Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  Once Sophie told him about an Indian waiter at a restaurant in Victoria who had attempted suicide but couldn’t tell his family back home about it. Lucian was fascinated. ‘He wanted to go to the restaurant and thought about painting him. He would get obsessed. In his mind he had created a character but if they then did something that disappointed him he could really turn against them. He could never forgive betrayal. He wrote outrageous letters to people. I remember someone asking him to host some grand function and he wrote back saying he would rather have a wank. But there were also sweet notes. “I’m sending this via a Bella-shaped messenger because I’m rather weary of late. Can you please come at six tomorrow for a dance. Love Lucian.” He knew how to enchant.’

  It was a heady and hedonistic time. Lucian and Sophie would have dinner at Annabel’s and breakfast at the working men’s cafés in Smithfield he loved, sometimes at six in the morning. He got a sudden obsession with a Johnny Cash song about swapping his brain with a chicken when the chicken was robbing banks. In his Bentley on his way to dinner he was always the most selfish and reckless of drivers as Cash’s music boomed out.

  With Sophie, it was a long affair which totally consumed her and bewildered her parents. Their initial introduction came when they witnessed him reverse his Bentley at breakneck speed down the street in Belgravia where she was living with them. When it came to an end, it was like the curtain coming down on a melodrama.

  ‘There was a time when I was leaving Lucian that felt as if I was giving up drugs. I saw it a bit like being an addict. I could give up for two years and then everything would start again. That can make someone quite bipolar. It went on most of my grown-up life. From the age of nineteen onwards, I was involved with Lucian in some shape or form, which changed with time. He would talk about love. He used to fall madly in love with people and do absolutely anything for them. He did some unbelievably kind and generous things for me, but he always had to pull himself back to work.

  ‘There are paintings in the 1970s that have so much sex in them you practically know what people smell like. He did a lot of mad chasing of women, climbing up drainpipes and climbing in high windows of women’s houses he wanted to see, hanging from balconies by his fingertips. By the 1980s when he was in his sixties he was saving his strength. His paintings were better, bigger and made more quickly. What was the same was the mattress, beds and rags,’ she said.

  Blond Girl, Night Portrait (1980–5), Standing by the Rags (1988–9) and Lying by the Rags (1989–90) are three portraits of Sophie as a prisoner in his studio, but one who chose to be there because of his commanding presence. The last of these three was the triumphal conclusion of his relationship with her, and one of his most powerful nude portraits. Sophie lies uncomfortably and incongruously next to the rags he used to wipe his brushes. Just as Samuel Beckett buried actors in dustbins or made them stare ahead without blinking, their words going round and round in echoes and rhythms, all to express a greater truth about the human condition, so Lucian manipulated his sitters to stretch the tiny studio stage into a wider world of understanding. Lying by the Rags is a portrait in which half the painting is of wooden floorboards. The top area is of discarded sheets and Sophie is sandwiched in the middle, lying exposed, vulnerable and seemingly abandoned, certainly uncomfortable. It is a tough act of collaboration. The hard polished floorboards, rumpled sheets and soft flesh all contrast and jar. Lucian owns and controls this figure, who seems willing to submit to whatever is necessary. He is pushing abandon and willingness to the edge. In the end he sacrifices everything for paint. As does his model; it was the last time she sat for him.

  Lying by the Rags, 1989-90

  ‘I got to mind someone else sitting. I minded too much to go back again. We somehow did stay good friends until he died. He is the person outside my family that I have known longest and best, and been involved with for what seems for ever. But our affair was finished,’ she said.

  ‘Our rows were not physical but they felt physical, they felt violent. I tried to avoid them as much as I could. He was always testing you in some way and there were times when it was right to be passive and others when you had to stand up for yourself. There would then be a confrontation, an explosion. And that would mean often not speaking for a few years.’

