The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  In 1967, the year Bacon was awarded the International Rubens Prize, he and Freud went to Paris to see an Ingres exhibition at the Petit Palais. Why Ingres? ‘My choice not his,’ Freud said. ‘The way he liberated pictures seemed so marvellously potent. Through his extraordinary discipline, the drawing is as good as any drawing there is. You get really excited about an Ingres fold in a curtain: said in such an incisive and economical way.’ He quoted Baudelaire on Ingres and the nude. ‘He depicts them as he sees them, for it appears that he loves them too much to wish to change them; he fastens upon their slightest beauties with the keenness of a surgeon, he follows the gentlest sinuosities of their line with the humble devotion of a lover.’13 Freud saw in Ingres what Baudelaire had observed of him: ‘His method is not one and simple, but rather consists in the use of a succession of methods.’ To be economical and incisive was to be more exacting, ultimately, than to be compulsively spontaneous-looking like any Bacon.

  At a birthday dinner for the novelist Angus Wilson in the early seventies, Freud was seated next to the novelist Margaret Drabble. She turned to him. ‘“So you are an admirer of Angus’ fiction.” “I like him, not the books.”’ She looked puzzled. Freud had first come across Angus Wilson at the Horizon office thirty years before. ‘“How can you dislike his work?” “Because it reminds me of Zola.” “Yes, Zola probably is his hero.” “I don’t like Zola. Full of false feeling.”’

  For all the ‘tremendous drama, excitement, sex and passion’ of La Bête humaine, Freud was unconvinced. ‘The characters aren’t real. I felt very uneasy about that type of realism.’ Not Zola, not Dickens, not caricature and stereotypes for the true realist. Henry Mayhew was more to his taste, and of course Balzac.

  ‘Balzac is completely real, even when he is just saying what his characters spent on things.’

  Angus Wilson, on the other hand, tended to splurge adjectives (‘“This is really wonderful,” cried John, with extra hearty laughter, pushing back his curly hair with a carefree boyish gesture’). The equivalent in portrait painting is the showy detail – presentation overriding particulars – and, being more susceptible than any other genre to whim and ingratiation, it interested Richard Hamilton for a while in the period leading up to his 1970 Tate retrospective. Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland, a mix of mask and newsprint image begun shortly after Gaitskell died in 1963, was a vengeful death notice indicating disapproval of Gaitskell’s attachment to nuclear weaponry as political instrument. A year later Hamilton turned his attention to celebrity constructs. A layout pad for Time magazine covers came into his possession, enabling him to pose himself in sketchy mock-up as a Time chosen one of world renown.

  Deconstructive gambits such as these were of no interest to Freud. ‘I did find, less than I do now, Richard Hamilton oddly boring in the way that he kept out of his work the thing that I was trying to get in, while keeping himself in. Which I thought self-serving. Every now and then things came alive. At the Robert Fraser Gallery I saw a lot of his photographs of Whitley Bay.’ These were enlargements from a postcard of the beach at Whitley Bay in which half-tone dots vied with blobby bathing caps. Magnified beyond legibility, identities become indecipherable. As was also demonstrated the following year in Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s elaborate take on fashionable photography, grainy photography and Swinging London. Another Hamilton project involved persuading colleagues ranging from Bacon to Joseph Beuys, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Gilbert & George to take Polaroid snaps of him, the idea being that these would be delegated self-portraits with Hamilton provoking his fellow artists to self-parody. ‘Lunching in Islington, he gave Francis a camera and said, “Take a photo.” And as he did he jogged it to make it more a Bacon.’

  Inexhaustibly circumspect, Hamilton dissected the aims, the means and the foibles of portraiture. Bacon on the other hand endeavoured to out-Bacon himself or, as he put it, ‘Slightly complicate the game’. Whereas Freud, possessed by the need to have the sitter present throughout, could not detach himself from his belief in character, real character, face to face, as the working conditions. ‘The act of sitting, which takes a long time in my case: that constitutes a connection, obviously.’

  Bacon’s paintings of Freud from the 1960s, notably his 1964 Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach and his 1965 Portrait of Lucian Freud and groups of Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud, all closely informed by Deakin’s photographs of him, were systematically dramatised in the making. Bacon amplified the feel of shapes, exaggerating how it feels to sit, to slump or to fidget to avoid a crick in the neck and cramp behind the knee. He loved a good whiplash assertion of fellow feeling. This often involved interchanged body parts. ‘He gave me his garters sometimes, and huge voluptuous ankles, which I never had.’

