The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  The nights Freud drove June home, Michael Andrews would have been working on Good and Bad at Games, a set of three paintings done between 1964 and 1968 in which he showed three filmic takes, as it were, of a nocturnal gathering by a hotel pool with each foreground occupied by a dozen or so figures representing friends and aunts, some bloated, some spindly, some palpably Giacometti-ish, their size varying from picture to picture depending on how they were perceived, or how they felt about themselves on social occasions. Among them were his Slade friends Vic Willing and Craigie Aitchison (both of whom Freud strongly disliked). Sitting for Freud, Andrews nursed the thought of body bulk correlating to social skills, conscious throughout that he was being worked from as never before. The painting, completed in 1966, is primarily a portrait of him. Freud caught Mike’s long-nosed angularity, his near cross-eyed concentration on keeping still under the overhead light whereas June is toned down, her arm and hand perfunctorily laid on the sofa’s shoulder. ‘She is in a sense almost a pendant,’ Freud said. Mike’s intent expression cuts across her thwarted expression, he being the guarded figure while she watches out for him. She smoulders; he brings his willpower to the sitting and a characteristic perturbed resolve.

  Ten years earlier, in ‘Some Thoughts on Painting’, Freud had remarked on the impact people make, filling the air. ‘The effect in space of two different human individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and an electric light bulb.’ Andrews talked of wanting to feel, when he painted, as if he was ‘placing the brush on the place on the real thing’. Freud put his finger on the congenial disparity between the two.

  Michael Andrews and June went to a bookie, Benou Miller. ‘I gave him it in return for a debt. His place was in Dering Street, off Bond Street: first on the right “B Miller Turf Accountants”. All the villains knew him. I owed £600 or £700 and said, “I can give you this instead.” “Fuckin’ horrible thing,” he said. “If you believe in me, keep it,” I said. But he put it into an auction and Jane bought it for £654, only a bit less than I’d said. He could have got more and when told he said, “You’ve made my fucking day.”’

  Before finishing the double portrait Freud began working from a new sitter. ‘I met her at a party at Sheridan’s, my ex-brother-in-law. [Sheridan Dufferin, a backer of the Kasmin gallery.] I was a frustrated painter of nudes and wanted to do something about it. She sat mostly during the day, once she’d stopped being a nanny.’ Penelope Cuthbertson was twenty-three when Freud first knew her and game for being painted first clothed then naked on a sofa, her hair dishevelled, her lips parted as if to spout a trendy mid-sixties mock-cockney accent, the soles of her feet grubby from the bare boards of Gloucester Terrace. Evelyn Waugh (who had been besotted with her half-Dutch mother, Teresa Jungman, one of the original Bright Young Things) had remarked, on seeing her a few years earlier, that she needed a haircut and elocution lessons.

  ‘A sweet girl,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘She worked with the kindergarten in Brunswick Square where Jake [Auerbach’s son (b. 1958)] attended and spoke very highly of Jake as the only infant with whom one could have an intelligent conversation. Lucian thought there were lots of girls like her, very very nice. With the exception of somebody who cleaned for him while her boyfriend was in jail, they tended to be upper-class girls, available in the sense that they thought he was exactly the sort of person they read about in their literature classes: Byron and Heathcliff and D. H. Lawrence and Eugene Marchbanks, the young poet/lover in Shaw’s Candida. Also the name Freud must have seemed a bit like a title. And also they had time on their hands, so if he called them at eleven o’clock in the morning they’d be ready.’

  Having had Girl on a Sofa photographed Freud decided to dispense with the dress; he then had the painting reproduced as ‘earlier version’ and ‘final version’ in the catalogue for his 1968 Marlborough exhibition, the removal of the mini-dress relating her to a Hogarth ‘Before’ and ‘After’ deflowering sequence. And, for that matter, to Goya, whose Naked Maja was, Freud maintained, a private boast. ‘It’s not “Oh, there’s Gertie without her dress on”; you don’t feel the clothed one is better: you do get a slight feeling of “I’ve done it.”’

