Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  ‘I said it would be better if, like every other artist, you come to me and I sell it and take a commission. But he always wanted the money up front,’ said Kirkman. Essentially he needed a dealer with cash flow. After going without a dealer for two years, Lucian found one.

  Acquavella was on a different scale. He travelled by private jet. He never queried a price. He had a palace of a gallery in Manhattan. He was rich and patrician and already dealt in major pictures by Picasso and Matisse. Kirkman had always been unable to find anyone who wanted to give Lucian a commercial show in New York. That changed in 1992 when Acquavella put his muscle and money behind Lucian to propel him into the big time.

  Ironically, Acquavella had not initially wanted Lucian as a client. He had met him socially in London through the Duke of Beaufort, but after Lucian had left Kirkman, Acquavella had heard every good reason not to take him on. But overtures had been made and a lunch was set up at Wilton’s, the grand restaurant on Jermyn Street in St James’s famous for its lobsters and Dover sole. ‘I had no intention of really taking on Lucian because every English dealer told me he was doing these totally unsaleable pictures: huge, full-front male nudes, impossible to sell and he’s such a difficult person. My wife came along for lunch and I said to her, “How we gonna get out of this gracefully if he wants us to go back to the studio?”

  ‘Well, we had a very nice lunch and sure enough he invited us back. The first thing he pulled out was a Leigh Bowery painting and I went, “Man, this is different from what I had in mind, and from what you have done in the past.” The first was the one with his leg raised. Then one of Leigh’s monumental back, before finally he pulled out the big picture of Leigh in the red chair. I saw those three paintings and said, “Let’s make a deal.”’

  They shook hands. ‘“If it works we will keep doing it and if it doesn’t we’ll stop,” I told him and he just said, “Fine.”’ Lucian had a new dealer, his seventh. His first had been the Lefevre Gallery which exhibited his work in November 1944, and then the London Gallery and the Hanover Gallery in 1950 before he joined Marlborough in 1958. Anthony d’Offay and James Kirkman then followed. The new deal remained how it had always been. The moment the final brushstroke was applied to a painting Lucian wanted a cheque. Whatever profit was made by his dealer never bothered Lucian. He wanted cash fast.

  There was one slight hitch. Lucian owed money to a Northern Irish bookie, and asked Acquavella to sort it out. He had often asked his dealers to sort out similar financial headaches in his life. Lucian said that the bookie’s name was Alfie McLean, and that he had bought many of his paintings. Acquavella duly arranged lunch with McLean, whom he recognised at once as ‘the Big Man’ in Lucian’s portrait of that name from the 1970s. ‘When I sat down with Alfie McLean at the end of the meal I asked what Lucian owed him. I was thinking of some preposterous figure like £100,000. When he spurted out £2.7 million I was blown away.’ Acquavella, however, kept to his word and the debt vanished. It was the ultimate act of confidence in his new artist. ‘I made Alfie buy a picture at a better price, and so on. We worked it out,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you have ever met Alfie – a very big man, I mean really big … hands and head, a big character. Well, it was a big debt too.’

  It was the start of Freud’s international career, moving from a niche British artist onto the global stage. Acquavella offered the picture of Bowery called Nude with Leg Up (1992) to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC for $800,000. To sweeten the deal he gave them two years to pay. Lucian got his cash immediately. Acquavella next persuaded the Metropolitan Museum of Art to buy the second Leigh Bowery. Twenty years later, of course, those pictures have an estimated value of $30 million each.

  The advantage for Acquavella was that because Lucian had had no dealer for almost two years, he had a lot of pictures to sell. ‘Once I took his work to New York and I started living with it I realised that he was an unbelievably special artist who had found his time. When Francis Bacon died, Lucian exploded on the market,’ he said. Freud’s pictures had grown in size and scale. They were more imposing and more monumental. Lucian had joined the top table.

  In December 1993, the Metropolitan Museum staged a Freud exhibition and at the same time Acquavella showed new works in his gallery. It was all so different from the first major American show at the Hirshhorn in 1987, when no New York gallery or museum wanted his work. This time everything sold. Big-shot collectors like the financial titans Henry Kravis and Joe Lewis bought paintings, as well as corporate players like the Chicago Institute of Art.

