What if, so many years after the theft, the portrait could somehow be retrieved?
A publicity campaign was planned. There was reason to think it might succeed. This wasn’t known until after planning for the campaign had begun, but under the German statute of limitations, a crime of this kind cannot be prosecuted after twelve years. So the hope was that the thief, or thieves, could be enticed into returning the painting without fear of penalty.
Andrea Rose of the British Council and her husband, William Feaver, a longtime friend of Freud and the curator of the upcoming retrospective, together concocted an idea: a bold and attention-getting WANTED poster. Freud loved it. He drew a design for it on the spot. The finished poster [see Fig. 1] had WANTED in large red lettering above a reproduction of the stolen portrait of Bacon, in place of the usual mugshot. There was also a generous reward: 300,000 deutsche marks (around US $150,000). The idea, said Freud, was “to make it absolutely plain, like those posters in Westerns which I’ve always liked very much.”
The poster’s finished design, based on Freud’s initial sketch, added a brief explanatory text in German and a phone number. The image of the painting itself was black and white. Since the portrait’s disappearance, Freud had never allowed it to be reproduced in color—“partly,” he explained, “because there was no decent color reproduction, partly as a kind of mourning…I thought it was a rather jokey equivalent to a black armband. You know—there it isn’t!” Two thousand five hundred of these posters were printed and then plastered all over Berlin. They were also widely reproduced in newspapers and magazines. Freud even put out an uncharacteristically deferential statement to the press: “Would the person who holds the painting kindly consider allowing me to show it in my exhibition next June?”
PRIVATE COLLECTION / © THE LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES.
FIG 1. Lucian Freud, WANTED poster, 2001 (color litho).
The poster, the media campaign, the scrupulously polite plea…none of it had any effect. The Tate retrospective went ahead without the portrait. The campaign may have failed, but for a long time Freud kept the poster prominently displayed at the entrance to his studio. It was the last thing he saw before entering each day and getting down to work.
—
THEFTS OF ART ARE always perplexing. Even when they leave behind useful evidence, what’s really left behind, the heart of the matter, is always an absence. All great paintings have an aura, which derives, in part, from their singularity. There is only one Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt. There is only one The Concert by Vermeer. There is only one Chez Tortoni by Manet. All three were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and their absence, a quarter century later, is still marked by empty frames on the museum’s walls, as if the aura could somehow continue to exist even if the paintings themselves do not.
When the painting in question is a portrait—certainly if it is a good one—its aura, its special quiddity, is enhanced. The singularity of the image is matched, and deepened, by the singularity of the person depicted. So a stolen portrait can amount to a confusing kind of double loss. One strives to orchestrate its return, but what exactly is it one wants to retrieve? The painting? Or earlier versions of the two people involved—the sitter, of course, but also the painter himself?
In his own portraiture, Lucian Freud always seemed determined to treat these two kinds of singularity as one. “My idea of portraiture,” he once said, “came from dissatisfaction with portraits that resembled people. I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.” It was as if he was determined to reenact the myth of Pygmalion, the mythical artist who fell in love with the sculpture he had carved.
How sharp, then, was the loss of the portrait of Bacon, which one critic, Lawrence Gowing, had described as exerting “the transfixing spell of an image that is tantamount to the thing itself”?
Freud was a truth-teller. He detested illusions and had little time for sentimentality. He usually claimed not to care about the whereabouts of his pictures. But he cared a lot more about this one. As much as anything, it was a question of quality. This small, ostensibly conventional portrait was electrifying. And he knew it.
But its loss mattered to him for another, more personal reason (although it is a reason that is related in every way to the picture’s quality). Very simply, it represented the most important relationship in his career.
