself was beginning to want to achieve. ‘The true imagination is for ever curving round to the other side, to the back of the presented appearance.’ To Lawrence, Cézanne’s struggle was to regain an initiative. ‘Our instincts and intuitions are dead, we live wound round with the winding-sheet of abstraction. And the touch of anything solid hurts us.’3

  To Freud, Cézanne was the painter who, above all, made expression (as distinct from skittering ‘Expressionism’) the very stuff of concentration. ‘Eliot said, “Art is an escape from personality.” In my head this rules out Expressionism. The art element is what has been concentrated on. Expressionism – as I think of it – it isn’t an escape, it’s a direct transmutation of the personality; it’s an attempt to express feeling direct and that’s why it’s so awful. Expressionism is exaggerated. The concept of overstatement: that’s
what it is. I can only think of it as a term of abuse.’

  He was sensitive about this because it was so often assumed that having been born German he was surely predisposed towards the Gothic and, even more surely, influenced at an early age by the Neue Sachlichkeit artists, particularly Otto Dix. This he baulked at. Wilhelm Busch, yes, not Dix. ‘Terribly not. I might have seen them; I disliked it intensely, with the exception of Grosz. I hated the overstated atmosphere of them: medieval German drawing all slipped up. And I thought they were political.’ Obviously such denials could have been bluster, as he himself acknowledged. ‘It could be like people turning into the parents that they loathed.’ Yet he had put a distance and a barrier of disinclination between himself and such presumed influences. He had been unaware of the work of Christian Schad, which did not come to attention in Britain until the 1970s. ‘Schadenfreud’, he suggested, was the pun to apply, and art historians were too keen to bundle together presumed influences simply by date, nationality or, if desperate, genetic propensity. The greatest influence on him, he insisted, was French painting. Why? ‘Because French painting is better …

  I felt more discontented than daring. Suddenly, for the first time, I felt I was pursuing a method rather than painting and I think that made me very dissatisfied. I felt I wanted to free myself from this way of working. Also people said that they liked it, which I thought was really suspect. I felt with such approval in the time I got it that it was being appreciated for something that I felt wasn’t of great account. I felt that the linear aspect of my drawing inhibited what I wished to do in my painting. Though I’m not introspective I think that all this had an emotional basis. It was to do with the way my life was going and to do with questioning myself as a result of the way my life was going.

  ‘Gradually I used more and more and more hours. I started standing up. And then I used bigger brushes, different hogshair brushes. I was very aware of the terrible things I was doing in the process.’