Artistically, Freud was moving into adulthood. But he was still unsatisfied. He only had to look at Bacon’s work to realize he had to do more. “My eyes were going completely mad, sitting down and not being able to move,” he told Feaver. “Small brushes, fine canvas. Sitting down used to drive me more and more agitated. I felt I wanted to free myself from this way of working.”
The ensuing change was extreme. After Hotel Bedroom, Freud stood up to paint and, as he put it, “never sat down again.” He put away his fine sable brushes and began to teach himself to paint with thicker, hog’s-hair brushes and more viscous paint. He was trying to make his touch richer and more ambivalent, to make each contact between brush and canvas more of a gamble.
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WHEN IT CAME TO Bacon’s relations with Lacy, Freud acknowledged later that he was out of his depth. Was it this that caused Bacon to lose patience with him, to push Freud back down into the category of naïve and foolish ingénue?
A similar inference—an accusation of naïveté, this time about art—was there in his later complaint about Freud’s work being “realistic without being real.” Actual naïveté, willfully cultivated, was fundamental to Freud’s early work, which may have been what Bacon found off-putting about it. Freud had earned what early renown he had through a style of rendering that was conspicuously childish—a style that channeled, in Lawrence Gowing’s phrase, “the visionary directness of childhood.” Observers often remarked both on the fanciful, dreamlike aspect in Freud’s earliest works, and on the youthful romanticism brimming beneath the concentrated focus of his early, wide-eyed portraits.
Superficially, there was always something anomalous about this. Freud, after all, was literate and intelligent, and could hold his own in company that included some of the most sophisticated poets, patrons, and artists of the day—people like Spender, Watson, Bérard, Picasso, Cocteau, and the Giacometti brothers. His “childish” style was not an affectation. But there was something willed about it, a conscious cultivation of childlike ways of seeing that was in line with Baudelaire’s famous insistence that “genius is nothing other than the ability to retrieve childhood at will.” This was an idea that was taken seriously by many of the giants of twentieth-century art, including Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Picasso, and Matisse, all of whom were directly inspired by children’s art. But it was utterly at odds with Bacon’s developing vision, which was despairing, cruel-minded, existential, and sexually forthright in very adult ways. Bacon detested illusions of any kind—including the illusion of childhood as some kind of creative Arcadia. Where Freud was able to joke that he liked “the anarchic idea of coming from nowhere…probably because I had a very steady childhood,” Bacon was genuinely in flight from his traumatic childhood his entire life. And of course, in the wider context of society—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Stalin, Franco, Hitler—it was a difficult time, all in all, to be toying with childhood reverie. Surrealism had all but sputtered out after the war for precisely this reason: Its indulgence of the amoral anarchy of unbounded reverie no longer seemed tenable in the wake of such a moral catastrophe. Freud himself was quicker than some to grasp this. He left Surrealism behind in his early twenties. But he hadn’t yet found all the ingredients that would transform him into the great painter he eventually became. In a sense, he still needed Bacon for that.
It’s not clear how long the breach between the two artists lasted. Freud said it was years, others say it was merely weeks. But Bacon’s all-consuming involvement with Lacy lasted a good while longer, ballooning year by year in destructiveness and no doubt leaving Freud sidelined. Although they remained closely connected, both socially and artistically, Freud’s friendship with Bacon was never really the same again.
They were close, on and off, throughout the 1950s and ’60s as they continued to move in the same Soho circles. But in their art they seemed to be on different tracks. Bacon was entering his best period (roughly 1962–76), turning out paintings of extraordinary vibrancy and command—and earning considerable critical acclaim. In one painting after another, he set bleeding, boneless figures, with pummeled faces and twisted limbs, against bright, clean, geometric backgrounds in saturated, sumptuous, and weirdly artificial colors.
Freud, meanwhile, pursued his solitary, studio-bound path, painting from life, and sticking to his deepest convictions even as, under the influence of Bacon’s example, he slowly expanded his scope. His gambling, meanwhile, threatened repeatedly to careen out of control, and his sexual history became hair-raisingly labyrinthine.
