The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  She also remembered that Lucian wouldn’t phone the house but would arrange to speak at a certain time to a call box and she would run down the road and be pleased to hear the phone ringing.

  Obligations were best resisted, he liked to think, because obligations entered upon and then shirked were surely more damaging than obligations never entered into. Regular payments, for example, were impracticable given that his earnings, or winnings, were unpredictable if not startlingly awry. Besides, those he barely knew or recognised were literally beyond him. So, finally, he added with an air of dismissive diffidence, it was up to them. Jane McAdam learnt to be philosophical about the matter. ‘Be who you are.’

  Anyway, obligations were shelved when mothers decided to do their own thing. Suzy Boyt, for one, took her children away for many months between 1966 and 1968. ‘Suzy bought a boat, a schooner, for the man with whom she became involved and had a son, Kai, by. They went to Scandinavia and the West Indies and had some near misses.’ The boat, the Inge, intended for a round-the-world trip, got as far as Trinidad, whence they were deported back to England. She bought two houses in Lonsdale Square, one to live in, the other to let. Freud said, ‘She got one house, a huge Gothic Revival house in a private road, unpaved, a factory behind, and let the other one to people who didn’t pay anything. When she got unhappy she changed houses quite a lot, about ten times.’ Learning that she was pregnant (with Susie, who was born in January 1969) Freud expressed surprise, he said, but not unduly. ‘I said something slightly polite about it not being mine and she said, “It most certainly is. You can give me a child by looking at me across the road,” she said.’

  The Freud birth rate wasn’t all that exceptional. ‘George Barker thought it was a matter of morality,’ Frank Auerbach remarked. ‘If a girl expressed a desire to have a baby, the thing to do was let her have it. And the fact that Lucian only very sporadically and later (very much unlike George Barker) had the means to support them: in a sense his was a religious faith that these babies would be all right. He sometimes said about other children (not the McAdam children, whom he never talked about to me except once when he said their mother said that on no account should he tell anybody that they were his) that he was very concerned that his mother shouldn’t know of their existence.’5 Whatever she may have suspected, it was not until the mid-sixties that Lucie Freud learnt of the existence of others besides Annie and Annabel and the two elder McAdams. Esther and Bella grew up not meeting her and not even knowing how to refer to her. Annie and Annabel called her ‘Limme’, Esther later learnt. ‘We didn’t have a name for her.’6

  Lucie made one discovery by chance at Walberswick. Freud said, ‘Harriet Hill was married to Tim Behrens and was in a bad way (Tim had gone off or something) and I said, “Would you like to stay at Hidden House?” So Harriet and her two children went there. And then my mother came and the twins were precocious and forward five-year-olds and they said to her, “Oh, we know Suzy’s children, we’re great friends. Do you have them here? You really should.” My mother said she didn’t. I think it was news to her. “Apparently I’m missing a lot of these children,” she said. I think she felt a bit put out.’

  Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (1967–8) thrashes and strains for effect. ‘It was to do with being at Gloucester Terrace, by the big window on the first floor, cars outside.’ Freud wanted to paint his fine glistening Dracaena deremensis and didn’t want it to be a still life, so he added himself. ‘I did it in daytime because the reflection was too dramatic at night, when it’s black outside, and you get the reflection strongly, whereas in the day I could hardly see it. It’s got that funny Berkeleyan look: that “You just think it, but I can actually see it” sort of look.’ Swiping across the picture, serrated leaves glint, white edged on glossy green, fading where the sap has ebbed. ‘It was a night picture, but actually I did it in the day. I was conscious of feeling more overwrought at night. I’ve always loved working from plants.’

  The picture combines harsh proximity and distant longing, Freud seeing himself as a demoralised faun or Arcadian, his bare shoulders top-lit in the scumbled compost of the mirrored gloom, in front of which the leaves rasp and fall limp, tangling on the right, levelling out to the left. It’s a contrived image, faintly Tarzan, one that represents frustration in several senses: the lone figure barely visible behind impenetrable fronds is trying to hear something or willing someone to respond somehow. It is unsettling in that he, the soft cameo, is maybe an apparition. This is no indoor pastoral or puckish dream. (‘My horror of the idyllic.’) He is acting as a replacement for the Harry Diamond of Interior in Paddington (1951) or, rather, he is implying that Harry Diamond then was substituting for himself. He used to talk about self-portraits keeping him honest and he noticed that he tended to resort to them when feeling ill or out of sorts.

