Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  Lucian liked feuds, and he fell out with Francis Bacon, Stephen Spender and Graham Sutherland, amongst others. Once I took to the breakfast table a biography of the painter John Craxton, who had travelled to Greece with Lucian and lived on Poros. Craxton had sent him giant-sized elaborate intimate letters with drawings and doodles, using the family nickname ‘Lux’. Lucian later accused him of stealing his ideas and copying his drawings. On seeing the book I had brought with me, he made a blistering assault: ‘Is he still alive? Has he done anything for the last twenty years? Does he still paint? He was a liar and a cheat, an absolute cunt.’ This is what his friend Francis Wyndham called his powers of ‘eloquent vituperation’. It sometimes distressed Wyndham, but equally fascinated him as Lucian would ‘mount an elaborate, imaginative case against the accused which might be arbitrary and unfair but which was pitched at such an extreme level of fastidious distaste that it fleetingly acquires a semblance of poetic truth’.29 With enthusiastic fervour he explained his fraternal feud to me in the bluntest manner:

  LF: ‘I was never friendly with either of my brothers. I had illusions about Stephen. I thought he was incredibly dreary, pompous, timid, but more than all that I thought he was honest and then I had to give up that illusion. Clement, I always despised.’

  GG: ‘And the reason?’

  LF: ‘Well, it sounds rather pompous: because he was a liar and I minded it. If you liked someone you wouldn’t have cared if they were a liar or not. He’s dead now. Always was actually.’

  GG: ‘At breakfast on the day of his funeral I pointed out a photograph of Clement in the newspapers and asked you what you were thinking. You said how it reminded you what a cunt he was.’

  LF: ‘Well, he was.’

  GG: ‘Were you never close to your brothers?’

  LF: ‘No. Because of our middle names we were known as the Archangels. [Stephen’s is Gabriel, Lucian’s was Michael and Clement’s was Raphael.] But no. I was treated differently from my brothers just by the fact that I went to Bryanston and they went to St Paul’s. I don’t know why but perhaps because I was known to like the countryside.’

  GG: ‘What was it like?’

  LF: ‘It was not a great learning process academically. I never really learned to speak English so I didn’t really understand when the other children started talking to me and so I started fighting. I couldn’t understand so I hit and you can’t really make friends like that.’

  GG: ‘Who would you fight?’

  LF: ‘Hard to say, but “snobs” comes up in my head. I was not very conscious of being Jewish but I was very conscious of anti-Semitism. In Paddington, where I lived later, they would go on about “fucking Jews, bloody saucepans [cockney rhyming slang: saucepan lids = Yids]”. I would say, “Now, none of that. I am a saucepan,” and they would say, “No you are not; you are a gentleman.”’

  Even without such anti-Semitism, the pre-war years in Britain were not easy for Ernst. He moved his family in 1935 into a very narrow (15’ 9”) Victorian house in St John’s Wood Terrace, North-West London, where Ernst used his architectural skills to try to make the house appear more spacious. He was a modernist, emphasising that ‘the idea of the house centred round the hearth was gone’. He wanted ‘to break down the division between the house and out-of-doors’.30 Lucian had an aversion to this sleek Germanic minimal and progressive sense of design. It was further reason for a lack of closeness with his father. ‘Ernst was very hands-off with Lucian and far more demonstrative to Stephen,’ said Annie. He affectionately called Stephen ‘Gab’, a reduction of his middle name. Ernst and Lucian shared a similarity in defying tradition in their different ways, only neither quite saw it like that. Also both held dogmatically to their contrasting views and tastes. There was a definite distance between the two of them which left Lucian with no obvious role model for a close and supportive father.

