The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  The Paddington clearances gradually eliminated the slum heritage of Mayhew’s London, as John Rothenstein of the Tate discovered when he arranged to call on Freud one afternoon early in 1962. He went to Delamere Terrace, saw the car parked – it could only have been Freud’s – and scrawls on doors indicating that water and electricity had been cut off. ‘You’re not looking for an artist, Mr Frood, are you?’ a passer-by asked him. ‘There’s one or two houses in the street that’s left. He’s there.’ In a ‘minute and derelict studio’ – at number 4 – Freud and a bottle of champagne awaited him.5 In 1961 the Tate bought Man with a Thistle, Freud’s chill self-portrait on Poros, prickliness exemplified.

  Rothenstein was gathering material for what was to be the third and last and most perfunctory of his volumes of biographical sketches of British artists. Freud found him irritating. ‘He used to pester me a bit, kept on that I was the most underrated painter in England, and then he said he wanted to do a book and I wrote a rather rude letter as I felt this was the wrong time to do it. Francis and I asked him for a drink and he said, “I was looking through my diaries and how heartening it was to find you and Francis so loyal.”’

  In a vendetta conducted against him in the early fifties by LeRoux Smith LeRoux and Douglas Cooper, with Graham Sutherland, then a Tate trustee, acting as Cooper’s cat’s-paw, Rothenstein had been accused of mismanagement, embezzlement and poor taste. Rothenstein’s offence lay in not responding enough to Cooper’s violent directives, leading to accusations that he was parochial in outlook and useless when it came to acquiring significant foreign works of art for the Tate. For example, in 1940 he had failed to alert his trustees to Matisse’s Red Studio, which for years had hung in the Gargoyle Club; eventually it had gone for less than £1,000 to the Museum of Modern Art. That was grounds for permanent reproach. However, those ganged up against him – a bully, a con man and Sutherland – were discredited and Rothenstein survived. He even biffed Cooper in 1954 at the private view of Dicky Buckle’s Diaghilev exhibition, knocking his glasses off and gaining the attention of gossip columns and cartoonists.

  Bacon had some sympathy for him, for Rothenstein had been viciously maligned. Freud felt the same. ‘Just a poor old thing. And he had this pathological passion for girls. He was so short-sighted; he could hardly see; he wrote something about how my circle “ranged from Max Ernst to Princess Margaret”. He said he’d seen me with them at Les Deux Magots. I wasn’t actually at a table with Max Ernst and Princess Margaret, but nearly.’

  He and Bacon dined with Rothenstein in the lofty stuffiness of the Athenaeum and planted the idea of Bacon exhibiting at the Tate. Happily, Rothenstein adopted the suggestion as his own idea and a retrospective followed in the summer of 1962. Naturally there were complaints. Ben Nicholson, writing to Herbert Read, included Freud in a diatribe against the anti-modernists. ‘I never saw a more profoundly uninteresting?.’ Rothenstein was accused of conniving with commercial interests in promoting a Marlborough artist, a distasteful one at that. The exhibition, which was toured to Turin, Zurich and Amsterdam, established Bacon as the leading British painter, unquestionably Sutherland’s superior and, among British artists of international reputation, second only to Henry Moore who consequently, and unawares, became his butt.

  ‘I remember one day, when he hadn’t been with the Marlborough for long, Francis said, “I had a long talk with Henry Moore. I think I really managed to fuck up his work.”’

  This was around 1964 when Moore and Bacon were shown together at the Marlborough in notional harmony: the human figure roundly celebrated thereby. By 1967 Moore and his representatives were discussing with Rothenstein’s successor, Norman Reid, the possibility of establishing a permanent space at the Tate for a great legacy from his estate. This provoked forty-one artists, including several of his former assistants, Anthony Caro among them, to write to The Times objecting to the imposition on the nation of a Moore mausoleum. The thought of such a burden on the Tate was enough to put Bacon off any further contact with Moore.6

  The possibility of turning to sculpture and solidifying the image rather than flatly depicting it tantalised Bacon. Freud (who was to order a load of clay some years later with the notion of trying sculpture again) became used to hearing Bacon holding forth on what might be achieved. ‘For a long time – a year or two – Francis talked about the sculptures he was going to do. People on beds. They were so exciting. He said he would do it because he was so practical and he was so stimulated by it, and he talked it away. The only thing they sounded like that had ever been done were effigies on tombs; but they were going to be … not wax: certainly a lot of metal was involved. All these things had real meaning early on, and then got somehow lost through drink and repetition and boasting. Which can be very good for people; I mean people can boast themselves into doing more. Egg themselves on.’