  To paint himself (‘one’s certainly the most reliable model that I know’) Freud put a hand mirror filled with his face on the chair usually occupied by other people; he also jammed it into the gap in the slightly opened sash window and painted it contre-jour, his reflection caught bat-like at a quizzical angle haloed by the darkness between it and the mirror’s rim. Painting himself had to be trickier than painting others. For although he could try different expressions – the scowl of concentration, the contrived smile – these were of course pretences to be seen through. ‘Painting myself is more difficult than painting people, I’ve found. The psychological element is more difficult. Increasingly so. You’re working in a mirror but in the end when you have been staring extra hard – perhaps too hard – I’ve noticed I could see the outside circumference of my own eye.’

  Interior with Hand Mirror, 1967

  Unsurprisingly Freud was interested in, and always concerned about, the state of his eyes. It wasn’t only that he valued sight above hearing; he saw it as an absolute necessity, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘I am become a translucent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all.’ Any hint of anything wrong with his eyesight caused utter alarm. Twitch the mirror and the face would vanish.

  ‘Non-Specific Infection causes all the blindness in the East. I got it once. I said, “I think I’ve got clap,” and the doctor didn’t examine me, he gave me a huge injection. But my eyes had an infection so I went to Moorfields – the Eye Hospital – and the doctor there said, “Have you had NSI recently? You didn’t have clap: you had NSI but the penicillin masked it.” And he treated me for NSI, not for the last time. There’s a very subtle mention of NSI in a William Empson poem: “It also affects the eye.”

  ‘The thing is, if you spend your time working and have no time for courtship and flowers and things you are very susceptible or, rather, if you go out and find someone you are more likely to pick it up. I was slightly susceptible. Clap is all I’ve ever got. And NSI.’

  Rose Barker, one of the many exposed to Freud’s susceptibilities and herself hazardous, was a daughter of Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and George Barker. ‘George made a little brood of snakes. I met Rose very early as a child – she was born in 1944 – in a flat in Westbourne Grove: mother and children, and Paddy Swift was there and Higgins the Irish poet. The two Roberts [MacBryde and Colquhoun] rather brought up Rose. “My Father and Mother”, she referred to them as. Elizabeth Smart said of her children – a bit ghastly this, saying it to your friends – “at least I’ve taught them what love is.” Rose had been married to the man Charlie [Lumley] hit, famous for being violent and hysterical; she said how pathetic he was, being impotent. And then I knew her slightly. I took her to my flat in Camden Road and she said, “I’ve got some rather bad news for you.”

  ‘“But I’ve never really met you before,” I said, thinking she can’t be, not by me. “Nothing to do with that: I’ve got clap.”

  ‘That’s considerate isn’t it? I went down once or twice when she lived in Norwich and called in on Liz Smart on the way. Liz didn’t know I was going to see Rose. Complete misunderstanding: she di
dn’t see me as part of the Soho life she had, she thought of me as outside it.

  ‘When I stayed with Rose her little girl said to her, “No wonder everyone wants to stay with you, because you are so beautiful,” and Rose was cross, in case I might think she was available. (She was, probably.) On the Sunday, going to the pub with her – it was so suburban, where she was – she said in a loud voice, “Of course people seem to think it extraordinary to have one black and one white child.” She was always behaving like George [Barker], aiming to draw attention to herself, bursting into tears and gazing up at people and saying, “Scusi.” She said I was just like Wittgenstein. “It’s funny,” she said, “all the men I took up with ended up beating me up.”’ In 1977 she took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills; an accident, Freud thought.

  ‘Once someone I was out with for a minute called me by somebody else’s name at a time when you’re not supposed to. Like in the song: “You spoilt it all when you called me Paul”.’

  Buttercups, painted in the early summer of 1968, is no conventional flower piece, no posy. The buttercups are bunched with clover, dock leaves, knapweed and ribwort thrust into an enamel jug, the yellow petals shining against the shinier white of the butler’s sink. Freud wanted them plonked in the jug, as lively as Dürer’s clump of grasses, as vigorous as Van Gogh’s awareness of flowers, ‘full of soul and idea, something more real than the real; something terse, synthetic, simplified and concentrated’. Cedric Morris, painter plantsman, had addressed in Studio magazine, twenty-five or so years earlier, the dreadfulness of Royal Academy-equivalent floral display. ‘English love of flowers has found a nasty mate in English lack of taste.’ Namely the Chelsea Flower Show: ‘Where it would be surprising that such a hideous result can be contrived out of such abundant choice of material …’7 Penny Cuthbertson drove up through Maida Vale almost daily to replace the flowers that wilted. ‘She kept picking fresh ones from the side of the road near Finchley or Hampstead and arranged them for me as I didn’t like my own arrangement.’

  David Somerset bought the painting for himself when Freud took it into the Marlborough. To him it was an exquisite display, enamel jug and all, and with delight he showed it to Bacon, but he turned away in disgust. Such a painting, so uncomposed, so subtle a challenge to Van Gogh’s sunflowers, was beyond him: bright and telling, like a lyric from the hedgerow poet John Clare. Frank Auerbach remembered Freud saying, when Wolfgang Fischer told him how much he liked it and how good it would be if he produced more of the same, how bad it would be if he did more like it. That is, such subject matter could set him on the primrose path to commonplace popularity.

  ‘There is now only one consuming interest left in our life, the passion for the study of living reality,’ the Goncourts wrote.8

  Wild flowers, ditch flora, free of the hothouse stylishness of the cyclamens he painted in a grander sink (‘they die in such a dramatic way’), Freud’s Hampstead buttercups are as spry as the marsh marigolds he picked from the stream and painted in his room at Glenartney during holidays with Annie and Anna. In the hunting lodge at the head of Glenartney, where the road ended and only a scribble track went on over the hills to Callender, Freud set himself day tasks: a portrait of George Dyer one year, marsh marigolds another. A tomato. A self-portrait. A dead bat. A second bat, which he brought back from Italy some years later, became Another Dead Bat, painted in London.

  An aggrandised Institute of Contemporary Arts transferred to premises in The Mall and reopened in April 1968 with ‘The Obsessive Image’ selected by Robert Melville and Mario Amaya. The ICA Chairman, Roland Penrose, described the exhibition as ‘a stock-taking of our human condition’, involving works from the sixties. Here Giacometti and Bacon, Balthus, de Kooning and Magritte were pre-eminent elders, Yves Klein, Warhol, Kitaj, Hamilton, Hockney and Peter Blake were the reinterpreters, and for novelty there were two gruesome effigies: Colin Self’s Nuclear Victim, a corpse in caramelised resin, and Paul Thek’s Death of a Hippie, a tableau of a body surrounded by trippy grave goods. Previews of what over the next decades were to become dominant trends.

  Freud’s work had never been more out of keeping with the norms of taste, which at that time were more polarised than usual: avid Expressionism or cool contrivance. He favoured neither. That his third and, it transpired, last exhibition at the Marlborough coincided with the rebirth of the ICA was of no account. ‘He was rather mismanaged,’ David Somerset conceded. ‘He was so tricky in those days. Bored.’9 Nothing in the exhibition was more than two square feet in size except for Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening, leaves from which filled the brown-varnish-tinted cover of a thin catalogue.

  The reviews were not all dismissive, but it was generally assumed that Freud was out of touch, aspiring perhaps to be the latter-day Rubens when others, more versed in modern fashion – Allen Jones for example with his Bikini Baby and his supine fibreglass women serving as chairs and tables – paraded groovy variations on catwalk chic. Paul Overy, a critic undeviatingly well disposed towards the compulsive geometrics of De Stijl, went so far as to approve Freud’s handling, remarking in the Listener that only in the ‘rather contrived’ Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening did he overdo things. ‘It is a remarkable exhibition,’ he concluded. ‘To paint well in a figurative idiom today is virtually impossible, yet Freud has done it.’10