  All this unfolded in a sealed vacuum; she could not reveal to others what was happening. His privacy remained sacrosanct. ‘He was fiercely, fiercely private. He had to protect himself entirely for his work. He did not want anyone to know where he lived. It’s like being a spy being with Lucian. He did not want people to know you worked for him. He was clever and would explain that he couldn’t work unless things were as he wanted them. I am quite secretive anyway but became even more so, partly because I wanted to be loyal.’

  Sophie eventually walked out for good because she could no longer tolerate the unsettling pressure of other women in his life. ‘There was someone who found out that I was sitting and they were so upset. She had been hospitalised and was almost suicidal. There were some ugly scenes where I really thought you could be killed. They were dangerous moments. Some of the people were quite violent,’ she said.

  Again, Lucian allowed chaos to exist around him but managed to keep a bit of himself at the still calm centre in order to stay focused on his work. Around him swirled hysteria, rows, falling-outs, new affairs, old affairs rekindled, debts and wild nights out. The only constant was the application of a paintbrush to canvas and the continued competing in his own mind with the greatest artists that had ever painted.

  * * *

  Unusual circumstances often played a part in producing new lovers. Alexi Williams-Wynn, a mature art student, met Lucian after she was almost knocked down by a speeding car in which he was a passenger. She caught a glimpse of his face, like a smudged Francis Bacon portrait, just before she was nearly hit. The next day, as a shot in the dark, she wrote asking to meet him. She became his lover and model for two years, moving in with him. ‘I only meet people through letters,’ he would quip. She was thirty-one at the time and had been a friend of the photographer and writer Bruce Bernard. Lucian was more than fifty years older than her but she found him irresistible. ‘I was transfixed by his energy, his manner, his physicality; he felt quite wild, even feral.’111 Straightaway he asked her to sit for a night painting. A day painting followed. Soon Alexi was sitting continuously. This required her to put her MA in art on hold. ‘It felt as if we were doing something constructive and amazing together, living, eating, sleeping. Painting, the central element of our life together, felt important and impactful. Sometimes we would get up at four in the morning having got to bed at midnight. I was the one who was exhausted half the time, not him. Occasionally, you could see a fragility,’ she said.

  It was a romance with much pleasure: trips to the ballet, weekends at Badminton staying with the Duke of Beaufort. It was odd meeting his children, Alexi felt, as she was younger than most of them. ‘There were some tense moments,’ she said, ‘but also they were often generous and welcoming, especially Bella and Esther.’

  The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer (2005) was the main legacy of their relationship. It is a portrait of Alexi crouched on the wooden floor, one arm caressing Lucian’s thigh, in a pose of submission and adoration, but with a suggestion of captivity. ‘I was quite keen for him to have other sitters to keep my life as normal as possible but he wasn’t having any of that. Lucian is quite greedy and he wants all of you. If you were five minutes late he would make it seem as if you didn’t want to be there at all, getting upset and cross.’ Lucian felt the threat of lost time keenly.

  ‘He would work outwards from a starting point. He was very concentrated, every brushstroke mixed separately in a long, laborious process. It was exhausting, as the four o’clock in the morning sessions meant leaving his Notting Hill house in darkness and getting a taxi to his Holland Park studio,’ she recalled. Her life was on hold while she was with Lucian. ‘I even gave up my mobile phone. He found any contact I ha
d with the outside world intrusive,’ she said. He was the maestro and wanted no competition or distractions. ‘He would give you a hundred per cent concentration – nothing else existed. It was always generous. He shared so much knowledge, poetry, songs, he was entertaining.’