Bacon made quite a few more portraits of Freud—fourteen between 1964 and 1971. They were all based on photographs by Deakin, which were found folded, torn, crumpled, and spattered with paint in Bacon’s studio after he died. (The American artist Jasper Johns made a series of prints and paintings, called Regrets, based on one of these photographs in 2013—a kind of refracted homage to his own lost love, Robert Rauschenberg.) Among Bacon’s portraits of Freud were three full-length triptychs. The first was painted in 1964 (the year he also, bizarrely, made a self-portrait fusing his own image with the photograph of Freud), the second in 1966. The third, from 1969, set a world record for an artwork at auction when it sold in 2013 for $142.4 million.
Freud also made a second attempt at painting Bacon—an early instance of his new, looser painting style—in 1956. But the work remained unfinished.
As if to compensate for what went wrong with Lacy, Freud got to know Bacon’s next lover, George Dyer, in a more intimate way when Dyer sat for him, twice, in 1965 and 1966.
But by the early 1970s, Bacon and Freud had definitely fallen out. The cause was never made clear. When Stephen Spender asked Bacon if they were still friends, Bacon let George Dyer answer for him: “Lucian borrowed too much money from Francis that he gambled and lost and never paid back. I told Francis, ‘Enough, Francis, enough of that.’ ”
Bacon himself said it bluntly in the 1970s: “I’m not really fond of Lucian, you know, the way I am of Rodrigo [Moynihan] and Bobby [Buhler]. It’s just that he rings me up all the time.”
Freud claimed a certain amount of resentment came into it. “When my work started being successful, Francis became bitter and bitchy,” he said. “What he really minded was that I started getting rather high prices. He’d suddenly turn and say, ‘Of course, you’ve got lots of money.’ Which was strange, because before then, for a long, long time, I’d depended on him and others for money.”
Bacon’s character, he continued, “had changed quite a lot, which I think was to do with alcohol. It was impossible to disagree with him about anything. He wanted admiration and he didn’t mind where it came from. To some degree he lost his quality. His manners were still marvelous, though. He would go into a shop or restaurant and people were absolutely charmed.”
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THE STORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT of Freud’s art—his increasingly aggressive attack on sentimentality, which caused so many people to find his portraits “cruel” and “ruthless”—is in many ways the story of his fight to keep his romantic susceptibility, his ingenuousness, at bay. It is the story of a long struggle not to suppress but to contain his most intense feelings—feelings that arose from intimate obsession and prolonged proximity. The example of Bacon—profoundly unsentimental, and yet at times, for Freud, uncomfortably theatrical—played a huge part in this transformation. If Bacon’s was a model to emulate, it was also one to avoid.
“I think that Francis’s way of painting freely helped me feel more daring,” he explained. “People thought and said and wrote that I was a very good draftsman but my paintings were linear and defined by my drawing, and that you could tell what a good draftsman I was from my painting. I’ve never been that affected by writing, but I thought if that’s at all true, I must stop. The idea of doing paintings where you’re conscious of the drawing and not the paint just irritated me. So I stopped drawing for many, many years.”
The shift was not only momentous but amazingly audacious. Freud had made his early
reputation, such as it was, almost entirely on the strength of his drawing. Critics, artists, and art historians, from Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark to Graham Sutherland, had praised him for it.
But now, under Bacon’s influence, he stops drawing entirely and begins to loosen up his paintwork. He sticks to his incredibly slow and arduous way of working. But, like Bacon, he incorporates chance and risk, he smears and displaces the face’s fixed features, and he utilizes all the viscosity and latent energy of oil paint applied by brush. He focuses more on flesh now than on eyes and faces, and begins to see the human body as a kind of landscape of shifting, almost arbitrary volumes that dissolve and re-form continuously, depending not so much on shifting light as on conditions of the skin and the movements of blood and bone and muscle and the fatty tissue beneath.