  For Freud portraiture was truth-telling and all-embracing. Where Bacon could only feel that he had to animate and quash, as though haranguing his every proponent into submission, Freud used people and things even-handedly once it occurred to him that they interested him; after that it was up to him to make something of them. And then in the mid-sixties the time came when he began seeing the face in the mirror not only as himself heroic, or himself moodily distanced in a hand mirror propped on a chair, but as himself related to others: himself parental, albeit detachedly so.

  Placing on the floor the mirror salvaged from 20 Delamere Terrace, he studied his reflection from below. At that angle the ceiling swung into view and the light fittings floated overhead as though flown in from some recent Bacon. After leaving, barely begun, an initial painting of himself in the looming space he persevered with a second version into which he inserted Ali and Rose Boyt as diminutive onlookers keeping company with his towering image. Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait) is the closest he ever came to overtly emulating a Bacon tableau. The children served as markers, stuck into the bottom left-hand corner like family snaps in a living-room mirror. Their incongruity may be variously interpreted (the artist’s hand is clenched as though holding puppet strings) but essentially they were posed as duplicates of the son and daughter of Seneb the dwarf in a 6th Dynasty family group reproduced in Freud’s constant resource, his much thumbed Geschichte Ägyptens. ‘They sat there. That Egyptian tomb idea rather.’

  Freud, foreshortened, holding himself stiffly in a blue-grey jacket worn without a shirt, substitutes himself for little Seneb, the electric light harsh on his forehead and glowing in dimmed reflection over his shoulder. The ceiling above is no mere background. Filling the mirror, it contains distance. ‘I used a palette knife to make the air round me.’

  ‘When we try to examine the mirror in itself,’ Nietzsche said, ‘we eventually detect nothing but the things reflected by it. When we wish to grasp the things reflected, we touch nothing but the mirror. This is the general history of knowledge.’ A mirror image, ready flattened and detached, contained on a surface, presents distortions as fact. Similarly, in his Geschichte Ägyptens the dense photogravure plates take the viewer back a few millennia to the anonymous yet idiosyncratic heads of sculptors from an unearthed workshop and to the heads of pharoahs, one of whom, Akhenaten, was arguably the first human being to have his individual image – his true portrait – propagated, potentially, for all time.

  Rose remembered grumbling at having to stay still, their astonishment at the array of cakes laid out in the teashop afterwards and their amazement at their father taking a single bite out of several cakes. Liberating, they felt.

  In August 1965 Andrew Wordsworth, a classics master at Bryanston, wrote on behalf of the school’s Da Vinci Society asking if Freud would care to come and give a talk. ‘Because you are the Bryanston painter whose work I admire most and this situation hasn’t changed in the past sixteen years.’ He enclosed a stamped addressed postcard but no answer came.

  By this time Freud was establishing something of a routine, proceeding with painting by daylight and painting by artificial light, day shifts and night shifts. The need to fin
d and secure sitters devoted enough and reliable enough to enable him to work meant that he was constantly on the lookout, readily on the prowl. A neighbour in Gloucester Terrace was out one day with her son, a golden-haired child, and Freud, whom she did not know, stopped and touched the boy’s hair, assessing it. She stood by, Freud walked on. Nothing doing on that occasion but potential sitters, he told himself, could be sighted anywhere. Obviously Colony Room characters – Deakin, Harry Diamond – were available; amenable, that is, to putting in the hours for no more than the price of a drink or two. But keeping them coming regularly and on time was another matter. That he was not necessarily friendly with such sitters was not a drawback. ‘People who irritate me: that has sometimes helped. The dislike can be very strong, but I’m very strong. You can dislike two people in two different ways. And what they are there for is so interesting.’ The desire to be painted, he recognised, may indicate anxiety to please and lack of self-esteem while vanity, the obvious motive, is a shortcoming in that it demands indulgence or endorsement. Bernard Breslauer, another Colony Room regular at that time, seemed desperate for attention, Freud thought: ‘An animal of a peculiar kind.’ Breslauer was an eminent antiquarian book dealer; he bought a painting from Frank Auerbach’s first Marlborough show in 1965 and at the same time commissioned a portrait from Freud who, while protesting that he never worked to order, was prepared to oblige when financially pressed.