  31

  ‘Awfully uneasy’

  Talk, perhaps of sculpture, probably of more gossip-worthy pursuits, hangs in the air in the long afternoon of The Colony Room, Michael Andrews’ conversation piece, exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery in January 1963 and immediately recognised by those involved as a true record of their daily encounters. In the secluded upstairs bar in Dean Street the regulars bitch and gossip and fall silent. Freud stands centre right, glass in hand, the only person wise to what the painter is up to, watching him compose his cast of characters. The others act unaware. John Deakin, photographer, faces an obstreperous Henrietta Moraes. (‘The only person who painted Henrietta well was Mike, in The Colony Room,’ Freud commented. ‘See her shouting …’) She could be laying into Deakin for selling nude snaps of her around the pubs. Above Deakin’s head swells the mural, painted by Andrews, after Bonnard: the Colony Room’s substitute for a window.

  The mirror on the far wall augments the gaggle, fanning the conviviality and furthering Andrews’ take on Manet’s Music in the Tuileries, in the National Gallery, where Baudelaire can be spotted in the throng. Perched on one of Muriel’s bar stools, Bacon replaces one of Manet’s crinolined ladies. Could he be once again telling them all about the sculptures he swears he’ll produce, any time now? Bruce Bernard, in profile, pays close attention. Not so Muriel Belcher, loudly presiding, skirt rucked up, legs crossed in a flash of nylons. Well set in her character part, she looks at Carmel her girlfriend, and at Ian Board serving behind the bar and calls for someone – ‘Cuntie’, ‘Lottie’, ‘Miss’ – to stand another round. While most of the figures in The Colony Room were at one time or another painted by Freud as key individuals, assembled by Andrews they interact, their show of confidence – their being the in-crowd – slyly observed; the scene is cinematic: Manet revisited, La Dolce Vita re-enacted upstairs in Soho. To David Sylvester, writing in the Sunday Times colour magazine, The Colony Room was yet another example of an Andrews composition ‘flawed by a fumblingness and uncertainty’.1 Sylvester was more at ease with the thrusts and wipes of a Bacon than with the cheek-by-jowl panache of Andrews’ masterpiece. What could be more expressive than his pale, stroppy face of Muriel Belcher and the way he poses Bacon’s shoulders and plumps his blouson and thigh?

  When the Colony Room Club opened in 1948 Muriel had offered Bacon free drink and the odd tenner a week to bring in the customers; Bacon was the main reason for Freud going there so much. The one-arm bandit was also an attraction and he served his time on it. ‘Not like Harry Diamond, who played on knowing that it was fixed so that after a certain weight it would pay out.’ One day, just when he reckoned it had got to that point, he ran out of change. ‘An old lady, a villain’s mother, moved on to it and he said, “Stop it, I’m going to get some more money,” but she took no notice, there was a crash of money coming out and Harry hit her. “He only hit X’s mother,” said Muriel. “I had to bar him.”’

  At one stage, in the early sixties, the Krays were said to be charging Muriel anything up to £250 per week protection money; they would turn up in the Colony Room in business suits and people would think them
quite respectable. One time, when they said they wanted a word with her, Frank Auerbach remembered, ‘she told them she was busy, could they come back Tuesday afternoon? Which they did. There were two men with her. She greeted the Krays: “May I introduce Detective Chief Inspector Gosling and Sergeant Burton?” This worked. She probably paid the police to mind her.’ As famous in her setting as Rosa Lewis had been in the Cavendish Hotel, painted by Andrews and photographed by Deakin for Bacon to transfigure, Muriel Belcher was a prime subject for Freud, perhaps too obviously so. He began a portrait. ‘I liked Muriel and it was nice to work from her, but she was easily frightened and then something went wrong, a legal issue, and she got nervous: she really wasn’t at all tough. It went very well and then I destroyed it.