  Around this period he was enjoying the gossip and memorising favourite diatribes in the journal of the Goncourt brothers. ‘Woman’s body is not immutable. It changes with each civilization, age and way of life …’ And ‘The person who does not paint the woman of his time will not endure.’14 He completed seven paintings of Penny Cuthbertson (‘I did think “I’m going to do a whole lot of them”’) between 1966 and 1970; they were transformative; there was a dawning assurance in the way she presented herself and the way he painted her, there on the floor, first awake then sleeping, confidently relaxed, her skin lustrous, her status as a ‘nude’ no big deal. Sitting up, as Girl Holding a Towel (1967), fist clenched and looking askance, she was the practised accomplice, inured to posing casually.

  Reviewing the 1968 Marlborough show in the New Statesman, Robert Melville had wondered about the identity of Naked Girl (1966). ‘Who is the model? She is very lean and has straggling, straw-coloured hair and to make matters worse, the artist’s ruthless concern with optical realism gives the rib-cage in the foreshortened nudes the look of a nasty swelling …’ Not being able to put a name to Penny Cuthbertson’s rib cage may well have frustrated Melville, yet arguably talk of ‘optical realism’ as an injurious mode was a greater bar to appreciation than Freud’s practice of rarely naming sitters. ‘Partly to do with privacy, but it also seems to me to be pretty irrelevant. Portraits are all personal.’

  ‘I get my ideas for pictures from watching the people I want to work from moving about naked,’ Freud told John Russell. ‘I want to allow the nature of my model to affect the atmosphere, and to some degree the composition.’15 Each painting being an expression of some degree of intimacy, each was dependent, to some degree, on the complicity of each person involved; that meant there had to be confidence. ‘Of course a naked model is going to feel vulnerable,’ he told me once. ‘The naked person is more permanent.’

  Anonymity is intriguing. And titles such as The Woman in White and Portrait of a Lady stimulate curiosity. Similarly, the unnamed sitter lives by appearance alone. Asked if it is not worth knowing that Hogarth’s portrait of a burly sea captain represents in fact Captain Thomas Coram, founder-benefactor of the Foundling Hospital and founder of Nova Scotia, Freud’s answer was that one doesn’t need to know. To name is to advertise: ‘rather like carrying material – canvas or frame or picture – down the street’. And even plain titles carry implications. Woman in a Fur Coat (1967–8) was Jane Willoughby in the same chair as Penny Cuthbertson in Girl Holding a Towel, who was also Girl in a Fur Coat. (‘When I did this I thought I was doing a nude.’) All wording is loaded: ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ demarcate, while ‘fur coat’ may seem to art historians to incite comparisons with Rubens and ‘towel’ with Degas. A good title, Freud concluded, speaks volumes. ‘I still haven’t read Conrad. My father’s yellow-bound edition, which I knew from Dartington: I tried to read them as Francis was keen on Heart of Darkness, but I still haven’t, except his marvellous titles: Nigger of the Narcissus, Lord Jim. Had he read further he might have come upon Conrad’s wordy but bracing raison d’être: ‘The unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth.’

  ‘I always had this idea of being able to have an escape. Naturally I’ve always had a feeling about covering my tracks.’

  Like Sickert and Matthew Smith, Freud took rooms, not so much to work in but for use as boltholes. ‘Hideaways, really. I had several rooms I could use in people’s houses, and a place up Leman Street, Whitechapel, over a café.’ One was near Holloway Prison: ‘a place in Camden Road, a council flat, which I got for Bernardine. Two rooms in a rather rough street, a real dump, up by the Brecknock pub, with evil-smelling stairs like old bacon, a scarlet-carpeted room and a kitchen
– bathroom with red and blue glass. Bernardine didn’t like Camden Road as Bella got burnt badly there; there were perfectly nice marble fireplaces, but hippies had horrible stoves with doors and put one in and Bella got burnt on it. It was a controlled rent, £140 a year, so I took it after she left, in 1965. Bernardine wanted to follow I Ching (3rd edition), and why she went was all to do with that: certain conventions. Like “never say no to a child”. She took the children to Ladbroke Grove, another flat.’

