Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  Gambling debts sometimes caused the odd social hiccup. ‘I remember when a guy comes up and says “Hello Lou, how funny seeing you.” Lucian head-butts him and says, “Run.” We get away and then I say, ‘What on earth was that about?’ Lucian says, “I think I owe him fourteen.” I say, “Fourteen pounds? That’s not much.” “No,” he says, “£14,000”. It had been a gangster trying to get money owed to him.’ Lucian and Tim were famously photographed together by John Deakin in Wheeler’s at a table with Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews.

  ‘When we lived in Liverpool Road, Lucian was with Suzy Boyt and I with Anne Montague,’ explained Tim, who had introduced Lucian to Suzy Boyt, the eventual mother of four of his children. ‘I first saw Suzy at a party, glued to a guy who I did not think was worthy of her. I was at least as good looking! Their mouths were locked together as well as their thighs. I waited to make my move,’ he recalled. ‘Lucian later asked for an introduction to Suzy, describing her to me as “that marvellous girl with green hair”. I had gone out with her before, not very satisfactorily, and I was happy to pass her on to Lucian,’ he recalled.

  Tim next met Susanna Chancellor, or Debenham as she was then called, when she was the girlfriend of Jane Willoughby’s brother Tim. Behrens regarded him as too rakish, someone from whom she needed rescuing. And according to Behrens, he accompanied Lucian to Nice to lure Susanna away, but after she left Tim Willoughby for him, Susanna subsequently turned to Lucian. One positive repercussion for Tim Behrens was that he met his second wife as a result of Lucian luring Susanna away from him. On finding the front door of his flat locked he went to bed in a small room on the mezzanine, taking off all his clothes, only unexpectedly finding another girl in that bed. She became his second wife.

  The falling out with Lucian occurred soon after Tim’s first wife unexpectedly died. She had an allergy to bee and wasp stings and, after they had separated, she had gone on holiday with her Turkish boyfriend without her serum and had been fatally stung. A few months later, Lucian became livid with Tim for immediately and, in his eyes, inappropriately, falling for a girl who looked just like his dead wife. Lucian thought this extremely bad taste so soon after her death and they rowed angrily. When Tim went round to try to talk it over, Lucian said he was too busy painting and slammed the door shut. It was one of the last times they ever spoke. Their intense nine-year friendship was over. ‘I was devastated. I could not believe anyone could be so cold. I had seen him as a substitute for my father who had been a complete bastard. I truly loved him and that was what made it so painful when we had our bust-up,’ he said from his home in Spain, where aged seventy-five, a black patch over his right eye, his hair still sandy red, he is a celebrated poet and painter.

  A no less conventional introduction took place in 2002 when Kate Moss was brought to Lucian’s attention by his daughter Bella. It went against all his instincts to use a professional model, but with her he was intrigued. She was wild and unpredictable and had caused a global media storm when she had been caught in a tabloid drugs sting. He always liked rebels.

  LF: ‘I was told there had been an interview in a magazine in which Kate said she wanted to be painted by me. I asked Bella if this was true. I had had a dance once with her and so when I heard that she had said she wanted to be painted by me I told Bella to send her round.’

  GG: ‘Was lateness a problem?’

  LF: ‘I used to get very cross sometimes. I get tense when working and the worst thing is if anyone is late. She was late only in the way that girls are, sort of eighteen minutes late. I was cross but tried to ignore it. I used other means to get her on time like sending someone to fetch her.’

  GG: ‘Are you glad you painted her?’

  LF: ‘I liked her company. She was interesting company and full of surprising behaviour. I used to mind someone waiting outside for her while she was with me. I think it was someone she had been with since she was very young. I have always hated being watched. Not that it happens much.’

  GG: ‘And the end result?’

  LF: ‘The picture didn’t really work.’

  GG: ‘Why didn’t it?’

  LF: ‘That is like asking a footballer after the match why he didn’t score. The picture is now with a South American collector.’

  GG: ‘And is it awkward when a painting is finished and you don’t want to see the person again?’