  Acquavella was delighted to hear young American artists say they had felt they could not be considered cutting edge or truly contemporary by doing figurative painting, but Freud changed all that with his ability to create surprise and tension. ‘They could stand up and compete with anything that was being done in the contemporary world here, a Jeff Koons or any other artist in America. You put a Leigh Bowery there and you’re not going to walk by without taking a look. Lucian needed to be established in this country as he was basically unknown. Our gallery has been here a long time and he fitted into our programme. I also just liked the pictures and if no one had bought the Bowery pictures I would have been very happy to have owned them myself,’ he said.

  The transformation into a global phenomenon reached its peak with a painting of Sue Tilley, or Big Sue, introduced to Lucian by Bowery. Like him she was enormous. She worked at the Islington Job Centre by day and posed for Lucian by night. The art market was electrified when Benefits Supervisor Sleeping sold for £17.2 million in May 2008 to Roman Abramovich. The painting was not sold by Acquavella, but his preparatory work for Lucian had set the pattern. Lucian was by then an international star.

  Anthony d’Offay could not have been more gracious on seeing the man whose work he had supported early on in his career do so well. He said: ‘It was thrilling that Lucian went from a little artist at the Marlborough into a great world master. In his last fifteen years he conquered the world.’

  Lucian was always a rogue trader, in that he never had a signed contract and liked to be able to sell his work on the side. Jay Jopling – the most powerful contemporary art dealer in Britain as the owner of White Cube, the gallery which represents most of the once so-called YBAs (Young British Artists), such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marc Quinn as well as older artists like Gilbert and George – met Lucian in odd circumstances. A dapper Old Etonian with signature ‘Joe 90’ glasses, Jopling had been having a quiet drink in Green Street, a dining club in Mayfair, when Lucian entered the room and attacked him. ‘He kicked me on the shins, grabbed the girl I was talking to and walked out with her,’ he said. Their only other connection had been when Jopling had written to him when he had been a student at Edinburgh University, to ask him if he would help with an arts project to raise money for Save the Children. Jay followed up by going round to his house and ringing his doorbell. He was bellowed at with a simple message: ‘GO AWAY.’

  When Jay set up his first gallery on Duke Street in 1993, he invited Lucian to visit. ‘Dear Lucian, It has been a long time since you kicked me …’ began his letter. The charm offensive worked and Lucian paid a two-minute visit, afterwards driving Jopling back (in typically hair-raising fashion) to see new paintings at his studio.

  Seven years later Jopling bought Naked Portrait (1999), a hardcore Freud nude, and subsequently sold it to the Museum of Western Australia. He was then sent a close-up of Leigh Bowery’s cock and balls, and sold that. Lucian befriended him, calling him ‘Jop’, and would ring for lengthy chats and occasional ventures into the outside world. Jopling accompanied him to see his daughter Annie on one of his rare visits to her flat in south-east London. Lucian partly used him as some sort of emotional buffer to dilute any difficult conversations. On the professional side, Jopling encouraged him to paint another self-portrait in the style of Rembrandt, and they flew over to Holland to the Rijksmuseum and spent a wonderful day looking at pictures. On the way back, Lucian had a slight memo
ry lapse and said, Jop, where are we?’

  ‘We are in Schiphol in Amsterdam, Holland,’ he reassured him.

  Lucian clicked back into top form ‘Ah Holland, Dutch-fucking …’ He was convinced that it was when two people have sex with another at the same time. Jay explained that an alternative meaning was when someone gives you a cigarette from which to light your own. ‘It was brilliant,’ he said, ‘he just flashed back.’ Doing deals with Lucian was never grey.

  The biggest winner among everyone who ever did business for him, though, was Alfie McLean, the bookie. He had taken the biggest gamble of his life by swapping Lucian’s gambling debts for pictures that eventually became worth tens of millions of pounds. He ended up owning twenty-five paintings, possibly the largest collection of Lucian’s work in private hands.