  Freud liked the Camden Road flat and decided to do it up. ‘Rather well. I had “The Buggers” there, and my red curtains, and the bed with straw ends, and a check table, which had been in Clifton Hill. (Kitty took everything of mine except the table, which was actually hers.) He also had some drawings there by Frank Auerbach. ‘Modest exterior, lush interiors’, a girlfriend remembered. An interior decorator was employed to do it. ‘He put brown paper on the walls, an Aubusson carpet, great chandelier, beautiful gilt chairs.’ He was pleased with it after nearly five years of more or less slum conditions. ‘I liked having that flat clean, like a hotel room, so Wilfred, my crazy Jamaican cleaner, a kind of part-time janitor to blocks of flats, went there once or twice a week. Wilf liked polishing and ironing and stitching; he was a lady’s maid who happened to be a man, loved bangles and uniforms, loved packing a suitcase and making breakfast. He had started working for James Mason as a kind of butler. He’d go to Golders Green and mingle with funeral people, when he wasn’t working; and he had an absolute passion for Lena Horne: signed photos everywhere in his flat in Sutherland Avenue. “Black Bess”, Muriel called him.

  ‘Wilf only liked white men. I sent him round to clean at Penelope’s, near by. “You know I don’t like working for women,” he said, “I think it’s degradin’. ” But he liked working for Jane – her title – and he’d never nick things. He was childish. “Can I have this?” he’d say.’ Freud let him have Gerald Wilde drawings, leftovers from Wilde’s stay at Abercorn Place. ‘I had good ones I gave away to Wilf: one of Brighton Pier.’ He found him sad. ‘Older than he seemed: he dyed his hair, as Negroes can. There was a lot of tart’s morality: shocked by someone not being properly dressed. Slightly Noël Coward. The place he loved was New York, but he wasn’t allowed there as he’d been caught for hustling. But he got on well, had good manners. A tiny bit like my grandmother, he was a grand retired actress but did all right. When these old boys died in the South of France they left him something.’

  He didn’t paint Wilf. ‘I couldn’t. I liked him but he was a bit irritating; there wasn’t that instinctive understanding of difference.’

  A Slade student, Brian Sayers, who was taken to see the flat one afternoon together with a friend of his, another student, was impressed by the set-up. ‘We went up the stairs to the top like something out of The Lady Killers, an elderly woman opened her door on the way up and called, “Is that you, Mr Freud?” Clearly keeping an eye on his flat for him.’16

  Fully furnished and regularly tidied – John Russell described it as ‘a hallucinatory likeness of a room in a French provincial hotel’ – the Camden Road flat amounted to domestic quarters, the first that Freud had had since childhood and marriages.

  ‘It was quite nice to get away from Delamere for a night or two, and when I was in Gloucester Terrace.’ But after a few years he had to give it up. People on the ground floor had complained to the council that he was hardly using the place except for assignations. ‘The Camden weekly paper said “Millionaire’s artist brother keeps luxury flat in Camden Road. Appears in a Bentley late at night, with beautiful girls, whereas a family with eight children need somewhere to live.” I was in a dangerous position: the house was bought by the council to demolish but I still had Gloucester, so – God – I suddenly had two council flats. I told Camden, magnanimously, I didn’t need rehousing. So I moved out, and took out a fireplace.’

  34

  ‘If work permits’

  In the mid- to late sixties Freud often spent evenings with Frank Auerbach, usually in the Colony Room, but also in the Troubadour in Knightsbridge and the Stork Club. Auerbach was penniless. When Freud took him to Annabel’s in Berkeley Square he was made to wear a tie and so he slipped the porter who provided ties a ten-shilling note as they left. Which was a lot for him and yet he felt that the porter was sniffy about so piffling a tip. Freud entertained no such embarrassments. For him, Bacon being his exemplar, there was perfect assurance to be had from a wad in the back pocket: money acquired, with any luck, through risk and dispersed freely. For Auerbach around then the Colony Room fruit machine was irresistible. Both used the hours spent away from painting as time in which to flush the sluices and wash away the studio tension.