  LF: ‘That was not the case with Kate but not really. I’ve never gone in for any lying, apart from just ludicrous ones. I so like that saying of William Blake: “The truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” I think that’s terribly good, but I’ve never gone in for it.’

  GG: ‘When I had dinner with her she told me you gave her a tattoo.’

  LF: ‘I think it was done in a taxi. She said I keep on hearing you give people tattoos. What do you do? I said, “Come on,” and gave her a tattoo in the taxi.’

  GG: ‘She said you used an engraving stick. I asked her to show me her tattoo but she said not in the restaurant where we were.’

  LF: ‘It was a little bird.’

  GG: ‘Who else have you given tattoos to?’

  LF: ‘Not many.’

  GG: ‘How do you cut?’

  LF: ‘You draw and rub in Indian ink until the blood comes up. Then it’s what’s called the scab which you pin in some of the ink and when the scab goes there’s a drawing, the tattoo. It’s very primitive. They did it on the merchant navy ship I was on during the war.’

  GG: ‘They gave you a tattoo?’

  LF: ‘No I gave them tattoos. “Oh, yeah,” they’d say, “you’re a fucking artist, give us a tattoo.” They’d say, “My girlfriend says if there’s an artist on the ship get him to tattoo my name.” Sometimes I did animals, mostly horses.’

  GG: ‘Some of your earliest work!’

  LF: ‘I wouldn’t like a tattoo myself. I think I could stand the pain but when the police arrest somebody they strip them to see any identifying marks. I wouldn’t want such a clear identity. I prefer to be able to slip away unnoticed.’

  Another person he tattooed was Jacquetta Eliot, who allowed him to mark her bottom. ‘If you are in love you do crazy things, it just happened,’ she explained.94 During his tempestuous affair with her, his landlord put a note on the front door of the building in Paddington where Lucian had his studio, asking everyone to keep it shut to prevent rats entering from the basement. Thinking of her lover, Jacquetta wrote a reply on the note: ‘Too late. There’s already one on the second floor.’

  * * *

  Painting and the act of sex were not unconnected. According to John Richardson, for Lucian they were interchangeable. ‘He turns sex into art and art into sex, the physical manifestation of his life expressed through paint. His creativeness was very akin to fucking. The sex act and the intellectual act – or creativeness, or whatever you call it – of painting, were in some ways interchangeable. He had no difficulty transforming sexual notions into paint and paint into sexual notions. There was no differentiation; the two aspects of his senses came together in the act of painting.’95

  But nakedness does not necessarily mean openness. The identity of the sitters often stayed secret, which was at odds with the way they were revealed in truly explicit poses. For instance, Penny Cuthbertson, who married Desmond Guinness (Caroline Blackwood’s cousin and the son of Diana Mitford, whose sister Debo became Duchess of Devonshire and one of Lucian’s oldest friends), obsessed Lucian for years in the 1960s. In Naked Girl, painted in 1966, her genitalia appear raw and pink. She lies back with a sense of acceptance of being dominated, not only by the angle of the picture as we look down on her, but also by her sweet expression of acquiescence and adoration. Her feet being cut off by the bottom of the canvas draws her even closer as if she cannot escape scrutiny.

  For all his dramatic impact as a great painter of nudes, in spite of his overt subject matter, his pictures were themselves not without a degree of caution, according to Richardson. Th
ere was rigid control and formality in his composition, however bizarre it might seem, with girls contorted on the floor or in cupboards, or Leigh Bowery with his legs askew on the sofa. ‘There are these people lying around, male and female, sexual parts exposed, painted with a great deal of love and care but at the same time there was a reticence,’ said Richardson. ‘With Picasso you know he has fucked this girl, is thinking of another and so he adds blonde hair to the brunette. It is the reverse of reticence. Picasso is thinking what more can he bring in. He might have seen a Man Ray book of bondage photographs and so a little bit of bondage comes in. It all comes at this heterosexual dynamism which you never get in Lucian’s work. You get this double take, a very sexual subject but, in a way, presented in a very reticent manner. There is this double thing of overtness.’96