  The Big Man (1976–7) is an archetypal Freud work, mesmerising, brooding and remarkable for a portrait of what is essentially just a ruddy-faced man in a suit. It could have looked like every corporation’s commissioned portrait of their company chairman, but this picture is scarily hypnotic. McLean’s fingers are entwined in his lap, the stuffing in the arm of the black leather armchairs bursts out, a mirror behind him creates a reflection of the back of his head with a quirky, unsettling perspective. He stares ahead, his enormous physical presence almost squeezed out of the frame, a brute force suggested by the sheer bulk of his body, his legs apart, thighs thick, fingers like fleshy truncheons. Every fold of his tight-fitting suit adds to the tension of this very bulky man trapped in this space, lost in his thoughts as he is scrutinised. A sense of physical threat hovers; this is not someone to fall out with over bad debts, and luckily they never did.

  This portrait was one of the pictures in the first Freud show that I had also seen at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1978 when I knew nothing about Freud or his life. There was a secondary portrait of him in the show titled Head of the Big Man. Back then there was no knowledge or hint about who he was. He was dressed in a gangsterish manner, a sort of muscular Sunday best. Questions hovered, but I had no answers, and the gallery said simply that the subjects were people the artist knew. It was another Lucian secret, his private life, his hinterland, all his troubles sealed beneath the painted surface.

  The Big Man was part of Lucian’s life for more than thirty years, and they became close friends after trusting each other over large sums of money. McLean was the most unlikely modern art collector. In September 2003, Lucian, the Duke of Beaufort and Andrew Parker Bowles travelled in a small private plane to view the bookie’s bounty in McLean’s modest family house in Northern Ireland, the ordinariness of the dwelling belying its extraordinarily valuable contents, which any national gallery would have liked to own.

  McLean was something of a legend in Ulster, born in Randalstown, growing up in Ballymena and staying loyal to the County Antrim town where he died and was buried in May 2006. When Northern Ireland legalised betting shops long before the rest of the United Kingdom, he became one of the pioneers of the betting industry.

  Painting remained an activity for Lucian that was equally bound up in risk. Surprise motivated him. ‘I am doing what I find most interesting, what amuses and entertains me. If I knew exactly what I was going to paint in the next minute why would I ever want to do that? It would be so pointless,’ he said, repeating his view that ‘gambling is only exciting if you don’t have any money. I used to get given very good credit because I went about with very rich people.’

  Lord Rothschild was one of those rich people and remembered a Pinteresque encounter when Lucian told him: ‘I’m in trouble with pressing debts to the Kray brothers. If I do not give them £1,000 they will cut my hand off.’ Rothschild recalled: ‘I said I would loan him the money on two conditions. First, that he never ask me for a loan again and second, that he did not pay me back the money. He accepted the conditions but ten days later a large envelope came through my letter box with £1,000 in cash and a note saying thanks. And he never asked me again.’120

  This was no solitary request. The Duke of Beaufort, one of Lucian’s oldest friends, was also tapped up. ‘He rang me at about four in the morning and said “David, can I come round? I’ve got something to ask,” and I said, “Well, yes, but you’d better hurry up because I have to go to the airport to catch a plane.” So he came round and said he needed fifteen hundred quid. It was quite a sum to raise then, and so I said, “Well, why do I have to give you £1,500?” He said because if I haven’t produced it by twelve o’clock they’re going to cut my tongue out,” and that this was irrefutable. You couldn’t say, “No, I’m sorry.” They [gangsters] excited him and perhaps he relished the idea that he’d got the better of them, but I doubt whether he did really.’121 This was Lucian as ever travelling vertically between social extremes, borrowing money from a duke to try to stave off threats from the most depraved gangsters in London. He always somehow managed to square this bizarre circle.