—
AS A YOUNG MAN, Freud was mercurial, ardent and unpredictable, attracted by danger, and, to most people who encountered him, extremely attractive. His famous family had relied on high-level intercessions to escape Hitler’s Germany in 1933. When he first arrived in England, he was ten years old. He spoke English, but not confidently, and kept largely to himself. Wild and secretive, he had a high-spirited, almost demotic side, and a fierce aversion to other people’s expectations. He was sent with his brothers to a progressive boarding school—Dartington—in Devon. But attending classes was voluntary, so Freud avoided them. He liked to sleep in the stables with the horses. In the mornings, he would ride the friskiest ones to wear them out for those who rode them subsequently. He later said his first amorous feelings were directed at the groom who looked after the horses, and he filled his early sketchbooks with portraits of horses and of boys riding, kissing, and generally worshipping horses.
For this alert and slender boy, who obeyed only his own impulses and had absolutely no interest in social niceties, animals made for more intimate and responsive company than humans. In 1938, at Bryanston, a school in Dorset where, only four years previously, an Anglo-German youth camp had been established to try to forge links between the Boy Scouts and the Hitler Youth, Freud was expelled for dropping his trousers and exposing his rear end in a street in Bournemouth. He loved to draw. When he was sixteen, his parents enrolled him at the Central School of Art (he earned his place with a sculpture of a three-legged horse carved from sandstone), but he gave up after only two or three terms, bored by the school’s rigid approach. His own drawings were cramped, fanciful, childish, their pressurized lines crisscrossing the page like cracks in thin ice. It was only when he enrolled, in 1939, in the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham in Essex, the intimate and informal art school run by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, that he found an environment that felt right. Morris’s awkward, intense painting manner—so pointedly devoid of virtuosity that it suggests a perverse kind of pride—had a huge influence on Freud.
Freud had two brothers, but he was his mother’s favorite—and he knew it. As a young man, he acted as he always would: with the flair and impunity, but also the tenderness and sensitivity, of someone whose mother adored him. “I like the anarchic idea of coming from nowhere,” he once said. “But I think that’s probably because I had a very steady childhood.”
The young Freud’s effect on those in his vicinity was remarkable. His family connection to the founder of psychoanalysis undoubtedly enhanced his allure, especially during what was then the heyday of Surrealism in Britain (Surrealism arose directly from Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind). But the effect he had on most people was not at all social, much less intellectual: It was visceral. Lawrence Gowing recognized a “coiled vigilance in him, a sharpness in which one could imagine venom.” John Richardson, the art historian who later became Picasso’s biographer, was amused to see Freud resent the attention his exhibitionism triggered. John Russell, meanwhile, likened him to Tadzio, the young object of infatuation in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice: “He was the magnificent adolescent who seemed by his very presence not only to symbolize creativity but to keep the plague at bay…Everything was expected of him.”
While still a teenager, Freud met the poet Stephen Spender through a friend, Tony Hyndman, who was Spender’s lover. When, in 1936, Spender chose to marry Inez Pearn, Hyndman joined the International Brigades and went to Spain to fight in the civil war. Spender followed him there in or
der to rescue him from a charge of desertion. And although his mission was successful (Hyndman could have been executed), it killed his marriage. Early the following year, 1940, Spender visited Freud and his art-student friend David Kentish, at Freud’s invitation, in the north of Wales. The two teenagers were spending the winter drawing and painting in a small and isolated miner’s cottage in Capel Curig. Spender, who had taught both boys at Bryanston, had just published a novel, The Backward Son, and was in the midst of setting up the literary magazine Horizon with Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson. He brought along a publisher’s dummy, which Freud, drawing by lamplight, proceeded to fill with antic drawings in the “high-spirited, demotic” vein Freud said Spender so admired in W. H. Auden—and which Freud in turn admired in Spender. “He paints all day and I write,” Spender wrote in a letter. “Lucian is the most intelligent person I have met since I first knew Auden at Oxford, I think. He looks like Harpo Marx and is amazingly talented—and also wise, I think.”
The drawings in the dummy book are full of running jokes and sly allusions, and they match the tone of letters exchanged between Freud and Spender around the same time. These letters, which came to light in 2015, strongly suggest that Freud and the poet, who was twice his age, were in a sexual relationship (Freud signs the letters, for instance, with the saucy pseudonyms “Lucianos Fruititas” and “Lucio Fruit”)—although it’s also possible they were simply flirting.
Along with the joke drawings, Freud made several portraits and self-portraits that winter. One self-portrait was included in an early issue of Horizon that spring. It appeared in the same issue as the art critic Clement Greenberg’s breakthrough essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”
—
FREUD MARRIED JUST TWICE—both times in his twenties. But over the course of his life he sired somewhere in the vicinity of thirteen children, and had so many lovers that even the most determined biographer would struggle to make a full accounting. Still, at the age of seventy-nine, Freud insisted that he had fallen in love only two or three times. “I’m not talking about habits, nor am I talking about hysterics,” he said. “I’m talking about actual, complete, absolute concern, where everything about the other person interests, worries, or pleases you.”
Who, one wonders, were those two or three? It’s not easy to say. But Freud’s first serious girlfriend—“the first person I got keen on,” as he later put it—was Lorna Wishart, a wealthy, adventurous, magnetic young mother of three, who was described by Peggy Guggenheim as “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” Lorna was eleven years older than Freud, who commented later that everyone liked her: “Even,” he added “my mother.”
Lorna married the publisher Ernest Wishart when she was just sixteen. One of her two children by him was the artist Michael Wishart, who was born in 1928. A third child, Yasmin, was born to the poet Laurie Lee, with whom Lorna had a long-running affair, before meeting Freud, in the late 1930s and ’40s. When Lee went off to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, Lorna reportedly used to send him one-pound notes dabbed in Chanel No. 5. Michael, for his part, remembered that his mother was “often dressed for dancing in clinging sequins” when she said good night to him. Yasmin described her as “amoral, really, but everyone forgave her because she was such a life-giver.”
Freud supplanted Lee in Lorna’s affections in 1944. He was just twenty-one; Lorna was in her early thirties. The affair had a huge effect on the young artist. Lorna was not only older and more experienced, she was wild, romantic, and unpredictable—inspiring company for any ardent young man. Yasmin later wrote that her mother was “a dream to any creative artist because she got them going. She was a natural muse, an inspiration.”
Freud painted Lorna twice in 1945—once with a daffodil, the next time with a tulip. From a taxidermist in Piccadilly, she bought for Freud a stuffed zebra’s head, which became a kind of talisman for him. He called it his “prize possession” and used it in a painting, which Lorna promptly acquired from his very first gallery show. The picture was a whimsical, surrealist tableau, featuring a tattered couch, a top hat, a palm, and the zebra’s head (its black stripes turned red) protruding through a hole in the wall.
It wasn’t long, however, before Lorna discovered that Freud had been conducting an affair with a young actress. She promptly left him, and although Freud tried hard to win her back—on one occasion threatening to fire a gun outside her house if she wouldn’t come out (and then actually doing so), on another presenting her with a white kitten in a brown paper bag—his efforts were all to no avail.
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FREUD WAS INTRODUCED TO FRANCIS BACON by the older painter Graham Sutherland in 1945. At the time, Freud was living in a condemned building in Paddington. “I used to go down and see [Sutherland] in Kent,” Freud said in 2006. “Being young and extremely tactless, I said to him: ‘Who do you think is the best painter in England?’ which, of course, he felt himself to be, and was beginning to be regarded to be. He said, ‘Oh, someone you’d never have heard of. He’s the most extraordinary man. He spends his time gambling in Monte Carlo, and then occasionally he comes back. If he does a picture, he generally destroys it,’ and so on. He sounded interesting. So I wrote to him, or called round, and that’s how I met him.”
Sutherland’s appraisal had not been wrong: Bacon, who was in his early thirties, was surging to life in these years. He may have felt racked, as he later professed, by self-doubt. But he was producing paintings that had already set him apart. Troubled, and troubling, works in which alert observers saw something almost reptilian stirring to life, full of menace.
