The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘Darling Felicity’ appreciated the patter. ‘It was never a very romantic affair from my point of view. It was rather fun. We used to go to London to go round the art galleries and clubs and pubs. He loved popping into the Ritz bar. It was very grand there. They all did art, the people there, students in shabby clothes. Lucian loved dressing up in smart clothes: nice suits made by a tailor in Ipswich.’7

  February 1942, Maresfield Gardens:

  Darling Felicity Thank you for your letter. I shall come down this weekend will you meet me on Friday evening at half past six but Where? In the station Refreshment room or bar. Yesterday I bought a lovely yellow jockeys waistcoat at an auction sale and also six doumier lithographs handcoloured I’ve done a drawing of ‘The Japanese Menace is daily assuming an uglier shape’ which is what Churchill said the other day.8

  The Village Boys (1942) could be juveniles up in front of the magistrates for rural misdemeanour, conscious of being examined. ‘Very weedy: nasty but strange’, as Freud described them or, to be precise, what he made of them. They have a background of portraits at various stages of development to be taken into consideration: life drawings (possibly Tony Hyndman) done with the usual mapping pen on a ‘Sketching Pad for Layouts’ – ‘I used a great many of them; they were the house thing at Cedric’s’ – pinned over a horse in profile, and two finished paintings, one ‘a funny figure, Van Gogh Zouave-ish’, the other a self-portrait visible only from the eyes upwards.

  ‘Images beget yet more images,’ Freud said of The Village Boys. But as they beget they relegate; the replication presented in the picture (a painted drawing and painting of paintings) is secondary to the dual proximity of the two sitters bored with being there all weekend, first drawn then painted, posed as part of a notion. Freud had already done a drawing of a framed portrait on a wall looking down on a group of figures such as these, the idea being that the portrait has more presence than the heads below it. The Village Boys reversed this. The two boys, one seated, the other standing, but diminutive, raise the question of which of them is the more immediate. The smaller figure is superimposed, like a donor in an altarpiece, and set apart, like Seneb the Sixth Dynasty dwarf in a funerary group reproduced in J. H. Breasted’s Geschichte Ägyptens, the Phaidon book of ‘Egyptian things that are not made up’: a gift from either his father or Peter Watson (he couldn’t remember which) that he kept to hand all his working life. Freud’s six recently acquired Daumier lithographs played a part too. For, like Daumier characters, those prime local specimens, the Hadleigh boys are conscripts in an arty set-up. It so happened that at the outbreak of war the doctor in Hadleigh had been landed with a pair of exceptionally troublesome seven-year-old twins from the East End. Could those two have been The Village Boys? It’s unlikely, but their traits correspond convincingly enough. They had fought each other continually and killed the doctor’s cockerel. Freud knew them a bit twenty years later: the premier gangsters Ronald and Reggie Kray.

  At the beginning of 1942 Auxiliary Fire Serviceman Stephen Spender, newly posted to a sub-station in a school in St John’s Wood, asked if he and his recently acquired Miss Right, the pianist Natasha Litvin – they had married in April 1941 with Tony Hyndman as witness – might move into the top-floor flat at 2 Maresfield Gardens. Freud had no objection and anyway his father had already said they could. ‘I didn’t sleep there much; I just used a room there. And then Natasha moved her mother in as cook and cleaner. They were both absolutely foul to the rather nice deaf old woman, and when she left they turned on me.’ The trouble was that Freud didn’t get on with Natasha. ‘I started a picture of her. In Ripolin [paint]. I think I destroyed it: there wasn’t enough to be worth keeping. She thought I was an awful little squirt. She assumed – wrongly – I had been, or was, a boyfriend of Stephen; since she felt very much unloved she felt threatened by Stephen’s past, by my finding him a replacement for his first wife. She did, however, behave disgustingly. Travelling in trains during the war she saw sad Jewish people and thought they were spies, so she reported them. They were just refugees. And she said to Stephen, “Stop that silly Schuster nonsense,” meaning that he wasn’t Jewish really. There was no row: to have a row you have to have a degree of trust.’

  Natasha Spender remembered being in bed ill one day and Freud coming upstairs with some buttery asparagus. They ate it on the bed, licking fingers, savouring so delicious a wartime treat. After he had gone his mother came upstairs and when Natasha said by way of thank-you, ‘What wonderful asparagus, how good of Lucian to bring it up to me,’ Mrs Freud muttered, ‘Why don’t I ever get to hear of my sons doing something nice?’9 Nothing could prevent what had been a show of friendliness collapsing into hostility. ‘She stopped sitting and I think that Stephen said to me, “Natasha said you have to go.” I felt humiliated and also felt that Stephen should have stood up for me. I was very naive. When he said, “We won’t disturb you in any way,” I’d have said, if I’d been less ignorant, “No, please don’t.” They were away a lot.’

  Monday [n.d.]

  Darling Felicity thank you so much for your letter with the Kandinsky on the back … I went to see a play called ‘No Orchids for Miss Blandish’ which is perfectly amazing for the London stage. A wicked old woman sits in her horrible room which is supposed to be a den or lair and the walls are made like a spiders web. I might be moving to a rather delishiouse place round the corner from here because Stephen can not work at his poems with the piano’s noise and I have got the only sound proof room in the flat but its rather uncertain yet. I am painting a portrait of a boy who wont sit he thinks he’s developed a neurosis about it, lots of love Lucian10

  ‘I’d moved chairs – my father’s – up to my flat and when I left, as they had no furniture, they used them. (Stephen was a bit what’s yours is mine and what’s mine’s my own.) They had no eye, so they never wondered, I suppose, what were these strange plum-coloured Weimar chairs doing in their house, or where they came from.

  ‘I like presents – having things I was given – and Natasha took my letters from Stephen and my Henry Moore drawing of him which Stephen had given me, and my etching – and he was embarrassed about this – the Picasso etching, the one of the boy with the violin being played on his bottom, a Saltimbanque thing. I went to my room and more and more things went.’ Eventually the Spenders changed the locks to keep him out.

  ‘I hardly ever went there and then my father got them a house and renovated it for them: Loudon Road, freestanding, a good house, where they remained permanently. With my father’s chairs.’

  Freud let it be known (‘I slightly pushed myself’) that he was aggrieved and soon enough, sure enough, Peter Watson responded, suggesting that he could have a room in a house near by, on the other side of Abbey Road in St John’s Wood where another of his protégés, John Craxton (‘very friendly with Peter Watson in a different way from me’), was already installed. Freud and Craxton were almost exact contemporaries and, having become acquainted a few months before, were by then companionable enough to be photographed together – along with Tony Hyndman – on the flat roof at Maresfield Gardens. Craxton was slightly ahead of Freud in professionalism and social climbing. He presented himself as a gentleman of taste. Freud was to remark, frequently, in later years how often Johnny used to recall his father’s advice to him, man to man: ‘Always hold a wine bottle by the neck, not – like a woman – by the waist.’

  A self-styled Arcadian, exempted from military service, Craxton had already developed a signature manner: curvaceous studies of Dorset countryside graced with phallocentric outcrops and musing lads. Two such drawings, Dreamer in Landscape and Poet in Landscape, reproduced in Horizon in March 1942, attracted Graham Sutherland’s attention, understandably so; they were, essentially, Sutherlands with blandishments. Freud too was impressed and intrigued. Here was someone his own age with an obvious sense of purpose. ‘There was a moment, a spark, especially in the drawings.’ Craxton could become his comrade in art if not a brother in arms, he
thought. ‘His mother, Effie, said, “Johnny, there are some men even more dangerous than women.” He did not take heed of his mother’s warning. I never knew Johnny was queer. Not for ages.’

  Peter Watson had offered to pay for somewhere for Craxton to work. He took a maisonette in 14 Abercorn Place, the first and second floors of a large Regency terrace house, £40 a year. ‘I told Peter my problem and he said why don’t you take the second floor?’ Craxton used his floor as a studio only and slept at the family flat. Freud moved in.

  Vintage postcard (girl whose voluminous underwear is revealed at the pull of a tab) to Felicity from St John’s Wood Terrace:

  I haven’t heard from you for so long I’m moving to a most delishiouse flat with John C. Im just rushing off to get a boy a job in a tiny shack where they put wartime ingredients into kakes do write…11

  Once he was no longer lodged under the parental roof, Freud assured himself, he would be ‘out of their orbit’. As it happened, around this time Cedric Morris painted Lucie Freud in evening dress and a five-strand pearl necklace, spotted voile veiling the shoulders. It was an awkward portrait, not so much because Frau Freud was hardly one of Morris’ usual Suffolk gentry types but because he was faced with the parent of a remarkably gifted yet peculiarly difficult pupil. For some time he and Lett had been rather hoping to see the last of him. The pupil sensed in the painting a lack of engagement. ‘I felt he was nervous about it; when he did the veil it got awfully sludgy, it just didn’t work. Cedric had got that queer’s thing of going on about “a really good-looking woman: so good-looking I’d love to paint her.” Not good.’ Freud found himself avoiding his mother’s eye and at the same time moving on from the nursery slopes of Benton End. Felicity Hellaby saw what a nuisance he was. ‘I did think he was brilliant, his drawings particularly; we all thought he was special. But he was terribly difficult. Cedric had written to his mother to persuade him to leave. One hears so much of his being admired so much but I know he made trouble. A blanket was cut up to use for something. Blankets were jolly difficult to get hold of then and Cedric was cross about that. Lucian was very difficult to have around. Other people helped in the kitchen with Lett. Not him. He always managed to get women to do things.’12

  For Freud the dwindling relationship between him and Morris was nothing to dwell on or worry about. ‘I admired Cedric, but I realised it was useless finding how somebody else did things. Cedric taught me to paint. And, more important, to keep at it.’

  It was only after having the best of his Benton End paintings framed at a shop in Swiss Cottage that Freud, not yet twenty, came to accept that his parents had no room for them and that they would clutter up his new workplace. So he asked Ian Phillips, ‘A Cambridge figure, cut rather a swathe, a rich Australian Jew who had a passion for furniture by Thomas Hope’, to store them for him in his fine modern house (designed by Denys Lasdun) in Newton Road, off Westbourne Grove in North Kensington. There they remained for fifteen years until Ronald Searle the cartoonist bought the house and came upon them in the basement.

  In the spring of 1942 a chance to exhibit in a West End gallery arose, not that any of his paintings were needed. Two drawings, ‘disjointed things, rather Surrealist in essence’, were added to ‘Six Scottish Painters’ at Alex Reid & Lefevre in King Street in May 1942: Horse at Night, in white ink on black paper and The Town, which was larger: ‘A horrible thing, crazy, sort of Paul Klee-ish and influenced by Tom Seidmann-Freud: very elaborate with bombed buildings and aeroplanes or not aeroplanes.’ Dylan Thomas, dropping in to see paintings by his Scottish cronies the Roberts MacBryde and Colquhoun, glanced at the Freuds and snorted, saying that they were rubbish. ‘He said, “They’re about nothing.” I was terribly young and not taken seriously.’

  9

  ‘Slight Dreigroschenoper’

  Fourteen Abercorn Place, tall and stuccoed, with a flight of steps up to a front door flanked by Ionic columns, became a bohemian abode with surreal trimmings. Craxton remembered it as an idyllic sort of squat. ‘There were these huge, spiky plants Lucian had growing all over the place at the top. I didn’t sleep there. Lucian used to sleep upstairs.’ The place grew on them. ‘We lived and painted happily there for two years,’ he said. ‘We were inseparable at that point, like brothers. He was very unlike me and that’s why we got on so well, because there was no clashing of styles.’1

  Freud worked on the first floor, Craxton on the second, and in the entrance hall they hung caps, hats and helmets acquired during nights out. This, Freud recalled, was one of the many aspects of their occupancy that infuriated the sitting tenant. ‘On the ground floor was a man called Clinton Grange-Fiske: he was a music critic for the Ham & High or Hampstead Weekly Examiner or something. Johnny’s mother was shocked by us being there with him. She said, “Clinton Grange-Fiske isn’t as white as driven snow.” He had been rejected as a music student by Craxton père and harboured resentment; he’d been the driver for the Rector of Stiffkey when he was displaying himself in circuses.’ This connection with the notorious Rector, defrocked for socialising with prostitutes in the West End on the pretext of reforming them, intrigued Freud. The unfortunate Rector had been reduced to exhibiting himself in a barrel in Blackpool alongside Genesis – Epstein’s graven hymn to pregnancy – and being prodded with forks in a burlesque hell; he died in 1938 when, having been demoted to Skegness, a pretty girl in the audience caused his concentration to lapse and Freddie the lion who shared his cage got him by the throat, a fate that reminded Freud of young Albert who met a similar end in ‘The Lion and Albert’, one of Stanley Holloway’s cautionary music-hall monologues.2 ‘Real social history’, he commented, adding ‘Grange-Fiske complained about the mice.’ These came for the croissants that Craxton liked to draw.3