  Sitting in Clarke’s in his eighties nursing a cup of tea and chiselling pieces of nougat to nibble, he was then far removed from the risk, remorse and exhilaration of blowing money recklessly on mere chance. He never regretted losing, and neither did he regret giving up gambling. ‘I only look forward, never back,’ he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Offspring

  There was a thirty-six-year gap between the birth of Lucian’s eldest child, Annie, born in 1948 towards the end of George VI’s reign, and his youngest, Frank Paul, born in 1984, the thirty-second year of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.

  Frank is a quietly spoken modest young man with a West Country accent. He has his father’s narrow face and inquisitive, darting eyes. He was essentially brought up by his maternal grandmother in Cambridge, seeing his father intermittently. He saw more of his mother, Celia, who also painted obsessively in her London studio. At Cambridge he read languages, and speaks Russian and German.

  ‘When I was little I very much admired Dad, but found it hard to relate to him because he and I lived in such different ways. Our tastes were very different, one extravagant, the other plain. He liked very posh restaurants and to eat oysters and mussels. I liked plain food like burgers and chips or pasta. I liked videos and computer games and became really obsessed by them.

  ‘I found it hard to relate to the fact that he lived in a very sparsely decorated flat and never seemed to watch television or play computer games, or do any of the things that I was into, and felt were pre-requisites for fun.

  ‘But he seemed very true to himself and never altered his behaviour in any way to please the person he was talking to, which I admired greatly. I remember coming to his flat when he had just finished Benefits Supervisor Sleeping which stood on an easel on the paint-splattered floor, and he asked me what I thought of it. My mum tells me that I said I thought it was disgusting but very good. He liked that.’

  The longest time Lucian spent with Frank was during a series of sittings. ‘There were a lot of silences between us when we were alone and I found that quite awkward, but he was entirely comfortable with that. I remember pointing out what I perceived as an awkward silence and he said he didn’t find it awkward at all. I felt quite small at that point; I wanted to be someone who was equally comfortable with silence. I think I am more so now.

  ‘I remember admiring him more as he never seemed to care what other people thought. I remember telling a friend of mine when I was about seventeen and at school how my dad had heard that “porca Madonna” was an incredibly offensive thing to say in Italy and he had decided to test this by shouting it out in a restaurant and was thrown out. My friend replied, “Wow, I wish my dad was like that.” I remember feeling immensely proud.’

  One singular childhood memory of him is being tickled by Lucian, ‘which I didn’t particularly enjoy, but I was quite helpless to stop. I felt too awkward to tell him. I remember looking pleadingly at my mother and hoping she wouldn’t leave the room, but being a bit too scared to announce that I wanted her to stay. She just smiled and she did leave the room and he di
d tickle me.’

  Frank had his father’s telephone number for a short while, but rarely rang him. ‘I don’t think I ever called him for a chat. I felt it was a very different relationship from what other people had with their fathers, but I never felt particularly upset about that,’ he said.

  He always used Paul as his surname. ‘I assumed it was my mum’s decision. She said she wanted me to be able to choose if I wanted to associate myself publicly with the Freud family. She thought it would be nice to have the choice to be more discreet about it if I wanted, which I think was a good decision,’ he said.

  Frank was twenty-six when his father died. There were thirteen other children who Lucian acknowledged as his, and to whom he left an equal portion of his fortune. He may have fathered as many as thirty children according to estimates by his friends (some journalists have put the figure nearer forty), with many of these children presumably discreetly folded into the existing families of some of the women with whom he had affairs. ‘My reckoning at one time was that we could count twenty-four children who were his,’ said Lucinda Lambton, Bindy’s daughter (who did not have children with him).

  Despite threatening newspapers with libel writs to dampen speculation, rumours about his priapic propensity and fabled fecundity were always circulating. As we sat in Clarke’s, over breakfast, he shared his thoughts on fatherhood.

  GG: ‘Did you aim to have lots of children?’

  LF: ‘No, I never thought about it.’

  GG: ‘Did you want children?’

  LF: ‘No. I don’t mean, “Oh God, children!” but it seemed quite exciting when women were pregnant. I don’t like babies. I think partly because they’re so vulnerable. But I’m very good with older children.’

  GG: ‘Was it impossible for you to have a family life and be a painter?’