The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

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  INFLUENCE IS EROTIC. Freud was young, and he was surely susceptible—ready to be seduced. And yet, even as he admitted Bacon’s example, he now found himself caught up in a struggle to hold true to his own course. He became increasingly aware of what distinguished them, of the differences between them, in temperament, talent, and sensibility, that were most likely unbridgeable. You can hear the ambivalence—the wariness and nervous excitement—in his reactions, remembered many decades later: Bacon “talked about packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me,” he said, “and I knew it was a million miles from anything I could ever do.”

  There was, too, another complicating factor, which was that, for a long time, Freud very much depended on Bacon’s largesse. Bacon would regularly pull out a bundle of banknotes, saying, “I’ve got rather a lot of these, I thought you might like some of them.”

  “It would make a complete difference to me for three months,” said Freud.

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  THE PRESSURE ON FREUD through these years is easy to imagine, impossible to measure. He knew Bacon was ahead of him, artistically speaking. But it was not as if his achievements up to that time counted for nothing. In many ways it was he, and not Bacon, who had been first out of the gates. He had shown his work in London before Bacon. And although he wasn’t known outside a small circle of supporters, many people—people who mattered—had been paying close attention to him. Peggy Guggenheim, who would go on to play a critical role in the discovery of Jackson Pollock, had displayed some of his very early drawings (Freud’s mother, according to Feaver, had pressed them on her) in a show devoted to art by children at her London gallery in 1938. More significantly, Kenneth Clark, the art historian and director of the National Gallery in London, had shown sustained interest in his work.

  And then there was Peter Watson. The disenchanted heir to a margarine fortune and a well-known collector of European moderns, Watson had the face, said one acquaintance, “of a frog just as he is turning into a prince.” Also a taste for young and handsome men. He was one of the richest men in Britain, he dressed in beautiful double-breasted suits, and he hated pretension and pomposity. Cyril Connolly, who adored him, described Watson as “the most intelligent and generous and discreet of patrons, the most creative of connoisseurs.” His “cure for boredom,” wrote Michael Wishart, “was to interest the young. No one was better at it.” He forged crucial links during the isolating war years between his little circle of British protégés and what was going on in Europe and America. And he cultivated and championed the young Freud.

  As a teenager, Freud spent hours at Watson’s Palace Gate flat, where he was exposed to a collection that included pictures by Klee, de Chirico, Gris, and Poussin. Watson gave him books, too, including one he treasured for the rest of his life: Geschichte Aegyptens, a book of photographs of Egyptian antiquities, which William Feaver has described as “Freud’s pillow book, his painter’s companion—his bible…” Watson offered to pay Freud’s art school fees, and found him a flat to live in.

  And yet for all the interest Freud generated—as much by the unpredictable force of his personality as by his work—he was not producing, even by the end of the 1940s, work that was in any way revolutionary.

  Bacon was. Aside from the few times they sat for each other, the two men never, according to Feaver, actually watched each other at work. But it was clear to Freud that Bacon’s approach was really the antithesis of his. Where Freud labored over his portraits for weeks and months, Bacon’s painting, when it succeeded, relied on stealth and surprise. Through a combination of chance and high emotion—fury, frustration, despair—he saw himself unlocking “valves of sensation.” But he also described feelings of hopelessness as he painted, blurting out that he would “just take paint and just do almost anything to get out of the formula of making a kind of illustrative image—I mean, I just wipe it all over with a rag or use a brush or rub it with something or anything or throw turpentine and paint and everything else onto the thing to try to break the willed articulation of the image, so that the image will grow, as it were, spontaneously and within its own structure.”

  Thirty years later, when the two men had fallen out, Bacon told a friend, “You know, the trouble with Lucian’s work is that it’s realistic without being real.” If the dismissal was unjust in 1988, it may have struck closer to the bone in the 1940s and ’50s, when Bacon would not even have needed to say it aloud: With his conventional working methods and his work’s fidelity to appearances, Freud probably felt accusations of backwardness, of timidity, of naïveté and provincialism emanating from his friend and mentor as a kind of background hum.