  Freud’s room enabled him to work more consistently than had been his habit. He took to using plywood panels – architect’s samples – passed on to him by his father and concentrated on clarity. For want of ordinary oil paint – costly and scarce – he started using barge paint from a shop in the Harrow Road and Ripolin, the French brand of enamel paint advertised as ‘Perfection in Paint, Dedicated to the Service of the Craft’. He had heard that Picasso had taken to it. ‘What I didn’t hear was that he drained off the surface oil, so I stirred it and then used it.’ The discovery of Ripolin came about through the Craxton family doctor who happened to know the manager of the Ripolin factory and passed on the news that there were shelfloads of old sample tins going begging in the firm’s Drury Lane office. Craxton pounced. ‘I went off with bags and bags of tins and Lucian got in on the act too. The idea is you put on masses of undercoat and then Ripolin on top, which doesn’t discolour. We mixed tube colours with the Ripolin and they have retained a luminosity where other paintings of that period have not.’4

  Turned loose in their part of the house Craxton and Freud littered it with finds such as job lots of old pictures for ten shillings a bundle, some of which were intact enough to be painted over. ‘I used to buy a lot of old picture frames and smash the glass to use as carpet. I used to put new sheets of it down in the entrance hall so there was a nice crunch. One of the things I liked about bombing was the glass breaking in the shop windows.’ One morning Freud was roused by Ernest Brown of the Leicester Galleries foraging for his latest show of ‘Artists of Fame and Promise’, referred to by Freud and Craxton as ‘Artists of Shame and Compromise’. According to Craxton, ‘a naked Lucian, walking on this broken glass with bare feet, opened the door, to his amazement’. Brown made a point of telling Freud that he was not used to dealing with ‘foreign artists’.5

  Prompted by Peter Watson, Kenneth and Jane Clark came to tea. Craxton maintained – and Freud disputed this – that their intention was to see him only but that Freud hung around on the stairs waiting to be introduced. Craxton told Clark that Freud was the nephew of Hans Calmann the dealer. ‘I can’t stand these Middle Europeans,’ Clark said, but undeterred Craxton called to Freud to come down and meet their guests. Clark
was in a tweed suit; the reason for this being that a visit to bohemians involved a degree of informality, much like dressing for the country. Lady Clark struck Freud as being ‘a gym mistress who never got over meeting this extraordinary person. Curtsied her way out of any possible social difficulty.’ She (‘very shockable’) insisted on going into the kitchen to make tea (Lucie Freud having provided a flan) and opened the oven door to discover two dead monkeys.

  The visit was in keeping with Clark’s magisterially stated belief voiced in the Listener: ‘I have often thought that ideally it needs two people to make a picture: one to commission it and the other to carry it out.’6

  ‘Kenneth Clark would come and, as it were, read the pictures; his advice was sort of good; I suppose he had belief. He was oddly helpful on sides that I didn’t consider: Italian values. In an indirect way what he said was interesting; he said that if you want to help a painter – he was talking to himself of course – buy all their best work and give it to provincial art galleries. Were they going to turn down gifts of very odd-looking artists from a very highly thought of, aesthete, millionaire benefactor? I was only about twenty or so and it seemed an amazing thing to say to someone of that age. When you’re very young, you’re very alive to fame.’ As National Gallery directors go, Clark was remarkably stimulating and a good judge of audience. ‘Raphael became a museum bore,’ he remarked (not to Freud but to readers of the New Statesman) ‘until rediscovered by Picasso.’7 Once, after he had called, Freud walked with him along Abercorn Place to Abbey Road in search of a taxi. ‘In Abbey Road, opposite the recording studios, he looked up at a block of flats where you could see kitchen taps through windows above one another, floor by floor. “Aah,” he said. “Strange lives.”’

  Clark’s powers of patronage, extending as they did from the National Gallery to the Ministry of Information and beyond, gave rise to an attitude of benign hauteur. He regarded young Freud as a prodigy with a name to savour. Patrician in outlook and practised at discretion, he kept a flat in Dover Street for trysts, Freud later learnt, and conducted his business affairs with a similarly compartmented poise. ‘He told me odd things about people’s ludicrous behaviour. Willie Maugham, for example, asked him to smuggle pictures from Switzerland to France for him.’ He knew simply everyone.