  ‘I did it as he looked rather like my brother Stephen. Father had been a book dealer in Berlin, an antique book dealer in New York. He was so horrible I changed the picture: I put a jersey on him to make his blubby chins more blubby and chinnish. He took the picture to Muriel’s and passed it round and they said how cuntish it was. He told people he destroyed it, but I don’t think that he did. [He did.] I saw him in the street in New York once, dressed in tartan, and bald.’

  News having reached the Bayswater end of Gloucester Terrace that a well-known portrait painter was living at the council-owned end, Freud was approached to paint a neighbour, a brigadier-general with a scar down his face, which tempted him. A fee of £500 was agreed but proved more than the regiment was prepared to pay. David Somerset at the Marlborough steered several clients his way, Charles Clore’s son Alan, for example. ‘He backed Polanski and others in films. David said, “Have you thought of painting Alan?” I said no. He was always preening his hair. He said, “Meet him: he longs to be drawn. Dinner at L’Étoile.” Alan, preening his hair, said, “I’d really like you to paint me.” “OK,” I said, “but could you pay me in advance?” “Yes,” but he wrote a cheque in pencil. Came to sit and I did lots but rubbed it out. Never came again. He said to David, “You know it was awfully good, but he destroyed it.” So I got £350 for one sitting, and that was quite a bit then.’

  Commissions from persons prepared to sit for as long as it took and, ideally, pay in advance were not to be spurned, particularly when he was in urgent need of ready money. There arose, for instance, the possibility of painting an Oxford college head.

  ‘I had a letter from a chemist at Jesus College Oxford and it said, “We had a discussion about having our Principal painted, and we had a Fellows’ dinner to decide, and I hope you’ll be pleased to hear the choice fell on you.” I wrote back and said I’ve hardly ever done any commissions – successful ones – as I need to work in my room with people I know, not work from a stranger in another place.

  So it seems not realistic. I wondered could I see Dr Christie before making up my mind.

  ‘I got a letter back. “We appreciate your difficulties because Dr Christie would get upset if you decided no. But I have an ingenious way round the problem. Once every few years we have distinguished visitors to dine at Jesus, so we could invite you and place you strategically where you could see Dr C.” So I went to Oxford, had a wonderful time. There are Elizabethan portraits in the dining hall, and a Henry Lamb of a blind Principal with four pairs of binoculars. Dr Christie was sort of Scottish, youngish-looking, and a bit of an old woman. That’s an insult to nearly every old woman.’

  John Traill Christie, Principal of Jesus from 1950 to 1967, was, the budding poet Dom Moraes had found, ‘a very kind man’. Christie had admitted Moraes as an undergraduate, against advice, and supported him against most of the senior common room when his turbulent relationship with Henrietta Law, to whom he was later married, interfered with his studies; he had even attended a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg, arranged by Moraes, and though shocked had remained well disposed.

  Freud agreed to do the painting. ‘I wrote that I’d have a try but must do it in London. “Right,” was the reply. “He comes to stay with his daughter.”’ The daughter, Catherine Porteous, happened to be working as Kenneth Clark’s secretary on the BBC series Civilisation and she told him about the proposed portrait. ‘K. Clark was both impressed and surprised; he knew my father slightly as they had been at Winchester together.’ Father and daughter arranged to meet Freud for lunch at the Great Western Hotel and took a corner table, Freud worrying about whether he would be turned out for not wearing a tie. ‘They seemed to get on well: seemed to spark each other off. I remember it being jolly and fun.’ Shortly after that, sittings began. ‘Dr Christie arrived with his daughter, sat down and never stopped talking. “And now, Freud, those paintings made of dots and dashes: what’s so special about them?” He’d been headmaster of Westminster and Repton. He came three times, talked about Dom Moraes, it was talk, talk, or down he went, fast asleep. And then I wrote and said, “Terribly sorry, I’m afraid I can’t do it. Magnificent as Dr Christie looks, I can’t work with him in the room.”’ Catherine Porteous agreed in retrospect that yes, her father did talk a lot. ‘But Freud could easily shut him up. He genuinely wanted to know. My father said he kept taking down drawings and chucked them in the basket and being a scrupulous nineteenth-century figure he didn’t take one when Freud was out of the room. The excuse, my father understood, was “the paint won’t run”.’ And that, Freud thought, was the last he would see of Christie.