  The Painter Surprised, a portrait of Lucian and Alexi Williams-Wynn, by David Dawson

  The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer, 2004-05

  She also noted odd things he did, like never saying goodbye. ‘He would just slam the phone down, not meaning anything except that the conversation was over,’ she said. He was not a hugger but he was very physical. ‘Everything interested him. It was part of finding out about the person,’ she said. He had a book about the sex lives of, among other creatures, dragonflies, as well as a copy of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love. And, as ever, he loved to share Flaubert’s letters, lying back in an armchair wearing his tortoiseshell spectacles, reading aloud. He would tell Alexi how he was by nature contrary, preferring reverse gear if urged to go forward. ‘I remember him telling me when he was told at school how to tie his shoelaces that he was never going to tie them like that again. And of course he never did. I didn’t really anticipate falling in love with him. You don’t really have a choice. These things happen. I was quite shocked when I realised I was totally involved in his world. It wasn’t a case of just being his model, it was much more complete. It felt totally at ease. We were lovers; it was very intimate. There was a huge sexual charge. You were there, involved in his life, which was around painting.’ There were new tastes, sounds and sensations; breakfasts of freshly squeezed carrot juice and sausages, his gentle voice reading aloud, his ability to turn heads, and to somehow turn the ordinary into magic, in art and life.

  The time that she could not control was the end of their affair. As usual it coincided with the completion of a picture: another portrait of Alexi, naked on a bed. She had not seen him for a couple of days and he was cross because he needed her in order to finish the picture. The power dynamic shifted. Press interest in Lucian and his young lover was increasing, the legendary Lothario and his young girlfriends fascinating the middle-market newspapers like the Daily Mail, who had placed a reporter outside Alexi’s flat for a week.

  When they did part, Alexi felt physically pained but understood. His power to change lives, as well as portray them, never seemed to dim. ‘He had a very acute sensitivity or receptivity to physical or emotional experience,’ she said. ‘I saw him as very independent and self-contained, but we possibly became too close.’ An illness Lucian had in 2005 also affected their relationship. ‘It wasn’t that I just didn’t go back to him. It was time for change, something I hadn’t anticipated nor took well. I was devastated.’ They stayed in touch after he moved on. Not a lot, but the connection was never severed. Her final farewell was at his deathbed.

  Naked Child Laughing, 1963

  CHAPTER TEN A Daughter’s Tale

  The public was fascinated by Lucian’s portraits of his sons and daughters, some of which were naked portraits. Journalists had a field day trying to explain the Freudian significance of children in their teens or early adulthood stripping bare for their father. His fourteen offspring included a novelist, a biro artist, a fashion designer, a journalist, a drugs advisor, a poet, and a sculptor. They rarely mixed, however. His four children by Suzy Boyt, a student he met at the Slade in the 1950s, and two by the writer, bohemian traveller and gardener Bernardine Coverley, were the main exception to this rule. Some were only vaguely aware of each other’s existence even after Lucian died. Some still do not know of at least one of their half-siblings.

  Over the years there were splits and spats, tight alliances and silent stand-offs, shared intimacies and dramatic events. His charm was magical, even hypnotic, and they all fell under his spell. He had a playfulness alongside the steel core of ambition. He always lived well. He may have at times been buried by debt, but he was never tight.

  He was the central focus of his family’s attention, deciding when he saw his children or not. Few had his telephone number. With the exception of the four children by Katherine McAdam, he did, however, paint all his acknowledged children. He painted their faces, in family groups, lying in bed with friends, holding their own children and, most controversially of all, in the case of six daughters and one son, naked.

  The first of these was in 1963, when Lucian asked Annie Freud, his eldest daughter, aged fourteen, to remove all her clothes and teenage inhibitions for a nude portrait. It was certainly risqué to use as a naked model a somewhat innocent and naive teenager. This was a momentous and controversial event in Annie’s life. Many felt it was reprehensible, if not downright immoral. Lucian did not care. The question of whether it would damage his daughter simply did not occur to him.

  On a worn sofa in his studio in Clarendon Crescent in Paddington, Annie perched with her leg jack-knifed into a position of protective modesty. In Naked Child Laughing she displays hints of emerging sexuality combined with gleeful innocence. It is a study in vulnerability and teenage allure, with her wild grin of spontaneous mirth. A good subject for any artist, but one with psychological edge, questioning the line between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour by a father towards his pubescent daughter.

