The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘I threw it in the canal.’

  Consequently – there seemed to be no other choice – Lucian was sent to see Dr Willi Hoffer, formerly of Vienna who had arrived in London in 1938. A warm and popular figure in Freudian circles, a great believer in clinical observation, he was to be involved in Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s Hampstead War Nurseries. The sessions were put to Lucian as being friendly chats only: ‘No question of an analysis but to have preliminary discussions. My father said, “You don’t deserve to be a painter,” which hadn’t struck me that way before. So it affected my life. I went five times or so to Dr Hoffer, a great friend of Aunt Anna. We chatted and he said he thought I was queer and I said, “Why? I don’t think I am.” And he said, “Because of the shape of your father’s hat.” Not being circumcised, I didn’t know it could be seen as an emblem: my father had a pork-pie hat and Dr Hoffer thought that must have made me prick-conscious. “How interesting,” I said. “I don’t think I am.” He went on: “Are you heterosexual? Have you ever had sex with a woman?” I always wanted to know what happens so I said, “What do you mean?” At that time I hadn’t learnt the facts of life so he started explaining it in semi-Latin terms and I said, “Oh, in that case, I haven’t.” Dr Hoffer was nice, he was tactful, and when I left he gave me a bottle of whisky and then a few years later he bought a Scillonian picture of mine.’

  Lucian told his friend Frank Auerbach that he had been amazingly uninformed about sex. ‘He actually said something to the effect that he didn’t really know the way women worked until fairly late on and he did say that he didn’t know the facts of life until he was sixteen or seventeen.’3 That Dr Hoffer had said he was gay did not surprise Auerbach. ‘I think there was something happening, but, then again, when Lucian made a decision he made a decision.’ For the time being there was, Lucian acknowledged, confusion to some degree. ‘At the Central, when I went there, there was a naked girl in the life room and I got Michael Hamburger and others and I said, “Come and see this naked girl. My God, look at this.” I didn’t have any girlfriends until awfully late by modern standards, though I did about a month later. David Kentish, who fell for really unsuitable people, fell in love with someone known as the Whore of Babylon, a huge man with a pitch near Piccadilly, and he sent flowers and presents to him, but he also had a girl he was in love with – he didn’t really know her – called “German Lily”, in trousers, in the Coffee An’. I took her back to my parents’ house when they were away. I was in my parents’ bed with her and afterwards didn’t want to go on so she went down to my room, where David Brown was staying the night. David, whose father was an MP, was keen on girls and he had a go. After a bit I thought, “That wasn’t so bad,” so I thought I’d have another go, so I went downstairs. Too late.’

  Analysis could not compete with the escapism available on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road on Lucian’s route to the art school. ‘I went to the Dominion Cinema a lot where there was a double feature and a stage show for less than a shilling if you got there by mid-day.’ Westerns – ‘anything with horses in’ – pleased him best. And Mae West being suggestive or Will Hay films with staccato puns and overgrown schoolboys. Afterwards came the stage show. ‘It was girls from the Midlands or girls from Wales who won the Eisteddfod and were brought in to sing, and Sandy MacPherson on his organ, and comedians. Then back for a last half-hour at the Central. The beautiful Valerie Hamilton I played ping-pong with; I’d hit the ping-pong ball a vicious swipe, hit her in the stomach and she’d double up.’

  Free tickets to the theatre were supplied by Michael Jeans with whom, in March 1939, Lucian saw T. S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion at the Westminster Theatre managed at the time by Michael’s father. In this first production it was the Furies coming through the French windows (later to become a much exercised motif for Francis Bacon) and ‘the low conversation of triumphant aunts’ that he particularly enjoyed. ‘A marvellous woman as Aunt Agatha, and Lady Monchensey saying to the doctor that she is worried about the younger son and he says “You have trusted me a good many years, Lady Monchensey; this is not the time to begin to doubt me.”’ Much of what was said on stage had a familiar ring to him. ‘Your mother’s hopes are all centred on you.’ And ‘Mother never punished us but made us feel guilty.’ He made no connections then – ‘never thought of it’ – for to him the play was not Freudian delving but a comedy of manners, like Saki short stories with their perverse twists.

  A standard Saki tactic was to get to girls through the brother. Lucian’s Bryanston friend Clemens von Schey had a sister. ‘I went to have lunch on the steps of the British Museum with sister Inge, big, fat, maternal. She gave me some puppets.’ He tried again, more amorously, with Michael Jeans’ sister, Angie. ‘She was wonderful and I wrote to her and asked her out. I took her to anarchist meetings, crazy anarchist groups in London, which I knew of from the Central. I was longing to find out more but she snubbed me. “When you are further from the egg”, she wrote, she might consider it. But she let me wash her hair once with foam; she was quite amused, and I tried to do pictures of her. Angie was very attractive and pretty promiscuous. Kitty [Garman], who knew her, told me that she said to her, “The lift men at Selfridges are awfully good.”’

  Years later, when his mother fell into a depression after his father died, Freud found lots of his own letters that she had kept in a drawer. ‘Something I felt shocked by: going through mother’s things, when she was ill, I came across all these letters I’d written to Angie. Mother, seeing her in Walberswick – she had a place there – must have wanted them.’

  Being his mother’s object of pride and devotion, Lucian felt he had to pull away from her. He needed grounds for resentment but couldn’t think of many and even those he taxed her with were slight. ‘For example, when we came to London, being non-English, she installed a pale-green bidet in the bathroom. I asked her what it was for and she said, “It’s a foot bath.” And she cut her hand once and washed it and left blood in the water. I’m not analytically disposed, but surely it was a thing of wanting me to see, of saying: “I’ve given you so much already and now this.” No wonder I didn’t go near her if I could help it until she was as good as dead. She never reproached me.’

  Theatre, cinema and Coffee An’ were ready distractions from the Central but parts of the course were enjoyable. ‘It was very exciting to be out of school in another sort of school. I liked metalwork best. Mr Bradley taught it. Working on the lathe I made a sharp metal spike in brass, which – and people rather found significance in this – I gave to my mother. I liked working on lathes and girls working on them too. I thought I was a good potter after Dartington and Bryanston, but I had to sandpaper to make the pottery look like porcelain. I never got anything fired at the Central. In Composition, Mr Cooper, raving mad, talked about Paris and Braque and so on and draped red handkerchiefs and fruit about. A very depressing sub-academician taught painting. “If you can’t draw hands, indicate them,” he said, which even then I thought wrong.’

  In the painting studio, where he worked fairly regularly, he saw William Roberts, the one-time Vorticist, now a painter of rounded figures, all of a breed: deliberate, as though sandpapered into shape, yet impressive. ‘He would draw something on the side of a student drawing and they would keep them. Quite exciting. But I never really talked to him. I got always a strong feeling he had a system.’ Roberts practically always painted from squared-up drawings. ‘When I was there once Bernard Meninsky came in – he was teaching drawing – and I was painting, and he said, “You’re enjoying yourself; why don’t you come and learn drawing with me? I guarantee to teach you to draw.” I thought that was a threat which I didn’t want to give in to.’ Though unaware then of Picasso’s maxim ‘above all develop your faults’,4 he realised that what he needed was not the bearing rein of formal instruction but a basic grasp. ‘The one thing that can be taught is the one thing that can be learnt, like riding a bicycle, which is a certain discipline relating to prop
ortion.’

  The model in the sculpture room was called Joan Rhodes. She was about the same age as Lucian. ‘She posed and I would be flicking tiny balls of clay at her shapely form and I’d do that schoolboy thing of looking up at the ceiling to pretend it wasn’t me. I knew her from the Coffee An’. She’d been kicked out by her parents in Scotland when she was twelve or thirteen and was taken up by a rough old busker. There must have been something very nice about him: nowadays she would have been molested, but he taught her everything and she became a strong woman on the music halls.’

  John Skeaping, ‘charming, encouraging, glamorous, really’, taught sculpture. He had been married to Barbara Hepworth, but by 1939 that was well in the past, she having gone on to marry Ben Nicholson. ‘Skeaping was a family man and quite exhibitionistic, liked admiration and it naturally came to him, on the whole. He had a job at Peter Jones as art manager. One night I was crossing Sloane Square. Quiet and empty, apart from a bullfighter with a cape being charged by girls: John Skeaping. He did have this amazing effect on girls. A frail, beautiful one ran up an eight-foot Christ in concrete or teak under his influence. He seemed very generous and lively and not phoney. He did those animal sculptures, very slick, and he did smudges-with-the-finger drawings of deer. But then there was an unfortunate How to Draw Studio book: how to draw horses in three lines.’

  In this little book, published in 1941 and much reprinted, Skeaping confessed to having a ‘point of view biased in favour of animals’; it was of course just how Lucian felt. ‘My one wish was to be a jockey,’ Skeaping wrote. ‘I was so obsessed with this idea that I spent most of my time pretending to be a horse or drawing them. I felt every effort in my own body and muscles. I imagined the bit in my mouth and could feel the tug of the reins in my cheeks.’ His exhortation to ‘get all the vitality possible in your work’ was tastier than any Meninsky guarantee of future prowess.

  Skeaping had the idea, attractive to Lucian, that ‘we were people who should get back to primitive things.’ Primitive art, like child art and some psychotic art, had a directness that suggested anyone could try it. Primitives managed without the strictures and bodybuilding courses of art-school training; their freshness looked well at Guggenheim Jeune. Primitivism was as heady as anarchism and as stimulating as Surrealism, to which, by descent, it was related.

  Lucian took up with Toni del Renzio, a young designer, Russian-born, an avowed cosmopolitan and the only painter, besides John Banting, that he met in the Coffee An’. Del Renzio claimed to have an elaborate past. This was myth, Freud said, dismissing the obituaries that appeared in 2007. He had been born in the East End, father unknown, and the stories of his youth (conscripted into Mussolini’s Tripolitan cavalry and posted to the war in Abyssinia; escaped across the desert disguised as a Bedouin, fought against Franco in Barcelona and Aragon and then worked as a designer in Paris) were essentially surreal, fiction. During the years Lucian knew him del Renzio was mainly homeless. Women took pity on him and in 1939 he was living in plausible poverty in a Charlotte Street attic with a model called Sally (he later married, briefly, the painter Ithell Colquhoun). Being a Surrealist with proper Parisian connections, del Renzio was good to know and indeed imposing enough to be taken home for Sunday lunch. Lucian wanted his parents to appreciate that his new friend was a bit older than him; however, they were more concerned by his smelliness and lack of socks. He was, Lucian remembered, camp with his hands, fluttering them as he talked. They decided to start a magazine, to be called Bheuaau (pronounced Boo), but fell out over a phrase. Del Renzio said, ‘Horses are thicker than water,’ and Lucian disagreed. ‘I said, “Horses are thinner than water.”’ Reconciliation proved impossible and Bheuaau failed to appear.

  Surrealism, Lucian discovered, generally meant Dalí or Breton rather than Picasso and that, he thought, was reason enough for not getting involved. His grandfather, who had been quite taken with Dalí when he came to tea, had remained sceptical about Surrealism’s irrationale. ‘I may have been inclined to regard the surrealists, who have apparently adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools (let us say 95 per cent, as with alcohol),’ he wrote. Lucian learnt to avoid casual art entanglements. Even then he considered himself a painter and, despite distractions, nothing but a painter. ‘It always seemed understood. At the Central I didn’t want to use cheap “students’ colours” because I thought I’m not a student, I’m a painter.’

  Although he painted quite a bit at home in St John’s Wood Terrace this was mainly to declare and demonstrate his calling. ‘I hadn’t got into the habit of working; I was showing off all the time at the Central. I did some figures and a portrait of Cle (Stephen had his own room but I shared with Cle); I did a self-portrait on board and went out and got some white for eyes and a smock. It was the first I did. It seemed brilliant.’

  The trouble was that he found the course at the Central neither demanding enough nor easy-going. It was too much like school. His social life on the other hand was promising. One fellow student, Margaret Levetus, remembered him as ‘Lutz Freud, a rather frail-looking youth, but he proved to be a demon at ping-pong.’ She beat him twice only. Lucian was quick to strike up acquaintances. ‘I talked to people and looked at people like Honor Frost, who had the next easel to me and was friendly, and Natalie Newhouse, who had been a dental assistant, very pretty and very very funny, but she had no time for me: to do with money.’ Many of those he first met that term were to reappear in his life, among them Lawrence Gowing and Stephen Spender (both of whom attended the rigorously figurative Euston Road School run by William Coldstream, Claude Rogers and Victor Pasmore), V. W. (Peter) Watson, margarine heir and patron of the arts, and Denis (Smutty) Wirth-Miller, a window-dresser for Tootals at £15 a week. ‘No one else had any money. Denis was doing Weimar Republic paintings, like those Germans who copied Van Gogh: Schmidt-Rottluff Wirth-Millers.’ His friend Dicky Chopping had a rich mother and did flower paintings, ‘rather nice, quite fresh and very like’. ‘They were generous and hospitable, had parties and were friendly – that I was a boy probably helped a bit – in a flat in Charlotte Street. Better than all the little dumps there, like Toni del Renzio’s attic and the terrible John Constable house, which Joan Rayner had. Very quiet and well-behaved parties, mildly naughty; the Queen’s hat maker would be there.’

  One night at the Coffee An’ Lucian met Smutty Miller’s half-sister Annie Goossens, daughter of the oboist Eugene Goossens and an impressive jitterbugger. How bored he was at the Central, he told her and she said she’d heard of somewhere that might suit him. A friend of hers, Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, was at a different sort of art school not too far from London. ‘Annie said, “Oh you must go and study at Cedric’s, it’s the only place.”’ She was referring to the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham in Essex, an art school with few constraints. It sounded attractive, compared to the Central or for that matter the Euston Road School, concentrated as it was on life drawing and about to close down anyway. And so in the spring of 1939 he moved there. ‘I wasn’t really looking round for an art school. I wouldn’t have thought of it. It was a jump to go there, done on impulse.’

  Founded in 1937 by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, the East Anglian School was a glorified summer school (‘largely for old women’, Lucian discovered), offering tuition (twenty-six guineas a year, down to two guineas a week: enough to cause Ernst Freud to seek a reduction) in ‘Landscape, Life, Flowers, Still Life, Animals, Design’ in agreeable surroundings. Stiflingly agreeable in that Dedham church tower – tall and distant in Constable’s pictures of Dedham Vale – stood over the village, a reminder to students that the entire place had been consigned through art into English Heritage.

  ‘The Constable country was rather sickening. Ghastly women went there and did watercolours of the Stour and I thought it was his fault.’ To leave the Central in High Holborn for the heartlands of East Anglia was to risk being sucked into seemliness. Yet for all its brick and flint and half-timbering De
dham was ‘on the right side of pretty’, Lucian soon decided, though it was quite a while before he came to regard Constable as a great and daring artist. ‘It was through Francis [Bacon] I got keen on Constable, because he was so keen on The Leaping Horse; I think early on that I thought he was a bit soppy.’ Even so he tried emulating him. ‘I remember plonking my easel in front of a tree at Dedham – I’d seen the Constable tree at the V&A – and thought I can’t do it. I didn’t know where to start. It just seemed impossible. There has to be some correlation between me and the picture.’

  According to Felicity Hellaby (later Belfield), a fellow student who was to become a friend, Lucian arrived at the school very much a juvenile. ‘He was sixteen. I’d never heard of the Freuds and this chap turned up and people said he’s got a very famous grandfather. He and I were probably the youngest.’5 He already had friends and acquaintances there, among them David Kentish, ex-Bryanston. John Banting was often around and John Skeaping was a Dedham legend, for he had stayed at Pound Farm, where Morris and Lett-Haines lived, with Barbara Hepworth and after the break-up of their marriage he had both worked there – teaching Agatha Christie to paint, briefly – and remarried there in 1934. ‘His wife, Morwenna, was daughter of the vicar of Langham, the local parish, and people said he seduced her on the altar. Maybe he did: the fact that everyone knew it meant something, surely?’ The whiff of scandal lingered. ‘Cedric said he, and Christopher Wood, who had stayed too, were smoking opium and he wouldn’t have them there. There is often a puritanical side to queerness and Cedric was a Welsh nationalist. “I really couldn’t allow it,” he said; it was a school, after all, and word would have got around. Though opium was considered odd and exotic, not druggy: no one ever says, “Do you like opium?”’