Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  At that time, according to Caroline, at her most crushing towards Lucian, many people saw his paintings of men and women as cruel: ‘The eyes of Lucian Freud’s sitters, as they stare out from his pictures, suggest that, like the blind Tiresias, “they have suffered all”. As selected specimens of humanity, magnified by the cruel accuracy of a microscope, they have also been seen by all.’87

  Caroline and Ivana were both referred to as heiresses by newspapers, and while financial security gave them the freedom from having to rely on men and the ability to bolt in times of trouble, it also made them struggle to find happiness. A desire to settle down conflicted with an unreliability. Just as Caroline fled Lucian, so Ivana left me just as abruptly for the film producer Bob Weinstein (shortly after he and his brother Harvey sold their company Miramax to Disney), although we remain very good friends.

  The final contact between Lucian and Caroline came when she lay dying from cancer in New York in 1996. He telephoned from London to her deathbed and they talked sweetly for an hour as she lay calm, touched by his affection and charm. In a morphine-induced state, Caroline saw a mosaic of colours as Lucian spoke. She was once again in a hotel room, not the cramped one in Paris as half a century before, but a grand suite at the Mayfair on 65th and Park with wood fires in the room. It was their last conversation.

  Lord Gowrie was there to give his farewell, but left Caroline to have her last words with the man who had made her immortal with paint. ‘We could hear her laughing through the door of her room, and she suddenly sounded young and girlish,’ said Gowrie. Caroline kept her dark humour to the end, telling Lucian how a friend had come to visit her with some holy water from Lourdes, which she had accidentally spilled. ‘I might have caught my death,’ she said.

  As her son Sheridan stood in the hotel room, with light coming in through the window from the Manhattan street, although woozy with morphine Caroline somehow in her mind drifted back to the final portrait of her, Hotel Bedroom, where Lucian had stood by the window in Paris all those years ago, and for a few seconds she muddled Sheridan with Lucian, and said he was just like Lucian, as art and truth and the people she had loved all merged in her final moments.

  Paint-smeared walls in his Notting Hill studio

  CHAPTER EIGHT Paint

  Lucian always had several paintings on the go at the same time. The work dictated every minute of his schedule, and nothing interrupted it. He was dictatorial to his models about being on time and would make some go through almost tantric feats of endurance, asking them to take up exhausting positions for hours at a time, and for weeks and often months on end. It defined his life and it was the only subject about which he ever wrote publicly.

  ‘God, it seems cheap now,’ said Lucian as he picked up my faded, yellowing copy of Encounter, the literary magazine edited by Stephen Spender. It cost just 2s 6d (12½p) and the 1954 July issue had included his essay ‘Some Thoughts on Painting’. On the front cover he was billed above W. H. Auden but below Dylan Thomas and Bertrand Russell. It was his only published article, and in 2004 I was on a mission to get a follow-up piece fifty years after Spender had commissioned him to write about how and why he painted.

  It was my second attempt to try to persuade Lucian to do something in Tatler magazine, having had him photographed at breakfast with Frank Auerbach. He liked the unexpected, and Tatler, the oldest magazine in the world, founded in 1709 with Jonathan Swift as its first correspondent, appealed to his sense of history and quirkiness. Would he write some more thoughts on painting? He said he would think about it as he flicked through my copy of Encounter, knowledgeably explaining Auden’s take on the Old Testament story of Balaam and his donkey which had divine powers that meant it could hear the voice of an angel. He momentarily cursed Spender, who he insisted had stolen some drawings from him.

  Lucian had not seen a copy of Encounter for decades, and enjoyed seeing reproductions of his pictures of Christian Bérard, Caroline Blackwood, John Minton and Francis Bacon printed over four pages, and two more pages carrying his text. He warmed to the notion of a sequel as long as he could think of something new to write. As we sat in Clarke’s I read aloud part of his 1954 essay while he and David Dawson listened: ‘My object in painting pictures is to try and move the senses by giving an intensification of reality. Whether this can be achieved depends on how intensely the painter understands and feels for the person or object of his choice.’