  Freud took Auerbach to the then newly opened Playboy Club and showed him that his powers of calculation were such that, calculating and anticipating, he could play three games of pontoon at once. ‘He only used those bits of the brain he found useful.1

  ‘For about fifteen years we used to have a meal on Christmas Day afternoon because we both worked in the morning on Christmas Day. Lucian would come round in his Bentley around two or three, relishing the fact that we were the last persons left alive painting and we would either go to a Chinese or Indian restaurant. It was only after about twelve years that he confessed that he really hated Indian food.’ One Christmas they had dinner with Sue Bardolph, a retired night club dancer. ‘Married and lived in Earls Court: she took the turkey out of the oven raw on one side, burnt on the other. Francis and Muriel were there too and the husband brought out pot, and all smoked including Lucian.’

  Mark O’Connor met Freud’s daughter Annie – same age as him, eighteen or nineteen, and they started going out together and lived together for a while. ‘I was Annie’s first boyfriend. The period was 1965–71. I remember we were in Kitty and Wynne’s house in Kensington Church Street once, in a huge studio room with windows, and Lucian and Wynne had a ping-pong game. Never was there such a contest, going at each other to win. This was in the late sixties. He’d come round to collect the girls. I used to go quite often for dinner, Kitty tiny but exquisite, she was very neurasthenic: she’d say, “I must go and lie down.” Nice and very intelligent, great fan of Proust.’ When Annie broke up with him he was upset partly because he had become attached to the household. ‘I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and I just got used to the idea there were people with Van Gogh drawings in their front rooms and if a poet was coming it was T. S. Eliot.’2

  Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘1967’, written in 1897, predicted, world-wearily, ‘new minds, new modes, new fools, new wise’. And so it proved: 1967 was the year of the dope-and-pill-fuelled ‘summer of love’, of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, anthologising the modishness of Time magazine’s ‘Swinging London’, that phase when, hippie-wise, the footloose ventured as never before into alternative ways of life in lands afar.

  That year Bernardine took Bella and Esther, aged six and four, to Morocco, an episode that was to serve as the basis of the latter’s first novel, Hideous Kinky, published in 1992. ‘I think my mother was quite ahead of her time,’ she said years later. ‘Very self-contained. She had no resentment. She didn’t want to be an appendage and once she realised she wasn’t going to have as much as she wanted, that was it.’3 The day before they went off Bernardine brought the girls with her to the Colony Room to get some money from Freud. She needed to get out of London, she told him.

  ‘Sometimes you’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do,’ he explained to me. ‘They were there two or three years. I had a request for money once: some notes to be sent between sheets of paper so that the strip wouldn’t show up in customs. And Bella saw my letter lying in a field, an address and my artless writing on the envelope, a hundred yards away from where they were living.’ In Morocco the two children learnt to fend for themselves. ‘When they came back, Esther was six or seven. She said to Bernardine, “Do you remember when we were in Algiers and begging and those Americans wanted to buy me?” I asked her, “Why didn’t you sell
Esther?” And she said, “She’s invaluable to me.”

  ‘Esther had the stronger character; Bella was more perverse: she was badly burnt and her whole character changed and she knocked her sister about a lot.’

  After North Africa the girls were sent to a Rudolf Steiner school in East Grinstead.

  ‘I went down to the school. “Does she knock you about?” “Only when I’m very silly.” Very anarchic, but no problem: Bella was protecting Esther.’

  Freud’s instinct about his acknowledged children – individuals and broods – was to consider them separately and to be available to them as and when he saw fit. They in turn were fit to be taken out to lunch only when they were old enough to participate properly. There would be presents, on impulse, every now and then, money in cash, when he had some to spare. ‘I didn’t want the situation to arise where it seems to them I’m not interested. I have feelings for my children as they’ve grown up. I haven’t had a domestic life,’ he added, unnecessarily. He felt a need for discretion in that to be disruptive or intrusive was never helpful to those concerned. ‘There’s still a distance: if children are in a marriage it can only confuse and dismay them.’ Reasoning or rationalising, as he did, that women wanted the children they had, his instinct was to stay clear unless or until, as they grew up, they began to display personalities to which he could respond. Naturally, that tended to become apparent to him only when the children became aware of him. Typically, Esther said, ‘I remember when I was about seven being in a holiday camp thing with another family and someone asking if my father was Lucian Freud and feeling proud and belonging.’4