  ‘Bernardine [Coverley] worked for an antique dealer in Islington, a crazy man, bisexual and promiscuous. (People often say they are bisexual and never are; but he actually was.) He’d been a pilot in the war, I think, drank a lot, married to a press lord’s daughter and kept a tarty boy. He had the picture of Bernardine almost giving birth to Bella and commissioned the painting of Muriel. He was a hot financier, got into trouble and unloaded on to me. He then sued me for the money. There was a solicitor’s letter, which meant they could come and take some pictures, plus one of their choice, and I had to sign something.

  ‘Scrapping the picture put an end to it. Obviously I didn’t have to destroy it, but it was a way of getting it settled, done out of panic. As he was a sort of ally, it was something I resented.’

  Far from the Colony Room and the Bacon retrospective, other, seemlier reputations were sanctified in May 1962 with the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, Basil Spence’s compendium of Festival of Britain modernism, featuring Epstein’s St Michael (modelled on Kitty’s second husband Wynne Godley), John Piper stained glass, and a hefty eagle lectern by Liz Frink. This was the older generation – plus Liz Frink – delivering contemporary church fittings. Behind the high altar arose Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Majesty, purportedly the world’s largest tapestry ever, every fault blown up out of all proportion. A wrinkled green immensity, it exaggerated Sutherland’s habitual blend: plush naturalism barbed with thorny emblems. ‘As a work of art,’ John Russell wrote, ‘it falls some way short of the more extravagant expectations of Mr Sutherland’s admirers.’2 Douglas Cooper still championed Sutherland, by now a member of the Order of Merit, as ‘the most distinguished and the most original English artist of the mid-twentieth century’.3

  If Sutherland disappointed, so too did the cathedral. A design package conceived as the high temple of post-war reconciliations and recovery, it became a show home of compromise, the only surprise being the absence of a Henry Moore. Neither Bacon nor Freud nor anyone they consorted with had any inclination to be involved in a project radiating consensus spirituality.

  The consecration came at a time when blanket urban redevelopment, along with colour in advertising and Sunday newspaper magazines, bright new acrylic paints and bright new pop and abstract modes, betokened a jaunty spirit of the age, pressure for change and stirrings in the social mix. In Freud’s part of Paddington one of the few buildings not listed for demolition was St Mary Magdalene, a blackened landmark of Victorian Gothic by the architect G. E. Street, just beyond the end of Delamere Terrace in Clarendon Crescent where it occupied almost half of the inner curve. ‘Hard to find in dismal streets’, John Betjeman warned in his 1958 Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Magnificently incongruous, built to dazzle the poor and glorify the parish, it was a Coventry Cathedral of its period a century before with an elaborate interior complete with a chapel in the crypt adorned by Sir Ninian Comper with saints and angels decked out in blue and gold.

  By the mid-sixties the new medium-rise Warwick and Brindley LCC estates reshaped the district, bringing patches of green space and leaving only the church and a few pubs untouched. Sitting tenants had no security of tenure but council tenants had the right to be rehoused so, knowing that there would be no reprieve for Delamere, Freud had managed to become a council tenant. ‘I moved from 20 to 4 as the terrace was progressively demolished. With demolition teams advancing along the road I was throwing cigars and bottles down at the workmen to give me one more day, I so liked it there.’ Number 4 had been a council flat, which meant that the council had to rehouse him in the neighbourhood. ‘As I was pushed out, I went to different places.’ Not for him the new housing. ‘The ones they wanted to pull down were the dumps that suited me.’

  He was offered a room just down the road: 12/6 a week for a first-floor flat at 124 Clarendon Crescent. Built in the 1850s for navvies and costers, the street was said to have come to serve exclusively as lodgings for thieves, prostitutes and laundrywomen. ‘It was the longest street in London without a road off it – because of the canal behind it – and people were so aware of the strain that the shop in the middle was called the Half Way Stores. I was dead opposite the church: in fact opposite the house where I had drawn the doorstep and railings all decked up for the Coronation.’ The houses were narrow, one room per floor; his room gave on to a landing leading to a shared lavatory outside on a balcony to the rear.