  His views had barely altered, he said. It was the powerful combination of intellect and emotion – how he ‘understands’ and ‘feels’. ‘I have not changed my mind at all. I still feel the same. Isn’t that right, David?’ he said. It was almost a tic in his last years for him to seek confirmation from David, who had observed his pictures develop every day for twenty years. The original words, Lucian said, had been hard-wrought, chosen with the same perfectionist zeal with which he applied paint, almost chiselled from his mind. He had expressed disdain for abstract art, arguing vigorously the case for the superiority of figurative art: ‘Painters who deny themselves the representation of life and limit their language to purely abstract forms are depriving themselves of the possibility of provoking more than an aesthetic emotion.’

  He believed the human body was the most profound subject and he pursued a ruthless process of observation, using the forensic exactitude of a scientist dissecting an animal in a laboratory. His paintings were always more analytical than psychoanalytical; he never intended them to have a narrative. They merely showed what he saw and if the oddity of a zebra, rat or protruding leg gave rise to psychological interpretation, he would insist that he had merely painted what was before him.

  I carried on reading: ‘The subject must be kept under closest observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject – he, she, or it – will eventually reveal the all without which selection itself is not possible; they will reveal it, through some and every facet of their lives or lack of life, through movements and attitudes, through every variation from one moment to another.’

  The essay was a justification of his way of life. ‘A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure. The artist who tries to serve nature is only an executive artist.’88

  Lucian listened and nodded. ‘It is very straightforward as very simply all I ever really want to do is to paint. I am very selfish about it. I say it not as a boast but a fact. I have never tried to hide that,’ he said.

  His ambition, he had written in Encounter, was to give ‘art complete independence from life, an independence that is necessary because the picture in order to move us must never remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life.’

  One week later I was back in Clarke’s and Lucian brought a piece of paper with several crossings-out in his genius-child handwriting, along with a few clear sentences. His thought process seemed jagged, reluctantly released into the world. He had shared his anxieties about finding the right words with his friend the art critic Martin Gayford, whom he painted in Man with a Blue Scarf (2004). ‘I’ve written three new sentences. I thought of another one today, in a taxi. Writing is so enormously hard that I can’t understand how anyone can be a writer,’ he said.89 ‘I can’t quite believe it, but I left out of my original article the most important thing.’

  His new, very short manifesto contained his final published words. ‘On re-reading it [‘Some Thoughts on Painting’] I find that I left out the vital ingredient without which painting can’t exist: PAINT. Paint in relation to a painter’s nature. One thing more important than the person in the picture is the picture.’

  In July 2004, it was published in Tatler alongside his original 1954 article. He judged the fifty-year gap between the two pieces to have been perfect timing. ‘No hurry,’ he said. Lucian had emphasised how painting was everything to him, and the way art was made obsessed him. On the walls of his studio were scribbled three words: ‘urgent’, ‘subtle’ and ‘concise’. He explained how tho
se words defined his purposes:

  LF: ‘By “urgent” I don’t mean SOS urgent. It is like a memo; I was trying to put into words the qualities that I was trying to achieve. I think art is not called art for nothing; it is a deliberately wrought thing. What is on your paper or canvas is what you actually leave.’

  GG: ‘Is it important to try to achieve sensuality in a painting?’

  LF: ‘Yes: feeling and touch. With the painting of a horse it can be

  rather like writing a love letter. It is to do with the forms themselves having a feeling that affects you. Doing it is private and individual.’

  GG: ‘How do pictures evolve?’

  LF: ‘If a painting’s going well you work on it all over. You don’t say, “Oh I won’t touch that bit again.” You suddenly find something you do changes another bit. That is the art element. That is what you feel or you wouldn’t do it. The picture sort of paints itself out in the end. It doesn’t want you to do any more; you have done enough. But sometimes you go on, wrongly, and think, “I have done this bit and so I will do some more over there,” and then you think, “What a mistake!”’

  GG: ‘Can you remedy it?’