In fact, according to Freud’s biographer William Feaver, they may first have met, by arrangement, at London’s Victoria Station, on their way down to Kent to stay with the Sutherlands for the weekend. It’s fun to try to imagine the two of them on that train trip. Exotic creatures, both. Freud with his preternatural alertness, his air of being unbeholden to anyone, his disorienting combination of shyness and theatricality. Bacon mischievous and ironic, his brutal bluntness somehow in service to his even more devastating charm. The war not yet over. Sutherland’s double-edged presence, encouraging yet daunting, hovering oedipally over the meeting.
Both men were striking to look at: Bacon jowly but handsome; Freud’s face narrower, pointier, with an aquiline nose, delicate lips, and tousled hair. Incredible eyes, all four—everyone commented on that. Freud was already, at this stage, an object of interest among a host of older gay poets, writers, and artists, including Spender and Watson, and the painters Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, his teachers at the East Anglian School in Dedham. These men, and others like them, were largely responsible for sustaining young, unconventional artists in England during the war years and immediately afterward. Freud’s relationship to them, and to many gay or bisexual men of his own generation—including Wishart, John Minton, Cecil Beaton, and Richardson—was close, curious, sympathetic.
So perhaps a sexual charge was in the air. But what was the conversation like? Was it guarded, hesitant, latently competitive? Or was it all a more innocent form of seduction, in the context of a trip that was essentially a lark? We don’t know the answers to such questions. Both men are dead. It was a mistake, one might think, not to ask—to ask for more, to ask again. But perhaps those who did ask quickly discovered that that, in fact, was the mistake. In so many ways, after all, it was precisely the inability to know, to truly pin down character, motive, feeling, or social status—all the qualities upon which traditional portraiture had for centuries been based—that soon became the premise both artists began to work from.
However it happened, each had found something in the other, something immensely compelling. Three decades later, they were no longer on speaking terms. But now, the two men began to see each other on an almost daily basis.
—
TWO YEARS AFTER FREUD split from Lorna Wishart, Lorna was magnanimous enough to introduce him to her niece, Kitty, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epste
in. Kitty shared her aunt’s large eyes, if not her confidence and vivacity. She was shy, which was part of what Freud, who also had a shy, evasive streak, liked about her. They became lovers, and they married in 1948, the same year the first of their two children, Annie, was born. They lived together in London’s St John’s Wood, just west of Regent’s Park. Their home was a half-hour walk from Freud’s previous home in Delamere Terrace, where he now kept his studio.
The split arrangement facilitated Freud’s developing penchant for amorous complexity. Still married to Kitty, he began an intermittent but long-running affair with the painter Anne Dunn. Dunn was the daughter of the Canadian steel magnate Sir James Dunn. She sat for a portrait by Freud in 1950, the same year she was preparing to marry Michael Wishart, Lorna’s son. A party was planned to celebrate the wedding. A three-night bash, it later became legendary and was remembered by David Tennant as “the first real party since the war.” Wishart, the groom, was addicted to opium at the time. In his memoir, High Diver, he recalled that the room in South Kensington in which the wedding party took place was “cavernous” and “sparsely furnished” with “dowdy chintz and velvet sofas and divans.” It had, he wrote, “an air of diminished grandeur, a certain forlorn sense of Edwardian splendor in retreat.”
John Richardson, who was there, remembered it as “the coming out party for a new variety of bohemia.” Among the guests, he wrote, were “members of Parliament and fellows of All Souls [the Oxford college], as well as ‘rough trade,’ slutty debutantes, cross-dressers.” Wishart boasted that “we bought two hundred bottles of Bollinger for two hundred people, and soon had to send out for more as our gatecrashers snowballed…I hired a hundred gold chairs and a piano. For three nights and two days we danced.”
The Art of Rivalry Page 3
