The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Now in his late thirties Freud could see how real the risk was of being for ever associated not only with long ago and faraway German painting but also with the types of painting that a dealer such as Arthur Jeffress had espoused: mindless detailing to trompe l’oeil effect, Venetian swagger as with recent Graham Sutherlands and brimming close-ups of youngish Dorian Grays. How easy too it could have been for him to catch up with and overtake Dickie Chopping, say, who by then was becoming celebrated for his fetishistic James Bond dust jackets. And there was also mischief to stomach. His Bryanston schoolfriend Michael Nelson published anonymously in 1958 A Room in Chelsea Square: a bitchy comic novel about ‘the world of smart Bohemia in London featuring an all too recognisable cast of characters. The late Peter Watson appeared, lightly disguised, as ‘Patrick … rich, indulgent, tortured’ (‘he still retained that schoolboy charm which he went to such lengths to preserve’), also ‘Ronnie Gras’, a Cyril Connolly figure bent on feeding well off a literary review called Eleven, and ‘Christopher Lyre’, who was unmistakably Lucian Freud. (‘Everyone laughed at Christopher. But they had to concede the fact that he was a talented painter.’) Nelson caught Freud’s speech patterns and faint Germanic lilt: ‘Stephen Spender in one of his better poems says that changing place isn’t changing mind. That’s terribly true, you know. We all find that as we grow older. Don’t you agree, Ronnie?’4 The talented painter lost his wife. ‘At the time I was terribly upset. I thought she should have understood that there is more than one kind of love. The nature of love is promiscuous and uncontrollable.’5 That said, ‘Christopher put down his brush, took a tie off the mantelpiece and twisted it round his neck, omitting to put it under his collar.’6

  ‘I did notice that those people – Paddington people – age. They really age. I noticed girls who were playing in the street: ten years later they were grandmothers.’

  ‘I’ve never minded being overlooked or forgotten. It wasn’t that I was abandoning something dear to me; it was more that I wanted to develop something unknown to me.’

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  ‘People being monogamous seems to me an extraordinary and imaginative situation’

  Freud’s first exhibition at Fischer and Lloyd’s Marlborough Fine Art, in April 1958, was significant for them, though in itself a minor affair. ‘I was their first modern person after Paul Maze.’ The Marlborough had risen fast. ‘Frank Lloyd had operated petrol pumps and service stations around Vienna before the war; Harry Fischer had been a bookseller.’ Interned at the outbreak of hostilities, then in the Pioneer Corps, they set up in 1946 in a basement in Old Bond Street dealing in prints and books initially, then in paintings; they had backing to start with, Freud learnt, from Ernst Heilbrun, Lucie Freud’s admirer from decades before. ‘He turned up after the war. “The Swabian Nightingale”. A German poet, rich, and had been interned with Fischer. He lived in Switzerland, I think. When they did well they gave him his stake money back, nothing more.’ Before long the gallery had branches in Rome and New York and began dealing in living artists. Enhancing reputations with impressive catalogues and international sales pitches could be more profitable, they suspected, than trading on old esteem. Besides, supplies of readily saleable Impressionists were dwindling.

  ‘They called it the Marlborough after Lord Ivor Churchill, a philanthropist, very civilised, who had this marvellous collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings and swapped them all with the Marlborough for paintings by Paul Maze, who was a friend of his in the war.’ Maze introduced David Somerset, heir to the Duke of Beaufort, to Lloyd and Fischer and they recruited him to add class, Freud explained. ‘They had a number of very rich clients who didn’t speak to one another and he would sell from one to the other.’ David Somerset, who backed Freud throughout his years with the gallery, said that Frank Lloyd didn’t approve of him, partly because he didn’t produce enough but also because he had a habit of selling a painting to more than one person at once, and – worse – not through the gallery. Freud maintained that the partners behaved at times like Delamere costers. ‘They would shout at each other across the street. Traffic would stop. They chucked Eduardo. “Mr Paolozzi, if you don’t like the way we do business, we don’t need you,” said Frank Lloyd and hung up.’