  LF: ‘Yes, you can do anything. Sometimes through urgency, strong decisions get things done on the canvas in a way that if you did it again it would not go down in the same way. Chance comes into what happens. Luck can be linked to pace or speed but also time. Scale affects everything. Doing everything on different scales is something that keeps you alive; it makes you aware. My Self-Portrait with a Black Eye that sold recently is tiny. I know this sounds presumptuous and rather selfish but it doesn’t look tiny.’

  GG: ‘So what makes you paint?’

  LF: ‘It is what I like doing best and I am completely selfish.’

  GG: ‘Can anger come into it?’

  LF: ‘More like franticness or desperation.’

  GG: ‘What do you like about it?’

  LF: ‘Everything. I always have three or four things on the go. It’s the actual project. In my case it is always entirely autobiographical. I work always with people I like being with and who interest me.’

  GG: ‘Ambition is a major spur for you?’

  LF: ‘The one thing I don’t want to do is just another picture.’

  GG: ‘And the sitter is essential at all times, even when you are painting the floorboards?’

  LF: ‘I need the person in front of me to achieve that because it’s a portrait rather than a naked still life of a person on the floor.’

  GG: ‘And with the portraits of Caroline [Blackwood], were her enormous luminous eyes what was important?’

  LF: ‘I never really think of features by themselves. It is about the presence.’

  GG: ‘There are some painters you have told me you do not admire, like Raphael.’

  LF: ‘I am not saying he’s not good. It’s just not evocative. He’s impossible not to admire.’

  GG: ‘Who then do you admire?’

  LF: ‘Ingres as much as anyone.’

  GG: ‘Do you think about time?’

  LF: ‘Yes, the older you get the more you do.’

  GG: ‘And do you remain ambitious?’

  LF: ‘Yes very. That’s the only point. What is the motive otherwise? There cannot be a harder way of earning money. I work every day. I don’t do anything else. I used to get caught up in manic activities like being in a casino for eight hours. No longer.’

  The Notting Hill house where he painted in his final years was a cross between a rough and-ready carpenter’s workshop and an eighteenth-century salon. As you entered there were two large, early, thickly encrusted Frank Auerbach paintings. In his kitchen was a Rodin sculpture of Balzac, bellied, bulky and imposing. ‘It was his face but the body of a local butcher,’ said Lucian as he put the kettle on his old gas stove to make a cup of tea.

  Hundreds of paintbrushes were stuffed into large tins, baskets, pots, many of them stiff, old and covered in dust with paint-smeared handles. The walls were in some parts crusted thick with paint, from where he flicked it from his brush or palette knife, building up and congealing over the years like 3-D Jackson Pollocks. (Lucian allowed only three pieces to be cut from the abandoned Holland Park studio wall to be preserved: one for Jane Willoughby, one for David Dawson and one for me. Six months after his death his studio was dismantled.)

  Brushes piled up

  Ripped pieces of white sheet on which he wiped his brushes were discarded on to the floor like giant pieces of tissue. Telephone numbers and names were scrawled on the wall. An old iron bedstead, leather armchairs with their stuffing spooling out, a tall bar stool, easels and tables of paint and brushes, were all arranged as if time had stopped. A trestle table in his studio bent under the weight of unopened and half-full tubes of paint. The furniture and mattress covers were slowly fading, disintegrating, the room devoid of any electronic devices. It was like the set for Samuel Beckett’s Breath, chaotically littered with miscellaneous rubbish, but somehow stylishly ragged. Michael Saunders, a bookie who worked for Victor Chandler, remembers turning up to try to recover money from Lucian to repay his gambling debts. He was met with a decadent scene: ‘He had a tin of Beluga with a silver spoon in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, standing by the easel wearing what looked like pyjama bottoms,’ he recalled. On the wooden table stood a half-bottle of Salon champagne, open, flat and warm. A slab of calf’s liver pâté from Sally Clarke’s delicatessen had been half eaten, its edges dark from being left out unwrapped. A tap could be heard dripping in the kitchen. He loved fine tablecloths. He was very happy neatly to sweep up crumbs. He had beautiful knives, forks and eighteenth-century wine glasses. He was so pleased, for instance to be given by his daughter Annie four simple egg cups. But next to the Irish linen tablecloth there might easily be rotting peaches, grey with decay. Lucian liked domesticity on his terms.