  It was the first full-body nude that Lucian ever painted, and it caught a moment of intimacy and trust between them. ‘We actually had a wonderful time; it is the picture of me by Dad that I most admire,’ Annie said to me.112 He knew that nudity changed everything, bringing new levels of revelation and exposure. Or as he once put it, ‘I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.’

  At the time, Annie could not articulate very clearly how she felt, but later said that she could feel the collective prudish culture of Britain breathing down her neck, as well as being embarrassed since her boyfriend and her mother, both not unreasonably, felt that it was not right for her to pose naked. Analysis of what had occurred seemed beyond a fourteen-year-old’s emotional grasp and understanding.

  ‘I knew that some people felt what I did with my father was dangerous and inappropriate. But my dad felt it was all right and whatever he did at that time I felt was a hundred per cent OK. It was somehow forbidden and experimental, but there was nothing sexual or inappropriate in what happened. There was some hurt done, not intentionally, and it was nothing to do with sex – perhaps it was more an intrusion into innocence. Being naked in front of your father certainly went against the tide of opinion at the time. It was all very well for Dad to say it was all right. No one else felt it was,’ she said.

  Annie’s mother Kitty Garman, by then divorced from Lucian, was alarmed. ‘When I was sitting a letter arrived from Mum which he opened and then howled with laughter. In it she said that her father would have felt that it wasn’t right for Dad to paint nudes of me, and how it might make me unhappy. Dad thought that was terribly, terribly funny,’ said Annie.

  Lucian said that ‘Ep [Kitty’s father Jacob Epstein] would turn in his grave if he knew about Kitty’s letter,’ as Epstein had himself aroused hostility many years earlier by also challenging taboos surrounding the depiction of sexuality. Lucian argued that nakedness was simply a way to get to a more truthful portrait, scoffing at any suggestion that to paint his own children was in any way taboo – and of course he liked risk, and never cared what others thought. Opposition always made him dig his heels in.

  It was of little comfort to Kitty to have Lucian sneer that her own father would have swept aside any of her protective maternal instincts concerning their child’s exposure. ‘Lucian just thought that my grandfather would regard Mum as ridiculous over all that. He howled with laughter, which was difficult for me to handle,’ said Annie. ‘It is awful when any parents say unpleasant or disparaging things about each other,’ she added.

  Lucian simply did not engage with Annie or her mother about how the painting affected them. He was interested only in what worked f
or him as an artist; those around him, the people in his life, were who he wanted to paint. He had an artist’s objective view of nudity, having often painted naked models in life classes. He saw objections as bourgeois, the fruit of people’s own twisted minds. He was simply pursuing an artist’s licence to portray people in a way that mattered. That the subject happened to be his own teenage daughter and that she was naked was no one else’s business.

  The picture was the starting point for a career defined by his naked portraits. He created his own language with paint through prolonged observation of people. ‘I’m really interested in them as animals. Part of liking to work from them naked is for that reason. Because I can see more: see the forms repeating right through the body and often in the head as well. One of the most exciting things is seeing through the skin, to the blood and veins and markings,’ he explained.113

  In his picture of Annie, Lucian used paint with a new confidence; he used expressive, looser brushstrokes to paint Annie’s arm, wrist, knuckle and breast, conjuring up her gamine essence and most memorably her slightly expressive out-of-control rip of laughter. He used a shorthand of marks in paint, daubs and strokes, and so became freed from his previous rigid sense of control. Risk was implicit in the style, subject matter and context. His skill had deepened to make his images more pliable and responsive. He told Francis Bacon his paintings had not previously reflected feelings through the way he painted, which was why he welcomed this more expansive, bolder and looser style.

  Although Annie said that on the one hand that they had a wonderful time, other memories of sitting for her father tell a more complex story, and sometimes ‘it was not easy. I remember having long hair and wanting my hair to cover my nipples and Dad would lean forward and move my hair away with his paintbrush.’