  Freud had no gallery when the Marlborough took him on. He had fallen out with the Hanover where he had been anomalous, particularly after Arthur Jeffress pulled out. ‘Jeffress backed Erica, then she was so dishonest with him. I didn’t show much at the Marlborough; there wasn’t all that much to show. The paintings weren’t easy to sell, but they did sell. David Somerset paid me in cash.’ The latter knew from the first that Freud was going to be a difficult artist to handle. ‘Such a bad producer.’ Lloyd had been against taking him on, but Fischer was in favour, considering him similar to himself in that they both came from a posh Viennese background.1

  ‘There was a moment in the late 1950s’, John Russell, the Sunday Times critic, wrote, ‘when the Marlborough seemed to have in mind a monopoly, with every living artist of consequence on the payroll.’ Ben Nicholson was lured from Gimpels and Henry Moore from the Leicester Galleries. Freud asked Fischer once if there was any artist he wouldn’t show. ‘Graham Sutherland,’ he replied. ‘And that was only two years before he showed him. Fischer was a shoddy, fat, pompous fool. He came round and borrowed a book of poems and I never got them back.’ David Somerset said that actually Fischer liked Freud; after all there was the same Viennese background and so showing him seemed to him to be a reinforcement or corroboration of his taste for Klimt and Schiele, which he extended when, in 1972, he split with Frank Lloyd and founded Fischer Fine Art.

  A couple of weeks before the Marlborough exhibition opened Quentin Crewe of the Evening Standard talked to Freud in his ‘condemned house in Delamere Terrace in Little Venice’. He found him, he reported on 17 March, ‘a nervous man whose eyes dart about like fleas in a snuff box. He beguiles with charm and alarms with an air of suppressed violence. The painting of his last wife, Caroline Freud, seems almost vicious,’ Crewe added. ‘He calls it Girl by the Sea.’

  Freud explained why those he painted were mostly nameless. ‘I don’t give them names as I think it distracts people. This one I call Procurer because the subject is a sort of procurer. I hope to finish this one for the exhibition but I have been delayed as he has been in prison.’ ‘This one’ being Man Smoking.2

  The Evening Standard article was intriguing and favourable advance coverage but then, on 5 April, an article by John Berger headlined ‘Success and Value’ appeared in the New Statesman. Berger began with congratulations to the Trades Union Congress on commissioning a sculpture by Epstein for their headquarters in Great Russell Street. ‘Both affirmative and tragic … a most effective expression of the determination of the Labour movement to prevent war.’ He then laid into the show with fervent scorn. Freud’s failings were graphic, he argued, and not unconnected, he implied, with lack of moral fibre. ‘The new Freud portrait heads are done with a painstaking naturalism somewhat reminiscent of the covers of Time magazine. Only they are more startling because they all emphasise decay – like touched up photographs of rotten apples.’3 Berger (‘like all communists, married to a very rich woman’, Freud contended) exercised what he himself later acknowledged to be a ‘puritanism’ of judgement. ‘They appear to be fashionable but are worth very little.’ The article caused consternation at the Marlborough. ‘Fischer panicked. He almost stopped the show.’

  Freud was not the only exhibitor. Drawings by Marcel Frischmann, a contributor to the satirical magazine Simplicissimus between 1926 and 1933, who had died in 1951, were shown in the front gallery while Freud, in the room behind, showed paintings such as Man in a Mackintosh, A Woman Painter, A Procurer and A Poet (the unfinished portrait of Stephen Spender). Whatever Berger said, compared with Frischmann’s somewhat dated graphics, the Freuds were fresh and immediate.

  The opening was overrun with art students and the Soho crowd, ‘teddy boys wearing day-glo
socks and flat-chested, flat-heeled, young women in torn polo sweaters’, as Ann Fleming, Maudie Littlehampton incarnate, described them.4 At her urging Ian Fleming, flush with James Bond money, bought Man Smoking (‘a splendid portrait of Lucian’s favourite thief’) as an investment, she suggested, for their son Caspar; however, the Evening Standard ran a headline ‘James Bond prefers Nature to Art’, for Fleming liked the paintings no more than he liked the painter. Charlie Lumley – ‘a young man with Tony Curtis hair’ – was also quoted. ‘He took a long time to paint my picture. Three years. Course a lot of the time I was in and out of jail.’5

  Several other reviews were as scathing as Berger’s. In the Listener Lawrence Alloway characterised Freud as ‘a compulsive painter, given to the elaboration of tiny forms and perfect surfaces. He lures the spectator close to the portrait, as for an embrace, there to repel him by the desert of the face, with its falling skin, rising veins, cracking lips …’ For Alloway the change of look from the early Freud, who ‘began as a kind of Sunday Fleming who gripped the world in bright fragments’, was deplorable. ‘The new portraits reveal a disastrous interest in painterly values. This does not mean that colour and atmosphere sweep across the heads, unifying each hair and crease. It means that the richer pigment he uses is subjected to the same obsessional fussing as his line, so that it takes on a weird surface animation.’ He particularly disliked A Woman Painter: ‘The elaborated paint turns the head into a soggy mass, like wet bread.’6

  Not everyone dismissed the show. The anonymous Times reviewer (David Thompson) talked obscurely of ‘faces ripe for betrayal’, yet Freud, he added, ‘sheds at last his more perverse and provocative qualities and becomes an artist of real intensity’.7 In the Sunday Times John Russell – known among colleagues as ‘Hearts & Flowers’ Russell – talked of ‘works of compassion’, concluding: ‘compassionate these pictures may be: but not charitable.’8 Neville Wallis in the Observer drew attention to ‘Freud’s method of so enlarging a head within its confines as to give it the appearance of a rare, exotic fruit outgrowing, and all but bursting, its greenhouse frame’. He summed him up as ‘a phenomenon of our time, destined, I suspect, to outlive most contemporary reputations’.9

  The paintings sold well enough, priced at up to 400 guineas, a scale slightly lower than Erica Brausen’s prices for Bacons. Clearly, if the thirty-five-year-old Freud could no longer be regarded as promising it was reasonable to assume that the paintings qualified as mature works. For Bacon, ever quick with a tongue-lashing, the time had come for him to say that he really wasn’t interested in what Freud was doing. That it was nothing. That it was worthless. This was a characteristic betrayal, Auerbach said, and at that stage more a snub. Freud had no business rivalling him at all.10

  Sir Kenneth Clark, by now Chairman of the Arts Council, took a look at the pictures. Relations had tailed off. In 1954, shortly after he bought Saltwood Castle isolated behind its curtain walls on top of a hill above Cinque Port Hythe, Freud, Ann Fleming and James Pope-Hennessy had been invited to tea. Arriving at the twelfth-century gatehouse, remote from the inhabited parts of the castle, Freud rang the bell. Some time later the Clarks came along the drive, not to greet them but to fuss over the bell-pull. Tugging it he had jammed it and they failed to hide their vexation.

  ‘I was very friendly with him and then less so, though I got books – The Nude – with dedications to me. I remember being near Saltwood and thinking I’d better not go there. At the Marlborough I saw him and he came over, looked pretty angry, “admired my courage”, and I never heard from him again.’

  Clark tended to veer away from artists he had helped once they had outlived or outgrown their suitability as protégés. He seemed taken aback by Freud’s loosening-up, by the loss of flawlessness, by the spectacle in painting after painting of rather ordinary-looking sitters with chapped skin and straggly hair where, previously, exquisite specimens had been provided for the connoisseur’s delectation. Harry Diamond in his grubby raincoat was precisely the type of scruff one might come upon making a nuisance of himself, not for the first time, at one’s castle gate. In his Presidential Address to the English Association, in November 1962, Clark addressed the topic of ‘Provincialism’. ‘No open-minded historian of art would deny that English painting is provincial,’ he remarked. While commending ‘independence’ (in Stubbs, for example) he cited Samuel Palmer as one who had lapsed from lyricism into ‘false poetry’; so too, implicitly, with the new Freuds. What a loss. ‘The occasional, unpredictable man of genius from the perimeters – Turner, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Munch – is outside the sort of classification upon which criticism must usually depend.’ There was, implicitly, the reproach that Freud had removed himself from serious consideration by one who had provided invaluable backing and advice. As he had said, ‘The ideal patron … is a man with enough critical understanding to see the direction in which the artist ought to go.’11