  ‘Much of the Clarendon Street area is insanitary,’ the Architects’ Journal commented in 1938, the year it was renamed ‘Crescent’. Since the war there had been no improvement. Yet, the Journal remarked, ‘It is a sociable home-like place with a character of its own, and it is liked by the people who live there.’ Previously owned by the Church Commissioners and compulsorily purchased from them by the London County Council in order to be pulled down, the Crescent curved in a long concertina squeeze of close-packed terracing from St Mary’s to the Harrow Road. Behind the peeling stucco and bent railings was authentic squalor. ‘It was known as Bug Alley, had to be debugged before I moved in.’ He was there for eighteen months.

  Clarendon Crescent was not as notorious as the recently demolished Rillington Place, site of the Christie murders, had become ten years before, but it was celebrated for having been a location for several car chases in the 1949 Ealing film The Blue Lamp, authentically so in that the police encountered hostility there and it was a dead end. ‘Villains would run along the roof and throw chimney pots on their heads. It backed on to the canal with just the towpath running below.’ This too was used for the discovery of a vital clue, Dirk Bogarde’s discarded raincoat, and the 1951 comedy The Lavender Hill Mob included footage originally shot for The Blue Lamp, now showing the inhabitants gathered on the rear balconies as police trawled for missing bullion. It was a prime location for seekers after outstanding mean streets, as did Walker Evans when he photographed in the area (principally the corner of Woodchester Street and Cirencester Road); his caption in an article for Architectural Forum in April 1958 identified it as ‘A perfect scene for a rousing manhunt or at the very least a pleasantly sordid heart breaking tryst.’ Rachman the slum landlord operated near by, out of an office on the corner of Monmouth Street and Westbourne Grove. Colin MacInnes, in his novel Absolute Beginners published in 1959 and focused on Rachman, singled out ‘this weird and fantastic region, in the triangle between Wood Lane and the Harrow Road and the Grand Union Canal … This is a place the Welfare State and the Property-owning Democracy equally passed by.’ Half a page of the Observer that January was given over to a set of Roger Mayne’s photographs taken in the area: ‘our London Napoli’, a district of ‘huge houses too tall for their width cut up into twenty flatlets’ swarming with the children of those children Marie Paneth had studied under wartime conditions and – hardly surprisingly – found to be uncontrollable. ‘Their background, their bagful of experiences had taught them not to trust and not to hope, but to attack, to grab, to lie, to steal and cheat, all of which are the reactions of people against a world they fear.’4

  Verlaine, Freud was pleased to learn, had hymned the street in Romances sans paroles (1874):

  Ô la rivière dans la rue!

  Fantastiquement apparue

  Derrière un
mur haut de cinque pieds,

  Elle roule sans un murmure …

  ‘Streets’, subtitled ‘Paddington’, was written in 1872, when Verlaine eloped with Rimbaud to London and stayed in Howland Street, Fitzrovia; though Freud could not be certain that Clarendon Crescent was the one, no other fitted the description better.

  La chaussée est très large, en sorte

  Que l’eau jaune comme une morte

  Dévale ample et sans nuls espoirs

  De rien refléter que la brume

  Même alors que l’aurore allume

  Les cottages jaunes et noirs.

  Even as dawn illuminates

  The cottages yellow and black.

  The move to Clarendon Crescent led to a saison d’enfer for Freud. Clarendon was notorious for being a dead end or last resort. Once there he lived by extremes more than ever before. More often than not for daytime paintings he used neighbours but also sitters recruited from his other world. The Bentley transported him at noon and night to the West End and back again.

  ‘I had a real desperation for money when I moved from Delamere. I associate leaving Delamere in my head with a club called Don Juan in Grosvenor Street and the Casanova where I went a lot; at Clarendon I was working 4 a.m. to lunch, then off gambling. Lots of playing, day and night, horses and dogs. I was completely broke.

  ‘There was a loo on a balcony (the inhabitants referred to it as the “flat”) in a shed overlooking the canal and in the winter, when pipes froze, I melted snow for water to boil.’ The woman in the flat below, whose husband was in prison, said to him, ‘It’s unfair of the council to put a factory in front of the place with you there.’ It was improper, she thought, for an artist to have a room with so uninspiring a view. ‘I just knew her to say hello to and we shared the loo on the roof overlooking the canal where there was a poem in pokerwork, green and yellow: