The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  THE LIVES OF LUCIAN FREUD

  Andrea Rose

  ALSO BY WILLIAM FEAVER

  The Art of John Martin

  When We Were Young

  Masters of Caricature

  Pitmen Painters

  Frank Auerbach

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: ‘Always wanted never to have anything known about me’

  PART I BERLIN, LONDON AND DEVON 1922–39

  1 ‘I love German poetry but I loathe the German language’

  2 ‘Very much a slightly artistic place’

  3 ‘My mother started worshipping it so I smashed it’

  4 ‘To cut a terrific dash’

  PART II THE PHONEY WAR AND THE REAL WAR 1939–45

  5 ‘A private language’

  6 ‘Born naughty’

  7 ‘I used to always put secrets in. I still do’

  8 ‘Slightly notorious’

  9 ‘Slight Dreigroschenoper’

  10 ‘A question of focus’

  11 ‘Living in a dump and going out to somewhere palatial’

  PART III FRANCE, GREECE, FIRST MARRIAGE 1945–9

  12 ‘French malevolence’

  13 ‘The world of Ovid’

  14 ‘Free spirits like me’

  15 ‘Me with horns’

  16 ‘Fed sweets by nuns on the coach to Galway’

  PART IV FIRST RECOGNITION 1949–58

  17 ‘My large room in Paddington!’

  18 ‘My night’s entertainment’

  19 ‘Being able to see under the carpet’

  20 ‘True to me’

  21 ‘Lady Dashwood, sorry to have kicked you’

  22 ‘A marvellous chase feeling’

  23 ‘My ardour in the long pursuit’

  24 ‘Idyllic, in a slightly maddening way’

  25 ‘Mad on heat and running round, pissing all the time’

  PART V AT THE MARLBOROUGH 1958–68

  26 ‘Do you think I’m made of wood?’

  27 ‘Brilliant ones fizzled’

  28 ‘Actually it’s all I can do’

  29 ‘People being monogamous seems to me an extraordinary and imaginative situation’

  30 ‘He was rather nice and repulsive’

  31 ‘Awfully uneasy’

  32 ‘The absolute cheek of making art’

  33 ‘I can’t be pressed really’

  34 ‘If work permits’

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Picture credits

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  Plates Section

  Author’s Note

  The day we first met, in 1973, I told Lucian that for interview purposes I just wasn’t interested in his private life. All that mattered was the work.

  Time passed and in later years whenever he taxed me with having been so artless my response was that what perhaps had sounded like a pledge had been a mere clearing of the throat. By then of course it had become obvious to me that the work reflected the life and embodied the life, and because the life Lucian led was spent more in the studio than anywhere else that was its commanding peculiarity. As he himself said ‘Everything is biographical and everything is a self-portrait.’ Since his relationships tended to be compartmented and the vicissitudes that eddied around various passions so clearly affected him, it seemed to me that some sort of consolidated account of them extending beyond self-portraiture was now needed.

  Initially this book was to have been a brief account of Freud the artist, but in the late 1990s, as the tapes accumulated and reminiscences flowed, we agreed that what Lucian had taken to referring to as ‘The First Funny Art Book’ was outgrowing its prospectus, so it was shelved for the time being, Lucian half-heartedly assuring me that he would have no objection to ‘a novel’ appearing once he was dead. Working with him on a number of exhibitions made the oeuvre ever more familiar to me and we went on talking, primarily on the phone, almost daily. The notes I took from the countless conversations (‘How old am I now?’ he would often ask me or, less specifically, ‘How goes it?’) are the chief source for these two volumes of biography.

  Prologue

  ‘Always wanted never to have anything known about me’

  There were, as usual, several pictures on the go. The main one, on an easel directly under the skylight, was so far little more than eyes and chin, floorboards edging in, indications in charcoal of body on bed, a muzzle and smudge where Pluto the whippet would lie and a patch of white at the foot of the bed where a woman was to have stood. She had become intrusive, the painter had decided. A lesser distraction was needed. ‘Possibly something under the bed,’ he said.

  While what was to become Sunny Morning – Eight Legs preoccupied Lucian Freud in daylight hours, others were worked on through evening sessions and into the night. Rose, one of his daughters, and her husband Mark were sitting for a double portrait, their heads distinct but as yet unrelated, the gap between them just beginning to be realised. ‘I’ve already put some air in here,’ was the comment. Another daughter, Ib, had been sitting with a book for a second daytime painting. The relationship of head to Proust had worked out well but more breathing space was needed and so the canvas had been extended. Proceeding as he did by accretion, form by form, Freud often found enlargement necessary. That way, ideas grew. The seams that zigzagged down all four sides of Ib Reading would soon be painted over, leaving scars visible only in a raking light.

  Freud’s Holland Park studio: work in progress on Sunny Morning – Eight Legs, at a six-legged stage, 1997

  Freud’s working methods were demanding while unassuming throughout. Presuming nothing save the presence of whoever or whatever he had felt like painting, he would go ahead with little or no preconception beyond the glimmerings of potential. Early on, as a beginner, there had been the buzz, the magic almost, of making imagined things substantial, making them convincing somehow. ‘In that way, once I got going, they led me on; I liked to have nothing there so that I felt they came from nowhere.’ Later he came to depend on engaging with what he actually saw, intuition reminding him, by the by, that a sitter’s outward appearance was ‘to do with what’s inside his head’.

  No other painter in modern times has more straightforwardly made so much of the particular. He used to mock me for being obliged, he said, as an art critic to maintain ‘eternal vigilance’. Which of course was what in practice he demanded of himself. His was an intent alertness sustained hour by hour, week in week out. Painting had to be unremitting, never (in his words) ‘indulgent to the subject matter; I’m so conscious that that is a recipe for bad art’. He talked about perseverance as an instinct. Ruthlessness too, he assumed, but that went without saying. ‘I always thought that an artist’s life was the hardest life of all.’

  Painting absorbs whatever affects the painter. Every consideration, emotional or otherwise, Freud believed, stretches a painting’s potential. ‘I don’t think there’s any kind of feeling you have to leave out.’ If the feeling wasn’t there, then ultimately the painting failed. Yet the feeling in a painting was necessarily filtered, distanced, objectified. He stressed the need to avoid ‘false feeling’ or gratuitous fervour. ‘I don’t want them to be sensational, but I want them to reveal some of the results of my concentration.’ His concentration over the years yielded paintings, drawings and etchings that fix insistently on what we are whoever we are, on the motif whatever it may be, getting a hold on the ingrained uncertainties that spice a life.

  Freud liked unpredictability, particularly at the outset. ‘I try and vary the way I start. What I mean is, sometimes I put down a lot of paint but sometimes – say on a single f
igure – I start in a different place. Often I’ve started round the stomach and different parts. It’s to do with my horror of method, which may come of my having had such a rigorous method at the very beginning.’

  That method, conspicuously exhaustive, culminated in Girl with Roses (1947–8), considered by Freud his ‘first real picture’ and certainly one of the first to advance on a sizeable scale the notion of close attention as the essence of a relationship. The girl’s stare is subjected to that of the painter. She looks towards a window shown reflected in her eyes. Such detail may prompt metaphysical analogy (windows into the sitter’s soul), but it represents more the desire of an exacting young painter to make the image alert.

  Girl with Roses, 1947–8

  The sitter was Kitty Garman, a daughter of Jacob Epstein whose bust of her done three years previously represented her as a sort of naiad with a streaming head of hair. Epstein talked of ‘a trembling eagerness of life’ pulsing through such portrait sculpture: ‘Head, shoulders, body and hands, like music’. His future son-in-law, ‘the spiv Lucian Freud’, as he was to refer to him after the divorce, saw Kitty plain: wide eyes, braced shoulders, seated as rigidly as a playing-card queen. He had painted her a couple of times before, initially young and artless in a busman’s jacket and then holding a tabby kitten as though proffering a decanter, the relaxed limpness of the paws indicating a kindly grip on the neck of this namesake cum attribute.

  Girl with Roses exemplifies wariness. It harks back to One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, a selection made by the Gallery’s Director Kenneth Clark and published in 1938 in which, page after page, the black and white photogravure reproductions parade stimulating qualities: the poise of Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, the salon aplomb of Ingres’ Madame Moitessier, one of Freud’s favourite paintings and Clark’s most astute acquisition for the National Gallery in his time there. Leafing through, the detail that in sudden alacrity most vividly compares with Girl with Roses is the close-up of the tabby cat clinging to the chair-back in Hogarth’s The Graham Children: eyes enormous, thorny claws bared.

  Thanks to Clark who fixed it for him, Freud used to have his paintings photographed by Mrs Wilson in the National Gallery photographic department and as Girl with Roses approached completion he began wondering how it would look in black and white. ‘I remember being so excited when I did the green stripes on the jersey. I put black dots on the green stripes because I thought if I put them in they’d come out. Like doing etching: knowing it won’t show on the plate but it will come out in the print.’ This peppering showed up well in the photograph. Reproduced opposite the tonal fug of a barmaid picture by Ruskin Spear, a blustery third-generation Sickert, in a 1951 Pelican book, Contemporary British Art, by Herbert Read (who, in a later edition, was to dub Freud ‘The Ingres of Existentialism’ and replace the Spear with a Burra), the painting looked radiantly distinctive. To the Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis, writing in the early 1950s, Kitty here was ‘petrified in a corner, at bay, like a frightened animal’.1

  In keeping with the ‘things that are not made up’ that Freud admired in ancient Egyptian art, Girl with Roses exalts appearance. Here are individual fingernails and individual hairs, some with split ends, living relics as fully realised as the golden tresses of a Dürer. ‘I did the hair architecturally and moved it and watched it and then I did that thing, through working slowly, that I’ve often done, which is to change life to suit art.’

  Daylight graces the painting, moulding the velvet skirt, glossing the lips, adding penumbra to the frizz of loose hairs around the head, streaking down the arm of the chair and silhouetting its torn cane-work. This chair, from a junk shop in a former chapel in the Harrow Road, near Delamere Terrace in Paddington where, since 1943, Freud had rented a flat, was peculiarly uncomfortable. ‘If you leant back the wrong way you snagged a nail. It’s useful in the picture.’ Equally useful is the congruity of forms, as calculated as any pin-up pose: flecked curls and curvy stripes; teeth and fingernails so alike; the nostril flare of the chair-back; the petal-shaped birthmark on the hand. The rose held up like a child’s buttercup thrust against the chin to test a taste for butter is halfway to being an emblem. Poetic rather than symbolic – the rose of Venus – it recalls the phrase of Rilke, ‘The rose of onlooking’, which Freud had seen in the September 1947 number of Poetry London. It and the other rose on her lap nuzzling her left hand are studiedly inanimate. ‘I suppose they are portraits,’ Freud said, by which he meant that they are specific, having been done from life. ‘They are not “let’s have a rose”, they are actual ones, those cheap bunches you got where most of them died but one or two survived; you don’t see them now: costermonger’s flowers, yellow and red ones, wired to keep them throttled. Very often they couldn’t get enough water so they just had asthma.’

  Over time Girl with Roses has eclipsed the most famous seated figure in British art of the period, a figure in Hornton stone even more complacent than Ingres’ statuesque Mme Moitessier: Henry Moore’s Northampton Madonna, unveiled in 1944 in the Church of St Matthew, Northampton, by Kenneth Clark who remarked as he did so that it ‘may worry some simple people’. Moore, talking of ‘an austerity and nobility and some touch of grandeur’, had shrunk his Madonna’s head a little in the interests of monumentality. Freud did the opposite. For him there was the urge to accentuate. He had to achieve the looming look of a face that, as the expression goes, is all eyes. Knowing by heart, as he did, swathes of poetry of all kinds, there were phrases that bit into the memory and came to mind as he worked. Muttered, murmured, behind Girl with Roses, are lines he loved, Shakespeare’s pox on the rhetoric of ‘false compare’:

  My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

  Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:

  If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

  If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

  I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

  But no such roses see I in her cheeks …

  ‘The fact of your life being your subject matter doesn’t in any way change the nature of art or artistic enterprise. And therefore it seems absolutely obvious, as well as convenient, to use as a subject what you are thinking and looking at all the time – the way your life goes.’

  PART I

  BERLIN, LONDON AND DEVON 1922–39

  1

  ‘I love German poetry but I loathe the German language’

  With a doleful shake of the head, during a platform discussion with me at the 1995 Edinburgh Festival relating to a ‘School of London’ exhibition, the critic David Sylvester declared Lucian Freud to be, in his view, ‘not a born painter’. Freud, he said, ‘had applied himself to the art of painting without ever convincing me that he was a painter’.1 Five days later in an article in the Guardian, written in response to a report of the discussion in The Times, he expanded on this notion of the inherent or incubated: ‘In reality he has become an outstanding painter without having been, I think, a painter by nature: he is a painter made, not born, made by a huge effort of will applied to the realisation of a highly personal and searching vision of the world.’2

  Reading this, Freud laughed. Here was cliché rounding on cliché. Certainly he liked to think of himself as self-made. ‘I like the anarchic idea of coming from nowhere. But I think that’s probably because I had a very steady childhood.’ Anyone with Sigmund Freud as a grandfather could be all too readily assumed to have privileged access – by genetic imprint maybe – to a searching understanding of character and motivation, not to mention a predisposition to examine people on couches. The parallels are inviting: clinical analysis and portrait analysis, neuroses diagnosed and neuroses depicted. In reality however Lucian inherited only his grandfather’s fur-collared overcoat and a part share, with the other grandchildren, in the copyrights on his published works. True, the illustrious surname awaited him at birth. That may have provoked expectations. But the idea of anyone being born or not born an a
rtist or indeed born a psychoanalyst was, he murmured, ridiculous. ‘It’s jargon. A twerp’s born. “A born idiot.” No, the only thing you can be born, actually, is a baby.’

  Born in Berlin on 8 December 1922, the middle son of thirty-year-old Ernst Ludwig Freud, youngest son of Sigmund Freud, Lucian Michael Freud was named after his mother, Lucie Brasch, and Michael, the fighting archangel. His elder brother, Stefan Gabriel, had been born sixteen months before and the younger brother, Clemens Raphael, came sixteen months later. The 8th, number eight and multiples of eight were to become significant factors in gambling calculations throughout his life. As for the archangel names, Lucie Freud explained that they fitted in with her plan to have three children. She had been certain that she would have boys only.

  Lucian considered himself isolated, outstandingly so, from the start. ‘My mother said that my first word was “alleine” which means “alone”. “Leave me alone”: I always liked being on my own, I was always terribly anxious there should be no competition.’ His mother, it emerged, had a special attitude to Lux, as both he and she were familiarly referred to. He was the born favourite. ‘She treated me in a way as an only child from very early on; it seemed unhealthy, in a way. I always longed to have a sister.’

  Ernst Freud maintained an architect’s office in the large family apartment – tall, panelled rooms with chandeliers – in Regentenstrasse 23 in Lützow, an imposing district of Berlin near the Tiergarten, two streets away from where Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie now stands. He had a partner and two assistants: ‘Mr Kurtz and Mr Augenfelt, who we called Grock (“Grockchen”) as he looked like Grock the clown who I’d seen at the circus.’ Lucian considered his father good at jokes but a bit distant. ‘I thought the one time I liked my father was when he used to walk me with my feet on his feet and he’d open his mouth and be a giant and take huge steps.’ Professionally speaking he was easy-going, so much so that he had to be bailed out on several occasions by his mother-in-law or cousins, the Mosses, when business ventures failed. He was happy, eager even, to represent the great Viennese Professor Freud at receptions in his honour. ‘My mother wasn’t: she felt it was wrong to be put in the position of going somewhere for his father rather than himself.