It all happens very slowly. His mature style—the Lucian Freud we know now—takes years to develop. And many of the results in this intermediate period are intensely odd and awkward. People watching what is happening can’t quite believe it. His supporters feel betrayed. Kenneth Clark basically says, “I think you’re mad but I wish you well,” and never speaks to him again.
And so for many years Freud stays a respected but minor figure—known more for the force and idiosyncrasy of his personality than for his work, and barely known at all outside Britain. It stays this way until the late 1980s, when Freud is in his sixties, and people can no longer ignore what is coming out of his studio, because it is so immediate and so arrestingly, intensely intimate. (The show in Berlin, from which Freud’s portrait of Bacon never returns, comes along at exactly this moment.)
Freud talks about treating the head as “just another limb,” and lavishes no more attention on his sitters’ facial features than on their thighs, their fingers, or their genitals. Pitting himself against the cliché that the “eyes are a window into the soul,” he paints his subjects either asleep or dead-eyed. He undermines the whole traditional idea of portraiture as a function of both psychology and social status. Instead, it becomes a function, a result, of the most intimate scrutiny of another.
—
BACON, THROUGH ALL THIS PERIOD, goes from strength to strength. Thanks in part to his famous and brilliant interviews with David Sylvester, he becomes something of a celebrity. He is accorded major retrospectives, first at the Tate in London and the Guggenheim in New York, in 1962, and then, in 1971, at the Grand Palais. He is regarded with awe, not only in England but throughout Europe, and eventually in the United States. Famous Continental writers such as Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Gilles Deleuze address his work. He is showered with plaudits.
Bacon’s rhetoric—and he was a wonderful apologist for his own work—insisted that his painting should avoid at all costs the tedium of “illustration.” “I don’t want to tell a story,” he told Melvyn Bragg. “I’ve no story to tell.” Instead, he wanted his paintings to hit “the nervous system” as directly as possible, without having to turn into a “long diatribe” in the brain.
Bacon’s run of producing great work was, as Freud himself insisted, “amazingly long.” At his best, he was one of the twentieth century’s most exciting painters. But in many ways his later work turned into exactly the thing from which Freud—under Bacon’s spell—had struggled so hard to escape: a manner, an anthology of affectations. Large areas of his canvases remained empty and lifeless. He came to rely more and more on pictorial gimmicks—teasing symbols such as arrows, syringes, swastikas, and artificial newsprint, most of them playing a role of negligible overall importance. The work often seemed to be doing little more than illustrating his own rhetoric—even as that rhetoric calcified into cant.
Bacon compensated for his mediocre drawing with his marvelous painterly touch, so full of movement, color, texture, and unexpected changes of speed. But outside the sumptuous excitement of his subjects’ faces and flesh, his canvases—and especially the figures’ torsos and limbs—could often feel flatly descriptive, exactly like the “illustration” he claimed to be so intent on avoiding.
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TOWARD THE END OF his life, Freud told William Feaver about being so caught up in working that he “noticed that in the big picture I’m doing I was using my brush for absolutely anything. I was amused by it because I was doing something rather delicate and I not only had the big brush but it was all silted with paint. It’s like people shouting and using any old word because somehow the way they are shouting will get through. If you know what you want you can use almost anything. An ungrammatical shout is no less clear. It’s to do with the urgency.”
The words echo uncannily what we know of Bacon’s methods—his willingness to use old rags, sudden swipes of newspaper, even his hands, to force a quality of urgency into his work. It was one more indication of Bacon’s sway over Freud, which lasted right up until his own death in 2011.
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THE THEFT IN THE most important sense was just that—a theft: brutal, audacious, an act of calculated risk and pragmatism. Freud could probably identify, in this sense, with whoever was responsible. Both he and Bacon had consorted with criminals, and both to some degree empathized with them. Both, too, early in their careers, had indulged larcenous impulses when it suited them. So the brazen theft of the portrait from the Berlin gallery was just a loss—another dumb and random fact in the world.