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  IN 1946, FREUD WENT to recently liberated Paris, where Watson provided him with introductions and money. He was introduced to Pablo Picasso by Picasso’s nephew, the printmaker Javier Vilató. The following year, after a five-month hiatus on the Greek island of Poros, he met Kitty Garman, they married, and Freud began a series of portraits of Kitty that are now among his most famous works. Some were rendered in pastel, others in oil. They have unadorned, slyly romantic titles: Girl with Leaves, Girl in a Dark Jacket, Girl with Roses, and Girl with a Kitten [see Plate 3].

  Coming within two years of Freud’s first encounter with Bacon, they announce a new ambition in his work and a sudden, startling intensification in feeling. They generate and somehow contain a psychological pressure that was entirely new in his work, and foreshadow the portrait of Bacon.

  Michael Wishart described sitting to Freud “as a trial comparable to undergoing delicate eye surgery. One is obliged to remain absolutely motionless for what seems an eternity. [Lucian] was distressed if I blinked while he was painting my thumb.” One wants to believe he is exaggerating. But in the Kitty portraits, the model’s unforgettable, almond-shaped eyes seem swollen and brimming from the strain of not blinking. Kitty’s eyes seem not only to mirror but also to amplify the artist’s own intense scrutiny. Not only every eyelash but every stray hair, every tiny crease in the lower lip, is minutely rendered. The result is a surface tension, a sort of psychological equivalent to a meniscus stretched across the entire picture’s surface, that barely contains a latent, uncanny force. “It seems impossible,” wrote Lawrence Gowing, “that she should not have been trembling.”

  What Freud captures in these portraits is Kitty’s acute awareness of being watched. In the intensity of his scrutiny—you feel it most in the masterpiece of the series, Girl with a Kitten, which shows Kitty throttling the cat—you detect a threat. Not a threat of violence, but a threat to the sitter’s self-possession—which is of course one working definition of love.

  The portraits of Kitty are truly emotional exchanges—depictions not just of things (dead birds, sprigs of gorse, unripe tangerines, and the like) but of relationships. And these, of course, are never stable. For all their troubling tension, then, and for all the labored fastidiousness of their rendering, the Kitty portraits were a massive advance for Freud. Perhaps we can also glimpse in them some of Freud’s own tension at this time—a tension arising not just from his vexed relationship with Kitty, who was soon pregnant with their first child, but from the pressure of trying not to be blown off course by Bacon.

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  BACON PARTIALLY REMOVED HIMSELF from Freud’s orbit in 1946. He moved to Monte Carlo. It was a place he already knew well, and it was to be his principal residence for the next four years. He and Freud saw each other intermittently in London and Paris. But most of these years they spent apart.

  Bacon adored the atmosphere of Monte Carlo. “It has a kind of grandeur,” he once said, “even if you might call it a grandeur of futility.” This grandeur, and the business of gambling generally, chimed with Bacon’s philosophy of life, which over the next few decades Freud eagerly adapted to his own more instinctive way of negotiating things. “As existence is so banal,” Bacon liked to say, “you may as well try and make a kind of grandeur of it rather than be nursed
to oblivion.” To Freud, this seemed instinctively right. And yet grandiosity was not, in the end, quite his style.

  Banality was ubiquitous in the cafés and bars of the Côte d’Azur, which Bacon toured in the company of Eric Hall. His descriptions of these places made them sound like stage sets for plays by Beckett or Sartre: “After a while the boredom was so extraordinary you simply sat there and couldn’t believe it.” The casinos and hotels of Monte Carlo could be just as life-sapping. Bacon remarked on the way the city acted as a magnet for doctors offering rejuvenating cures; he marveled at “all the incredible old women who queue up in the morning for the casino to open.”

  But all this was also what he loved about Monte Carlo. There was an aspect to its casinos—lurid, choreographed, theatrical, airless—that he couldn’t get enough of. Details of their interior design, such as the polished metal rails encircling roulette tables, found their way into his paintings. He loved the sensation of losing while watching the sun set over the Mediterranean. He loved winning even more. “You can’t understand the tremendous draw gambling has unless you’ve been in that kind of position where you terribly need money and you manage to get it by gambling,” he said.