  Few paintings sold. Lord and Lady Beaumont (Mary Rose Beaumont was to sit for him a couple of years later) bought Naked Girl Asleep, I; the Duke of Devonshire bought Naked Girl Asleep, II and Small Fern. Kathleen Garman, who helped Freud out more than once, bought two of the smallest: the marsh marigolds (Souvenir of Glenartney) and Annabel; since Epstein’s death in 1959, Lady Epstein (as she now was), and a wealthy friend, Sally Ryan, had been assembling what was to be known as the Garman–Ryan Collection, consisting of works by Garman’s immediate family – by her late husband, by her son Theodore Epstein and by her nephew Michael Wishart – and by others, Freud among them. She added to these a Degas portrait, a Monet landscape, Van Gogh’s drawing Sorrow, a flower piece by Matthew Smith, Rembrandt etchings, Dürer woodcuts and Cézanne’s Bather lithograph and bequeathed the lot to Walsall, the town nearest to Oakeswell Hall, Wednesbury, where she had been brought up. For Freud, whose Villefranche portrait of Kitty, bought by Epstein in 1948, took precedence over the two new purchases, her patronage was an embarrassment in that it smacked of helpfulness, even more so than the supportive buying instigated by his parents at the Lefevre in 1944.

  ‘Lots didn’t sell and so I made a deal: Colin Tennant bought some for a lump sum and then, later, he bought more.’ Tennant took Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening and several others. ‘Quite a lot were remaindered: seven or eight. He had a roomful in a house he built. Francis went to see it and said, “I suppose it’s a kind of a shrine.”’

  To the Marlborough Freud was rather a nuisance. The years of promise were long gone and now – unlike Sidney Nolan, say, or Graham Sutherland – he was proving unreliable and, worse, unpredictable. And there was his persistent refusal to go along with their lucrative printmaking schemes. To Freud, the gallery was useless to the point of being inimical in that he was disliked by both Fischer and Lloyd and, more to the point, he was considered a busted flush. Despite David Somerset’s subsequent friendship and the enthusiasm for his work shown later by the young gallery assistant James Kirkman, it failed to help him out when cash was most urgently needed. The situation demoralised him, particularly when things went wrong in other sectors of his life.

  ‘I miss you,’ Freud wrote on a drawing of the entangled plumbing of bath and wash basin, together with newspapers, used plate and broom in the back room at Gloucester Terrace: a plaint for Jane Willoughby, away on her travels or busy on her estates. It was the summer of 1968. ‘She was so loyal,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘And the laundry went to her, as far as I can tell, all his life. I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was, he put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immacul
ately laundered. In a way, Lucian at the lowest points of his life kept some of the habits of a spoilt bourgeois upper-middle-class Berlin person.’11

  Drawing c.1958

  In the mirror behind the basin is the reflection of the rim of the plant pot in the middle of a painting just begun, the progress of which some days later (shoots arising, child’s head and body dabbed in) can be made out in Small Interior (Self-Portrait) (1968), where the big mirror from Delamere Terrace rests against a paint-smirched wall together with the broom. From drawing to painting, from painting to painting, certain objects recur, layered by reflection.

  ‘I really used the mirror, which I like and know, as a device for an interior on a small scale. Always the same mirror,’ Freud said. Within the confines of the mirror the opposite side of the room rearranged itself, the floor rising like a drawbridge, a picture plane barely formulated on the easel and the painter dancing attendance alongside it, catching sight of himself, as it were, between one picture and another. The painting gives pause, complicatedly so, for he has included in the mirror image fronds of Dracaena deremensis from Interior with Plant brushing against the image on the canvas. A representation of a reflection set against the representation of a reflection of a representation of a painting that was to become Large Interior in Paddington (1968–9), six foot by four foot, his largest painting since 1951.

  ‘I wanted to work from Ib. Suzy was very amenable, Ib liked it and I was working from Penelope and they got on well: she used to look after her. (Ib was very shy at being half-naked.) It’s got a happy atmosphere I think.’ Ib remembered more the discomfort of lying on bare floorboards, resenting being hauled away from home all day, particularly on Sundays. The painting breathes vexation. Sulkily bored, with nothing to look at but the big plant pot inches from her nose, Ib lies doggo, a shock-headed urchin out of Struwwelpeter, inclined to tantrums. She has to keep still, but the room is hot and smelly. Bright leafage, a proliferation of escaping thoughts, press against the opaque window above and beyond her. She could be a foundling under a gooseberry bush, a surprise under a Christmas tree. Her mother was pregnant as the painting began; by the time it was finished she had another sister.