  One work of intrigue and ambivalence features the artist Celia Paul, who was taught by Freud at the Slade, and who was the mother of their son Frank, born in 1984. In Painter and Model (1986–7) she stands fully clothed while a naked man called Angus Cook, unrelated to her, lies on a cracked brown leather sofa. It is another scene of tangible tension. Lucian paints her bare foot squeezing green paint out of a tube. Having previously been painted as Lucian’s naked lover, helpless before his gaze, Celia sees herself with newly emerging power in this picture: ‘I’m holding this very definitely angled brush and I’m standing on a tube of paint which is oozing. The brush and the oozing paint tube, I feel, are kind of sexual symbols and I think suddenly me becoming a mother and a seriously ambitious painter put me in a different position and I was no longer the kind of voluptuous figure lying on the bed. I remember at one point we had some quarrel and I said I’m leaving and he pleaded with me not to because he said we’re just in the middle, and it made me conscious that there was going to be an end and that it wasn’t going to be a relationship for life.’ It was not something that Lucian ever denied.

  Life with Lucian was very tricky for the mothers of his children, and for Celia, there was the ever-present dilemma of how to deal with the constant rivals for his attention – work and women. He always wanted them to sit for him. Celia said, ‘I found it an excruciating experience to be scrutinised so pitilessly. I cried most of the time. After that I think the paintings of me became more tender. He started the painting of me called Girl in a Striped Night-Shirt in 1983 and finished it in 1985. I sat regularly from 1980 to 1987. The first painting was Naked Girl with Egg. The last painting was Painter and Model which shows my independence, me literally standing on my own two feet as the strong, clothed painter compared to the weary, vulnerable, naked man [Cook] on the sofa in front of me.’

  Painter and Model, 1986-87

  For young painters like Celia Paul, it was absorbing to see him at work. In one painting, Double Portrait (1985-86), she is the subject as well as being able to observe the other model. ‘When he painted he stood quite close and it was always possible to see the slow progress of the painting. He would start from one point and then work out from there. In Painter and Model he started with Angus Cook’s balls and for a long while that was what he focused on.’

  Wanting someone meant wanting to show in paint what they were like, who they were when put under scrutiny and how they interacted with him. The experience affected the psyche of all his most intimate sitters, like Celia. ‘He didn’t start painting me for two years until after I started going out with him. I was a very, very self-conscious young woman and it did feel very exposing to lie there and he stood very close to me and kind of scrutinised me in a way that made me feel very undesirable. It felt quite clinical, almost as though I was on a surgical bed.’97

  Encountering Lucian himself naked in his studio was not uncommon. His art dealer Anthony d’Offay would conduct conversations with Lucian in the bath, catching up and exchanging news. ‘He would get out of the bath and be completely at ease, almost purposefully so, clearly not shy about his body,’ he said.

  Lucian was quite nonchalant about how new models and lovers entered his life, whether they were random encounters in restaurants or letters from admirers, and he was always on the lookout – even in St James’s Palace, where he asked a young woman who worked for the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures to pose for him. Henrietta Edwards had sat in for the Queen to wear the diadem on her head for some extra sittings when Lucian was painting the monarch in St James’s Palace.98 He was always on the look-out. When his specialist art movers came for a meeting at his Notting Hill house in 2006 he invited Verity Brown, an engaging 29-year-old executive, upstairs to see his pictures. She ended up naked as a sitter a few weeks later, and although she was not a lover, she became very attached to him. Whenever he found someone he liked, he folded them into his extraordinary schedule, painting day and night. ‘My subject matter is entirely autobiographical: using the people I like and who interest me to make my pictures,’ he explained to me.

  The final stage in the creation of his pictures was often the appearance of Frank Auerbach. ‘I dreaded the arrival of Frank as it most likely meant that the painting was finished,’ said Verity Brown.99

  ‘I would always ask Frank what he thought. Above anyone else he would have a view which I would want to hear and which could be useful,’ said Lucian.