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  FREUD DIDN’T NEED BACON’S example to spur his own gambling habit. He had always been fascinated by risk. “He courted danger and tempted fate in ways of his own invention,” wrote an old friend. He kept a big table made of window glass in his studio, for instance, and deliberately made it bear gradually increasing weight; he was curious to find out the point at which it would shatter. And he took up gambling in earnest early on. During the war, he said, “I used to go to cellars where there were gambling games going on, with very rough people. When I lost everything—which was quite often, since I’m so impatient (except with working, where patience isn’t quite the point)—I always thought, Hooray! I can go back to work. Sometimes you lost and lost, and were about to go, and then you won again, so you went on to lose some more. I was often six, seven, eight hours in these basements—and that I hated. But generally I lost and would get out very soon. And very occasionally when I won quickly I’d make a run for it.”

  Gambling, for Freud, was a visceral thrill, and perhaps, too, an expression of his disdain for conventional notions about what matters in life. It was not yet, however, a way of life—much less a philosophy—as it had become for Bacon, whose more extreme and theatrical proclivity for gambling beguiled Freud, as did the beautiful rhetoric Bacon used to explain his habit. It was all of a piece with Bacon’s attitude toward painting: the emphasis on risk; the willingness to stake all on a spontaneous swipe of a rag or smear of the hand; the conjuring of nightmare and disaster; and the tendency to destroy as much as he created. It all exemplified how Bacon’s work, in Freud’s own phrase, “related immediately to how he felt about life.”

  All this had almost nothing in common with Freud’s own exacting methods. Bacon’s approach was rooted in a gambler’s mentality: “only by going too far can you go far enough,” as he put it. In truth, he exaggerated many aspects of his approach to making art, and most of his paintings, especially in the 1940s and ’50s, actually involved a lot of labor. But his method was still a world away from Freud’s patient and concentrated scrutiny, his slow accumulation of observed lines and stylized hatchings. Where Freud spent weeks and months on a portrait, Bacon talked during these years about images being handed to him ready-made, dropping into his mind, one after the other, like slides.

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  AT MIDCENTURY, BACON HAD entered his most fertile, innovative period. To those who looked on, he seemed capable of producing almost anything. He was enjoying his first public successes, attracting the attention of galleries, critics, and fellow artists. He had taken to painting heads, blurred, in shades of gray, against vertically striated backgrounds that evoked a strange, ambivalent space. These ghostly stripes called to mind both the hatched backdrops in the late pastels of Degas (an artist both Freud and Bacon revered) and the rows of vertical searchlights used by Hitler at his Nuremberg rallies. Bacon’s work was full of such lurching, discordant allusions.

  Soon, inspired by Diego Velázquez, he was painting variations on the Spaniard’s famous portrait of Pope Innocent X. His ambition, he said, was “to paint like Velázquez but with the texture of a hippopotamus skin.” He became obsessed with wide-open mouths, screams, and snarls, both human and animal (he saw no distinction), and he returned to these motifs again and again. “I like, you may say, the glitter and color that comes from the mouth,” he later told his friend, the art critic David Sylvester, “and I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.”

  Freud, too, was beginning to get more attention. In Paris, he moved in exalted circles. He became friendly with Diego Giacometti, and spent long hours conversing with his brother, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who did two drawings of Freud, now lost. He mixed with the likes of Picasso; Balthus; Marie-Laure de Noailles (the patron and friend of Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Jean Cocteau); Boris Kochno, the poet, dancer and librettist; and Kochno’s lover and collaborator, Christian Bérard, whom Freud drew—a tour de force of torpidity—six weeks before Bérard collapsed during a rehearsal of a Molière play and died.

  For all these connections the young Freud had Peter Watson’s introductions to thank—but also, no doubt, his illustrious name, his looks, his electrifying manner. Back in London, too, he had a hypnotic effect on people: John Russell remembered Freud living during these years “with an absolute minimum of circumstantial baggage…Freud is not so much lawless,” he wrote, “as a volatilizer of law: someone who dismisses the general rule as inapplicable and reacts to any given situation as if it were previously unknown.”