  ‘Two or three days later, bang on the door and there he was in top hat and spats. “Your letter”, he said, “played into the hands of my enemies.” I couldn’t reply. Then he said, “No hard feelings, Freud … What’s the matter with me? Nothing, you say? Come off it …”’

  Word went round the college that Freud disliked Christie and wasn’t prepared to continue, so the commission was transferred to Peter Greenham ARA who painted him in subdued tones, to the satisfaction of the fellows of Jesus.

  ‘I can’t be pressed really. It put me off doing anything like it again.’

  A double portrait involving characters he knew well preoccupied him instead: two heads set together in much the same pose as A Man and his Daughter but with the charged air of a Hals marriage portrait. Michael Andrews and June was a non-conversation piece: two heads, two characters, mutually protective. Andrews, his stare averted, plays his part with resigned concentration. ‘The success of the marriage’, Freud remarked, ‘was to do with her outraging his sensibility non-stop. His gritting of his teeth was the same as being fondled.’ Andrews admired Freud as a painter, considering him second only to Bacon, and sometimes went out drinking with him. Freud found it hard to get drunk, try though he might, and so drank little; Andrews got drunk easily, which was why he was arrested the night Tim Behrens married Harriet Hill.

  Freud and Bacon called one evening at Duncan Terrace, where Mike Andrews and June lived. She remembered it clearly. ‘We were having a screaming row. The bell went. It was Francis and Lucian. “We called round to see you.” “June and I are having a screaming row,” said Mike. “Oh are you?” said Francis. “Maybe we can be of help.” Mike kept him out. He’d have had Mike and I killing each other. It took the sting out of it, being interrupted.’

  Freud tried working from the two of them together initially then scraped June out and did her separately; she ran the Perfume Centre in Burlington Arcade at the time, and sat for him after work. ‘Lucian would pic
k me up and drive me home to paint me. Once, outside his place, a man in leathers got off his bike and said, “Mr Frood?”

  ‘“Who wants to know?”

  ‘“I do,” and he tried to stick a paper in his hands, but Lucian kept his hands behind his back, so he stuffed the paper in Lucian’s jacket and left and Lucian said, “We are going to see Ted,” and drove somewhere, and I sat in the car while he spoke to Ted. Then I went off home with him, changed into the dress for the picture and sat. Mike told me to tell him that after a day’s work I could only sit for two hours and I noticed, as the two hours were up, that he would start to paint more dramatically, all moves and pressure, to stop me saying anything. I said I was hungry once and he went off and came back with a tooth mug with toothpaste on the rim, sloshed it full of neat whisky and said, “Drink that and shut up.”’

  Experienced though she was at coping with men in the clubs, June was nervous of Freud. Every time her arm slipped off the back of the sofa he would shout and during breaks he would edge up to her, she said, and she would calculate the distance to the window and tell herself that if he made a pass at her she could take a running jump. The room was on the first floor so at worst she would only break a leg. Ted appeared. He and Freud were going gambling and he suggested dropping June home. ‘We haven’t got time,’ Freud said. ‘We’ll drop her at Paddington station and she can get a taxi. I can’t bear her company for another minute. She’s been moaning.’ One night he did drive her back to Duncan Terrace where she saw that the light was still on so she asked him if he would like to come in and say hello to Mike. He said no. ‘I’d like to but I couldn’t stand another second of your company.’

  ‘Another time a police siren was going when Lucian was driving me home. He jumped the lights. I said, “Pull over,” and he did, and I suddenly saw a load of purple hearts on the dashboard. Police got out and came towards the car and I grabbed the bottle and put it in my bag. I thought if he got lippy they’d have him.’ Amphetamines, or uppers, were a boost, Freud found, when working long hours, or being otherwise hectic. ‘I used to have purple hearts, as Mike did. Dr Moynihan would dish them out: he was always very nice in that way. Mike and Frank had them. Liked staying up all night. I must have stopped very soon because I had some left for a very long time. Didn’t need them, got them just for Mike. I never slept much.’