  Although the physical material of paint was so present in Lucian’s life – his clothes were often speckled with it – his hands were scrupulously clean. ‘Sometimes I will have three baths a day; it calms me down,’ he told me. He was snapped naked in his bath by the East End photographer Harry Diamond in 1966, and later by Jacquetta Eliot at her home in Notting Hill with her young son. He was rather addicted to time in the tub. He was always elegant, a raggedy silhouette sitting in the back of Clarke’s, his grey hair cropped short by his daughter Bella, a day or two’s stubble often visible. He slid across the kitchen linoleum in his socks as if on skates. Neil MacGregor remembered that ‘He was always with no shoes on, scampering up and down the stairs in that long athletic way. The speed of movement was astonishing for a man of his age and the suppleness and deftness. There was something elfin about the features, the sharpness and brightness of the eyes and their constant movement.’90

  Lucian needed to be fit, standing up for hours on end when working, at any time of day or night. If 3 a.m. suited him and his model, he would paint then. Although his hours became less antisocial as he grew older and he found it harder to rise very early, the intensity of his relationship with paint did not fade. It folded into his life in every way: he even used a paintbrush as a shaving brush. ‘Bristle While You Work’ was the headline in Tatler beside a photograph by David Dawson of Lucian lathering up his face with a paintbrush in one hand, a razor in the other.

  Lucian working on his final painting, Portrait of the Hound, March 2011

  ‘It was not just a need to paint. It was the need for perfection,’ said Victor Chandler. ‘Sometimes he bought back pictures which he felt were not good enough and should not have left the studio. It was the anger, real anger at himself when he did something wrong. And it was quite frightening because he’d jump backwards and swear. You got “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”’91

  Success or failure rested on a knife-edge. ‘I think of Lucian’s attention to his subject. If the concentrated interest were to falter he would come off the tightrope. He had no safety net of manner,’ said Frank Auerbach.92

  He painted who
ever was in his life, sometimes those intimately connected with him, like his children or lovers, sometimes strangers with whom he became intimate through the very process of painting them. Mark Fisch, the New York property developer and Old Master collector, whose portrait Lucian painted, said to me, ‘I can remember him telling me once how a girl he had never met knocked on his door, he opened it, she enters, he fucks her against the wall and then he paints her.’ This was recounted to Fisch when Lucian was eighty-four. ‘Countless husbands and boyfriends could have put a sword through him. In so many ways he should not have lived till the age of eighty-eight,’ said Fisch.93

  Sometimes his friendships splintered, as did the one with Tim Behrens, who for nine years saw Lucian almost every day. They had met in 1955 when Tim was a 17-year-old student at the Slade School of Art, and Lucian was his one-morning-a-week teacher, at 33 almost twice his age. For a time they were inseparable. ‘Everyone assumed we were having a homosexual relationship which was very far from the truth. For a time we lived together, sharing a house at 357 Liverpool Road, Islington,’ he remembered, fifty years after he first sat for Lucian.

  The older and younger painter grew very close and as a sign of his affection Lucian gave his protégé an early self-portrait and a drawing of Caroline Blackwood. But sweetly as their friendship started, it was to end sourly.

  One reason was the cross-over of women in their lives, remarkable, even by Lucian’s priapic standards. Three of Tim’s girlfriends became lovers of Lucian: Suzy Boyt, Susanna Chancellor and Janey Longman. Lucian also had an affair with Tim’s daughter Kate.

  When they first met in 1955 Tim was the rebellious son of a prosperous banker. He had left Eton early to go to art school where he met Lucian, who immediately asked him to sit for a portrait (he painted him four times). He also encouraged Tim with his own painting and bought some of his pictures. It was as much a friendship of equals as a quasi father–son relationship. They partied hard, often very late, as well as hitting the pubs around Paddington, not that Lucian drank much. ‘We used to play pinball a lot, Lucian never won,’ recalled Tim.