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  DURING THIS PERIOD, Freud was still depicting dead things. He drew a dead monkey in 1950, one year after painting a dead squid oozing black ink alongside a spiky sea urchin. The following year, he moved on to painting a decapitated cock’s head, with a floridly colored comb. But the challenge of depicting living and breathing subjects over indeterminate durations was, increasingly, exerting a pull on him. In 1951, on a large rectangular canvas provided by the Arts Council, Freud painted Interior in Paddington, his most ambitious painting to date. It was a full-length portrait of his old friend Harry Diamond. It shows the bespectacled Diamond standing on cheap red carpet, dressed dissonantly in a trench coat. He holds a cigarette in one hand and has the other firmly clenched. The fist—like Kitty’s swollen eyes—puts the whole painting on high alert. It draws every closely scrutinized detail (the undulations in the carpet, the palm’s dying fronds, the stray lace on Diamond’s shoe) into a single moment brimming with menace. The effect was so close to the simmering tension—always on the cusp of exploding into room-wrecking fury—in certain portraits by Ingres (especially those of Monsieur de Norvins and Monsieur Bertin) that Herbert Read that same year dubbed Freud “the Ingres of Existentialism.”

  Interior in Paddington was Freud’s first big studio picture, his first concerted attempt at converting the intensity of his smaller portraits to a bigger scale.

  In 1951, Bacon’s world was upended. His beloved Nanny Lightfoot died while he was away gambling in Monte Carlo. Guilt-ridden and disoriented, he reacted with an extremity that surprised everyone.

  “Francis looked as if he wanted to die,” remembered Wishart. He put an end to his long-standing relationship with Eric Hall. He sold the remaining lease on the Cromwell Place studio to another painter. And for the next four years, he was basically on the run. He moved for a while into a house shared with the artist Johnny Minton. Between 1951 and 1955, he occupied at least eight different places.

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  IT WAS EARLY ON in this period—still 1951—that a fascinating little exchange took place between Freud and Bacon. Each artist made his first attempt at portraying the other. The challenge provoked each to try something new. The immediate results were clumsy, and even discouraging. But for both men,
it seems, the intimacy of the exchange, and the latent competitiveness it aroused, opened up a new path forward.

  It’s safe to say that no famous painter ever depicted a fellow painter in a pose quite like the one adopted by Bacon in the three rapid sketches Freud made of him in 1951. They show Bacon [see Fig. 2] with his collared shirt open, his hands strangely hidden behind his back, and his hips thrust forward. His trousers are suggestively undone at the fly, and they’re folded down at the waistline to reveal a hint of underwear and a vulnerable belly.

  PRIVATE COLLECTION. COPYRIGHT LUCIAN FREUD / LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE / BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

  FIG. 2 Lucian Freud, Study of Francis Bacon, 1951.

  According to Freud, Bacon himself had adopted the pose, saying, “I think you ought to do this because I think it’s rather important down here.” Never keen on directing his models’ poses—most of the time, they simply took up whichever pose felt most natural or comfortable—Freud nonetheless enjoyed letting his more extroverted models indulge their various whims. In the 1990s, for instance, he painted the Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery in an array of unlikely positions, including one in which Bowery lay on the wooden floor of Freud’s studio, propped up by a pile of paint rags, with one leg elevated on the bed, his large penis dangling across his thigh. (Extroverted, gentle-mannered, and reliably outrageous in public, Bowery was in some ways, perhaps, a stand-in later in Freud’s life for Bacon.)

  Looking at Freud’s three sketches of Bacon, each one close in spirit to the others, you can feel something uncharacteristic entering his manner. What stands out most is the swift swoop of Freud’s drawing arm as he tries to define the arabesques of his friend’s flanks. There’s something not quite right about the results: The lines are really too sinuous, and Bacon’s torso is improbably slender. His eyes, in the only one of the three drawings in which they are visible, look hooded and docile in not quite the right way, and his mouth is flat and lifeless. Trying to loosen up, to channel some of Bacon’s louche painterly energies and arrive offhandedly at something more stalked and intimate, Freud found himself fumbling. This sort of thing was not his forte. But the very attempt to try something new—to try on his friend’s clothes, as it were, and see how they fit—tells us something about the sway Bacon was beginning to hold over Freud. Together, what’s more, the drawings generate a fascinating little microclimate of contending weather—sexual, artistic, and interpersonal.