  In around 1948 the family moved to 28 Clifton Hill in Maida Vale, West London, which Lucian helped decorate, showing a hint of showmanship with his display of a stuffed fish. Lucie wrote how Lucian had made a rare good impression on his father with his decorative elan. It was unusual enough for her to comment on it:

  Lux painted the entire house in oil with his own hands and those of friends. I have never heard Ernst being so enthusiastic about the work of anybody else as he was about Lux’s colours and his architectural and other ideas. The bedroom, for example, seems to be painted in a strangely matt green (Lux used paint for slate tablets) and Ernst said the effect of the colour is that one’s eyes want to fall closed as soon as one enters the room. Above the bathtub a stuffed fish is suspended in a glass box. One room, the conservatory, accommodates Lux’s drawing table and otherwise only plants and birds.31

  Lucian liked to talk about his early paintings, describing them as ‘visually aggressive’. His technique was intense observation to create a sense of his subject’s core. ‘I would sit very close and stare. It could be uncomfortable for both of us [painter and sitter]. I was afraid that if I didn’t pay very strict attention to every one of the things that attracted my eye the whole painting would fall apart. I was learning to see and I didn’t want to be lazy about it. I sometimes looked so hard at a subject that they would undergo an involuntary magnification.’32 On another occasion he spoke of how he ‘hoped that if I concentrate enough the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures’.33

  These early works were drawn with a steely precision and literalness. They sometimes seemed to embrace death more than life, with dead chickens and the corpse of a monkey (bought from a vet who also sold dead snakes by the foot). Lucian liked to cite from T. S. Eliot’s play The Family Reunion as evidence of his desire to create tension and a drama of the unexpected.34 One of Eliot’s characters mentions a stuffed bulldog in Burlington Arcade designed to attract the attention of shoppers. Lucian liked to think it scared people before they realised it was not alive. It created confrontation or a contradiction of the expected. That startled pause, when the viewer is momentarily disconcerted yet deprived of enough information to produce a rational calm reaction, attracted him. He liked touching nerves, erasing complacency and confounding conformity. ‘I don’t like to repeat what I think I know about them. I would rather learn something new,’ he said.

  * * *

  As soon as they had arrived in England the Freud boys had been sent to Dartington Hall, near Totnes in Devon, a progressive school with an emphasis on freedom of choice for its pupils. Lucian loathed his art teacher and avoided his classes, instead spending hours riding horses. However, he liked the quirkiness of Dartington, and delighted in telling me: ‘It had only one single rule: you weren’t allowed to push people into the swimming pool. I used to sleep with the horses in the stable as there was no rule forbidding this. I used to have quite an intimate life with them. The first person I liked was Rob Woods, the farmer, who ran the school farm. So I’d sleep with them in the stables with a blanket over me and the horse. I never went into school classes, I went straight to the school farm which was a quarter-mile walk.’ Some of the boys complained of Lucian’s smell due to his intimacy with the horses.35

  His Dartington career was short-lived. ‘My parents then wanted to take me away from Dartington, but Bryanston, where they wanted to send me, said they couldn’t take me unless I had been to a prep school. So I went to Dane Court for a year, which I liked. There was a sculptor who was Czech and I had a key to his shop in the basement and I spent all day every day sculpting. I thought if they didn’t see me they wouldn’t miss me so I sculpted instead of going to lessons.’ He didn’t do much painting or drawing ‘because the painting teacher was so bad’.

  He relied as much on his fists as his wits. ‘I won the boxing cup at my prep school. I think the best three boxers were ill. Many years later I went to a sporting event and saw this man who was six foot four who’d been the one I’d beaten in the sports final.’

  After one year at Bryanston in Dorset he was expelled after redirecting a pack
of hounds into the school hall and up the stairs. He had just also dropped his trousers in a Bournemouth street as a dare. He lasted just one term at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, before moving to the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, run by Cedric Morris, the self-taught painter and horticulturalist, whose method was to complete a small detail of his pictures first rather than working simultaneously on the whole, a strategy which Lucian borrowed. ‘I got a feeling of the excitement of painting, watching him work, because he worked in a very odd way as if he was unrolling from the top to the bottom, as if he was unrolling something which was actually there.’36