  Having pronounced the paintings superficial in his New Statesman review (‘The “compassion”, which is probably meant to be inspired by the care with which the long-sufferers’ grimaces are recorded, is really only a form of self-pity’), John Berger implied that painter and sitter owed it to the viewer to be glum to some purpose, such as the prevention of war.12 His exhortations were wholesale and not of course aimed only at Freud. Turning his attention a couple of months later to the 1958 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, he wagged a forefinger at Academy portraits. ‘One could say to the artists who painted them that, if they looked more searchingly, selected with more discrimination, drew better, asked themselves more thoroughly and exactly what they thought was important about their subjects, they might produce worthwhile works.’ There was plenty at Burlington House to inspire derision: an official portrait of the Queen in an overly spangled evening dress and tiara by Anthony Devas, a chamber of dimmed conferring lawyers by Norman Hepple and, more ‘modern’ but no less conventional, portraits by William Coldstream and Lawrence Gowing (the epitomes of Slade mid-tone academicism), by Rodrigo Moynihan and Robert Buhler (Royal College academicism) and even – carrying on as ever – paintings by Augustus John. Berger singled out none of these for specific comment; he even resisted describing the ‘Picture of the Year’, a title applied by the press – a portrait by John Merton of the Countess of Dalkeith, porcelain-pretty in an alcove overlooking the Dalkeith estates. Yet it reflected everything that he condemned in Annigoni whose portrait of the Queen (‘a badly composed, weakly drawn, grubbily painted picture, totally lacking in grandeur’) had been, in his view, the presiding picture in an exclusive category. ‘It is the nearest that, with respect, we can get to a Royal pin-up.’13

  What Clark took to be a loss of clarity or application in Freud’s work Berger regarded as a lack of compassion, feebly expressed at that. Either way the charge was that he had veered into a sort of academic naturalism. Yet Freud had moved on, concerned in his paintings more with ‘the life in them’ than with the exercise of accomplishment within narrow bounds. To Auerbach the difficulty was that the transition had now been made public and Freud was exposed for the first time (Douglas Cooper’s 1954 denunciation didn’t really count) to the discomfiture of being written off. ‘Lucian said – actually of Leon [Kossoff] – “I don’t think he realises the luxury of being ignored.” In the very courageous period when he transformed himself and had the first show at the Marlborough, Lucian just carried on in his own way and knew exactly what he was doing and what he was heading for: what turned out to be an enormous gap in art history where there isn’t anything like Lucian’s lumps of flesh and human animals. And nobody had written or suggested that this was a gap; they’d written things saying that painting should come off the wall or that there shouldn’t be any literary reference or that it should be like music is.

  ‘What Lucian did was like what Baudelaire said “the term avant garde should be given back to the military and we should look for the absolutely new.” With Lucian it was absolutely new and nobody recognised it. And if there
was a tiny element of copying Francis (and perhaps even to a tiny degree myself) about the way the paint was put on, he went through it and digested it. We were – Francis much more than me – the associates that he had chosen and then forged his own language with this addition of more varied ammunition.’

  That summer Freud went with Jane and Tim Willoughby and June Keeley to Expo ’58 in Brussels, via Paris, a weekend during which he was stopped for jaywalking in Paris and saw Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus in the Musée des Beaux Arts. He also retained a vague memory (‘It’s sort of in my head, as in everyone’s head’) of seeing Annigoni’s portrait of the young Queen in the UK pavilion, installed there despite Philip Hendy’s protests to the pavilion’s designer, James Gardner. Hendy had even arranged a special showing at the National Gallery of the wretched picture. He had it placed on an easel beside a Rembrandt self-portrait and summoned Gardner. But Gardner knew his business and in Brussels, predictably, the ‘Royal pin-up’ was a hit.

  Expo ’58 was one of a number of occasions when Freud, the Willoughbys and June Keeley were a foursome. Sometimes they went to the Stork Room in Swallow Street on Sunday night where, as June remembered, they sat on the left, near Pip the manager. ‘If the police raided, a bell was rung. Those on the left were served in coffee cups and would turn the cups up and tip the booze on to the carpet. Jane didn’t dance with Lucian, as she couldn’t: no rhythm. So I danced with him on the postage-stamp stage floor. Six couples were about all it held. He’d lead in, kicking out to left and right, and he’d clear the floor. He was a kicker.’ June often acted as the hostess for Tim Willoughby’s parties. ‘Once Tim put me to bed drunk, as I didn’t like the guests, and I passed out and woke up, heard voices, and Tim was saying, “Lucian, what are you doing?” Those were the days of stockings and suspenders and Lucian had come up quietly and was removing my suspenders. He said, “I was trying to make her more comfortable.” And have his wicked way. Tim didn’t hold much brief for Lucian.’14