But I believe the portrait, in its absence, couldn’t help but become emblematic, for Freud, of the slippery, volatile, and unknowable aspect of his relationship with Bacon, and of their old but still intimate rivalry.
If the WANTED poster that was designed to get the stolen portrait back was a sort of joke (and I think it was: the idea of Bacon as a “criminal at large,” and a nod, perhaps, to Deakin’s “mug shots taken by a real artist”), it was nonetheless an immensely poignant one. It was an admission that not just this riveting painting, but this man, this crucial relationship, meant an enormous amount to him, and that somehow, it had slipped through his fingers.
MANET AND DEGAS
A picture is something that requires as much trickery, malice, and vice as the perpetration of a crime.
—EDGAR DEGAS
Toward the end of 1868, Edgar Degas painted a portrait of his good friend Édouard Manet. Actually, it’s a double portrait: The painting [see Plate 6] shows Manet reclining on a sofa while his wife, Suzanne, sits at a piano, facing away from him.
It is a portrait, one could say, of their marriage.
You can see the picture today in a forlorn museum of modern art on the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu. The museum is on top of a hill on the outskirts of Kitakyushu, a midsized industrial port facing mainland China. The hill, surrounded by woodland and gardens, has a soft and secretive feeling. But the building itself, erected during Japan’s boom years, has the sad and characterless feel of a modernist ruin. Its boxy exterior is chipped and tarnished, the galleries are vast and often empty, and the whole museum, with its air of cheerful civic idealism in embarrassed retreat, feels strangely at odds with the soft and drowsy intimacy of Degas’s painting.
Manet’s wife is shown in profile. She wears her light-brown hair up, revealing a small, delicate ear and a thickish neck, around which winds the thin, curving line of a black ribbon. Her skirt is a light, blue-tinted gray, with black stripes that fold and bend as the abundant material falls to the floor. Her blouse is made from a gauzy material—difficult to reproduce in paint—that lets the pink of her skin show through, except at the seams, which Degas keeps opaque—a bravura touch. There is little in the way of vivid color, apart from a red cushion near the center and a lovely, dream-inducing turquoise that accumulates like tropical weather around the figure of Suzanne.
—
THE CANVAS DEGAS CHOSE for this marriage portrait is not terribly large. The format is horizontal. The painting looks handsome in its rather ornate gold frame. But there’s one thing about it that’s extremely odd.
You can see it from some distance away: A large part of the right-h
and side of the picture—somewhere between a quarter and a third—has been left blank, unpainted. When you get closer, you can see straightaway that a part of it has in fact been cut out and replaced with a new piece of canvas. This piece has been covered with a washy, tan-colored undercoat, presumably in preparation for a repainting that never happened. Half an inch back from the join is a vertical line of small nails that descends at uneven intervals. Degas’s signature appears in red in the bottom right corner of this empty third.
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THE SETTING DEGAS HAD chosen for his portrait was a third-floor apartment on the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, a short walk from Place de Clichy in Paris’s Batignolles district. It was here—just down the hill from where Pablo Picasso would later meet tensely with Henri Matisse—that Manet and Suzanne lived, together with their teenage son, Léon, and Manet’s widowed mother, Eugénie-Desirée.
Suzanne was a stout but good-looking Dutchwoman, blond and with a ruddy face. She was also an excellent pianist, so it was fitting that Degas chose to portray her at the keyboard. When guests attended the Manets’ regular Thursday-evening soirées, to which Degas had a standing invitation, she would invariably play for them.
Everyone who knew Manet personally seemed to love and admire him. He was charming, he was warm, he had courage; you wanted him on your side. Degas was no exception. By the time the portrait sittings began, Degas had been close friends with him for seven years. But he may have felt about Manet that he had not yet had the chance to get to know him as he really wanted. Asking Manet to sit for a portrait was perhaps a way not only to seal their quietly competitive friendship, but for Degas to get closer to him, to make some sort of claim on the intimate life of this most convivial of men.
The Art of Rivalry Page 9