  His portrait of Cedric Morris, painted in Dedham in Suffolk in 1940, shows his teacher with a pipe in his mouth, staring out beadily, one eye with a blackened iris. A red scarf is tied round his neck, a fashion that Lucian adopted. His portrait of Morris is direct but unsophisticated, a tightness of concentration and style yet to be achieved. Morris also painted a picture of Lucian which Lucian saw as ‘rather quick, a bit soppy, hair made a bit much of’.37 It was the perfect place: individualistic, inspiring and run by a free-thinker Lucian felt that he had been taught that portraiture could be ‘revealing in a way that was almost improper’.38 His parents were grateful to Morris and his companion Arthur Lett-Haines, although they worried about their son’s endeavours. ‘We are interested to hear that you are delighted with his progress. He may have told you but I could not help but loathe the last picture he brought to London but his style and his subjects will as I hope change,’ his father wrote to Morris.39 It was another instance of why Lucian felt less close to his father.

  Lucian had a new life and it was steeped in English verse and art, and also in English men of letters. What remained a unique hybrid was his accent. According to John Richardson, ‘Lucian’s voice, so much his own, was a slight work of art, carefully honed and worked on.’ Lucian’s distinct English accent by way of Berlin had a cultivated sound, ‘very like Stephen Spender or Cyril Connolly talking in the 1940s’, and, of course, they were his models and mentors, as well as an intimate friend and love rival. ‘It had a kind of clarity and precision of articulation which you only hear in a second language. It wasn’t so much German as just a preciseness. It was spoken as though this was a language that had been taught, not just acquired,’ said Neil MacGregor, who as director of the National Gallery later was to give Lucian twenty-four-hour access to the gallery.40 Often security guards would see Lucian wandering around after midnight, accompanied by his dinner date or model, or alone with his easel.

  What was emerging was a young man of extraordinary talent and personality who was resolutely focused. He was not going to be sidetracked, as his father had been, and he was to cut his mother out of his life ruthlessly. Lucian was brutally candid to me about his feelings towards her, and said he could not stand being near her. Her curiosity, he felt, invaded his privacy. Only when she was badly afflicted by depression, caused by the death of Lucian’s father in 1970, could he tolerate being in the same room as her for any length of time. ‘After years of avoidance there came a time that I could be with her, and I thought that I should do so. Doing her portrait [in the 1970s] allowed me to be with her. I suppose I felt I needed her to forgive me,’ he said. The portraits of her as an elderly woman, The Painter’s Mother Resting I and a more close-up version, The Painter’s Mother Resting II, lying on a bed, staring apathetically out of the canvas, stuck in my memory from his d’Offay exhibition in 1978. Not all his family liked these pictures of her without make-up in a paisley dress. His cousin Carola Zentner explained how she felt he took advantage of his mother’s decline.

  The Painter’s Mother Resting I, 1975–76

  To some extent it was terribly morbid, what he was doing, and I’m not sure that I respond emotionally to the idea of painting somebody who is no longer the person they were. He perhaps was after a kind of truth about her state of being when in reality he was looking at a mask because she was no longer portraying emotions. I mean she rarely smiled. What he revealed was despair and grief and I who loved her as a wonderful, vibrant, vivacious, bright individual hate seeing this particular view of sort of semi-mortality, because basically she was still alive physically but she wasn’t really alive any longer mentally.

  Lucie suffered a shocking decline after she attempted suicide. ‘She took an overdose, was rushed to hospital and had her stomach pumped but there was some damage and the result was that she was a shadow of her former self,’ said Zentner.41 But actually, Freud’s paintings go far beyond the biographical. He takes us through the vicissitudes of age. She is an archetypal old woman, her quietness, passivity and acceptance, arms up, hands on her pillow in surrender show her vulnerability, but we are never allowed to forget the intense experience of the sittings with the detail and fierceness of his gaze on senility.