  It was never easy. Paint for Lucian was ‘pain’ with a ‘t’ on the end, as one of his sitters noted, a view echoed by his son Alex Boyt (known as Ali), who also sat for several pictures: ‘It appeared to me that the painting process had an element of masochism. When a series of brushstrokes went down well there was often a silence, but when the paint didn’t do as he wanted, there were startling jumps, shouts and stabbing himself or slashing at the easel with a paintbrush.’ Progress could be slow. ‘Sometimes he would work on a part of a painting for a week, only to decide it wasn’t good enough, soak a rag in turpentine and gently wipe the whole lot away. When I was young, after I had put so much effort into sitting as still as I could, my heart sank when it appeared to have been for nothing,’ Ali said. ‘Dad told me once that if he lived to be 300 he might become good at painting.’100

  Modelling for Lucian always went far beyond sitting still in one spot as he folded sitters into his social life too. Lucian also liked to escape the entrapment of his studio. ‘In my teenage years, the sitting started to take on a glamorous edge. There were the visits to the Playboy Club after work where Dad raised the stakes at the blackjack table until all other gamblers left, save sometimes one stubborn Arab who couldn’t be shaken off. There were letters from the Vatican cajoling Dad to paint the Pope.’ Lucian took it all in his stride.

  But finding models or muses was not always straightforward. When Lucian cast an eye towards Hannah Rothschild, the protective instincts of her mother Lady Rothschild came out. ‘My mother apparently said if you lay a finger on my daughter I will break both your kneecaps. He was so upset that he left the house immediately,’ recalled Hannah. She never sat for him. The next morning a poison postcard from Lucian to Lady Rothschild landed on the mat.

  The raw, naked portraits are the most recognisable of Lucian’s paintings, but he also often brought narrative intrigue to his work. Sunny Morning – Eight Legs is a painting in which David Dawson sprawls naked across a bed, his arm around Lucian’s whippet Pluto. The room seems abandoned, its dirty plaster walls more suggestive of a police cell than a living room. The picture seems to tilt, making David and the whippet in his arms appear as though about to slide unnervingly towards the viewer. Two of the legs referred to in the title belong to David, four to Pluto, and then there are two further anonymous male legs emerging from under the bed. Do they belong to a corpse? To someone hiding?

  At Clarke’s, David explained to me that all the human legs in the picture are his, and that during the sitting, as well as lying on top of the bed, he had also lain underneath it for weeks with his legs poking out, the rest of him wrapped in a duvet on a mattress of cushions. ‘I am not a naturist! I was allowed to wear pants under the bed,’ he laughed.

  ‘Even I am n
ot that demanding,’ added Lucian.

  The extra legs were added to give a sense of hidden space under the bed; but it is also simply what was there: his loyal assistant and dog stripped bare in his unadorned studio. Lucian was averse to the idea of any symbolism being seen his pictures, yet embraced the idea of narrative interpretation. ‘The reason I used David’s legs rather than somebody else’s was precisely because I didn’t want mystification. I thought, by using his legs, it would be rather like a hiccup or a stutter or a nervous repetition and therefore the legs would refer back to David.’101

  Another quirkily composed picture, After Cézanne (1999–2000), is in part a homage to the post-Impressionist painter’s two different versions of L’Après-midi à Naples (1872–5 and 1876–7), with Lucian’s variation using a stockily built naked woman awkwardly carrying cups of tea on a round tray towards the two other naked figures. Lucian used his son Freddy, and a blonde-haired woman introduced to him by Sue Tilley, to sit on a white makeshift bed on the wooden floor. A chair nearby lies upended. The upper right-hand corner of the canvas is completely missing, as if the painter has cut it out, playing games with the viewer’s expectations. Or was an extra panel added on the left side to give the woman with the tray more space? It is playful, but like so much of what he painted, it does not make the viewer feel comfortable. The man is leaning awkwardly on wooden steps. The woman with the tray seems to be steadying herself to avoid tripping. The blonde woman looks as if she has been rejected in some way by the man. The fallen chair adds to the nerviness, the jittery lack of calm. One of the women had worried that it was unflattering to paint her without her nightdress. Freud disagreed and said he always made his models seem ugly. To make her feel better he told her he was worried that he had made her look beautiful. It was a typical Lucian conceit that he should worry that he had failed by flattering.