  The death of Lucian’s father was a critical point for him both psychologically and professionally. ‘Lucian got depressed and felt he could not paint people,’ said his daughter Annie.42 It was a bitter realisation that someone with whom he had not spent much time but who was a critical part of his life was gone. It was an end to knowing his own beginning. His mother remained, of course, but he still felt she was oppressive, even predatory towards him. Unable to paint people, Lucian instead chose as a subject a rubbish-strewn landscape, the view from his window. It became Waste Ground with Houses, Paddington (1970–2). While working on it he paid the dustmen not to remove the detritus in the abandoned garden which became the foreground of the picture. This showed grey skies over the back of terraced houses with orange chimney pots and grey London brick. It spoke of absence. He had been urged by his then girlfriend Jacquetta Eliot to try to paint the view, to jump-start himself out of that rare mood of despondency.

  ‘When my father died she [Lucie] tried to kill herself. She had given up. I actually felt I could finally be with her because she lost interest in me,’ Lucian said. ‘I tried to be unavailable to her when I was young. She was very intelligent and highly observant. I felt oppressed by her because she was very instinctive and I’ve always been very secretive. It was hard to keep things from her. The idea of her knowing what I was doing or thinking bothered me a great deal. So it was a strained relationship.’

  Her intrusion was often well-intentioned, but for Lucian it was still unwelcome. For instance, in the 1960s she wrote to him in panic from her house in Walberswick in Suffolk after she had been telephoned by the police who were pursuing Lucian for allegedly being involved in a hit-and-run accident on the Euston Road. She warned him that the police knew that he lived at 227 Gloucester Terrace in Paddington. She stalwartly defended him to the investigating officer who suggested that Lucian had acted badly. ‘You may not know that an artist is not as well equipped for everyday life as you probably are and I am.’ In her letter she tipped off Lucian that the police were threatening to circulate his description unless he gave himself up. She kept this episode secret from his father, partly out of kindness as Ernst was then having a rare break from his migraines and she did not want to kick-start another. ‘Please go to the police and square things up. You probably could leave the country, but think how sad it would be for all who love you. And I for one would not feel ashamed of you even if you had to spend a month in prison. And what does it really matter if you will not be allowed to drive again? We never miss it.’ However kind she was, she never fully accepted that Lucian wanted her to leave him alone.

  Lucian always felt watched, and his predilection for escaping scrutiny and maintaining his obsessive privacy never left him. ‘All the real pleasures were solitary. I hate being watched at work. I can’t even read when others are about,’ he later said.43 He had started to try to restrict his mother’s access to him as a teenager. When in hospital after an appendicitis scare, he wrote some poems in English and also drew a few of his fellow patients, but he was determined she should not see them. This was when some of his first notably arresting images were made, and it coincided with a startling awaken
ing of his libido and imagination, as he told me over breakfast.

  LF: ‘I had very bad stomach ache and they didn’t know if it was appendicitis or what, but I was in hospital for three or four weeks. I was sent to the country because it was wartime. The hospital was outside Cambridge and it was where I developed my passion for nurses. I thought I had never seen such marvellous girls and it had something to do with their being nurses. I loved the conversation as they were making my bed: “Didn’t die till five o’clock in the morning … kept me up all night, selfish bastard.” I thought, my God, you are wonderful. I drew and did a lot of poems. I remember one: “When on a chalk-white bed you lie with loathing in your yellow eye swimming in sickly fat.” I liked the nurses talking and sitting on my bed. That was very stimulating. I could hardly move but I did make a little book.’

  GG: ‘Did you write love poems?’

  DAVID DAWSON: ‘Wasn’t there one about snails? Just two lines?’

  LF: ‘Something about fucking someone in a telephone box …’

  GG: ‘A good subject but not exactly spring blossom and other symbols of love.’

  LF: ‘Blossom! Oh yes I remember Blossom all right. I had her in a telephone box.’

  GG: ‘I give up! Did anyone see your poems?’

  LF: ‘I liked poems but didn’t want them to be about that much in case my mother found them. I started hiding them to avoid the awful possibility of her saying “These are the poems of my son.”’

  GG: ‘Were you her favourite?’

  LF: ‘I was the middle one of the three boys. I can’t really tell but I was always very secretive in every way. Every word I said was a lie but I knew they were. My mother got me to give her drawing lessons from the age of four, which is going a bit far isn’t it?’