The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘My mother used to go daringly down there and leave me food parcels on the step. I never liked having her round. She never called in.’ Which was just as well, he felt. It would not have looked good for Lu the Painter, as he became known in the district, to have been seen to be mothered by a fine lady with a German accent. Her concern for him was irritating. His father on the other hand was realist enough not to bother him. ‘He worried, understandably; I think his happy nature made him not want to know what I was doing in any way.’

  Among the few things Freud took with him to 20 Delamere Terrace were the zebra head (‘my prized possession’), a top hat, a couch and his potted palm, the objects displayed in The Painter’s Room, a picture begun in Abercorn Place and completed – ‘like I took Box of Apples to Wales’ – in new surroundings. Shown off like shop-window items, accentuated in effect, they could be clues, though there is nothing about them to suggest mystery or significance. Freud acknowledged the painting to be ‘a bit out-of-Miró’ in that the living space is as abstracted as the playground of Miró’s Harlequin’s Carnival, a painting that he had admired in reproduction for its ‘most marvellous elation’ not knowing that the milling organisms were said to be hallucinations brought on by hunger. In The Painter’s Room the scarf and top hat are, plainly, a boulevardier’s trappings. The palm stands over the couch, as in the Douanier Rousseau’s parlour jungles and the line in Ubu Roi about ‘palm trees growing at the foot of a bed so that little elephants standing on bookshelves can browse on them’; the zebra head may suggest a connection with Christopher Wood’s Zebra and Parachute – shown at the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street in 1942 – in which exotic coincidence is effected on the flat roof of le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie. But this was not Freud turned Surrealist. He admired the scissors-and-paste upsets in Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de bonté collaged from old wood engravings; plonking the Lion of Belfort on a billiard table was a neat move. However, the incongruity of the zebra head is striking rather than surreal. He had lived with it long enough to regard it as familiar, as his familiar indeed; the metaphysics it scents and sniffs at is de Chirico’s ‘furniture grouped in a new light, clothed in a strange solitude in the midst of the city’s ardent life’, that same strange solitude that his father aimed to achieve when designing consulting rooms and that stills the silenced mêlée of Uccello’s Rout of San Romano. (‘I thought I got nothing from art, but that didn’t mean I didn’t. I certainly looked at it for a long time.’) The collapsed paper bag in Quince on a Blue Table and the scarf abandoned in The Painter’s Room resemble the bits of kit on Uccello’s pink battlefield floor. The creases in the muzzle and the shrivelled tip of the palm leaf, the nap of the hat, upholstery and neck, the studs and bristles, the skidmark shadows cast by the castors, are vivid transferences, like W. H. Auden’s line ‘the tigerish blazer and the dove-like shoe’.25 A blazerish red galvanises the zebra patterning and casts the scarf as a detached stripe. The couch stands daintily, like a foal, below the watchful head.

  ‘I never put anything anywhere odd; except, obviously, I used the zebra as if it were more native to the room than it actually was. I was working in a very cramped way of altering nothing and feeling that was the only way I could do things. I wasn’t aware of that at the time – Matisse hadn’t probably said it: “Accuracy is not the truth.” If I had read that I can’t help feeling that I’d have seen what he meant. But I was trying for accuracy of a sort. I didn’t think of detail; it was simply, through my concentration, a question of focus.’

  For some months following D-Day, from June 1944, London came under attack from V-1 flying bombs. ‘Nobody in London has slept for four nights past,’ Freud’s neighbour Wrey Gardiner wrote. ‘The flying bomb has passed over and exploded somewhere else. For the moment.’ Later he added: ‘As I write this the siren wails to herald the flying bomb which people fear more than the other kind for obscure psychological reasons.’26 Freud used to look out for them from the roof of Delamere Terrace; sometimes, when he spotted an explosion, he nipped along on his bike to view the damage. One doodlebug landed in Maresfield Gardens, demolishing several houses and bringing down the ceiling of the Spenders’ flat. Another day, leaving The Painter’s Room on the easel, he went out to the paint shop in the Harrow Road to get pigments. While he was walking back a bomb struck behind the terrace and he was plunged into a cloud of dust. ‘As I started down the street I saw a red thing moving towards me in the fog. I put out my hand and it was wet, covered in blood. A thing just walking a few steps and then it was gone. Dead. No face. Completely gone.’

  The window of his room was shattered but the painting, on an easel at right angles to the window, was miraculously undamaged. With that the zebra head, craning through the aperture more in confidence than curiosity, became a backhanded take on Guernica, ‘full of life and hope. No horrors of war there.’

  11

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

  Marie Paneth’s Branch Street, a vivid sociological study of child life in a London slum street, identifiable from her descriptions as Clarendon Crescent W2, just up the road from Delamere Terrace, was published in July 1944. It focused on gangs of boys and girls aged four to fourteen, habitually fighting, wrecking, thieving, and with whom the author – an Austrian settled in London and a painter by training – tried to cope by operating rudimentary Play Centres in abandoned houses and a public shelter. Unlike Young Children in War-time by Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, an account of ‘child development and psycho-pathology’ from the same publisher, her Branch Street reported with a degree of appalled fascination on ‘a queer urge to break, to spoil and to besmirch’. Feral behaviour was the norm there. ‘Disastrous evenings left us in queer depths of despair, when hasty fights, stealing and lewdness overshadowed our small periods of constructive activity.’1 The wariness and hostility of these children of prostitutes, coal shovellers and railway porters, she observed, was occasionally alleviated with touching spurts of trust. Freud, who at twenty-two was not much older than some of Mrs Paneth’s leading hooligans, saw at least one or two of them as potential sidekicks. For him there were parallels to be drawn with the juvenile leads in Emil and the Detectives: Gustav with his motor-horn, little Tuesday and the Professor, street-gang characters whose nicknamed resourcefulness matched that of the players in Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls.

  ‘My guide to a side of Paddington life was Charlie who lived next door at number 19. He was under fourteen then and he used to sleep in shelters. He wandered along the balconies, along the terrace, into my room. There was one of these bombing raids, and then he suddenly seemed to sort of belong to me.’ Charlie Lumley said that his first encounter with Freud arose out of his habit of clambering on to the balconies, and whenever the retired greengrocer next door spotted him he would say ‘Bloody cat burglar!’ as a joke. ‘Lu moved in and heard this – he was standing there with John Craxton – and that’s when we first met.’2 To the Lumleys their new neighbour was as poor as they were. ‘He never had a penny and my mother used to make him a sandwich and that. She would say “Pop this in to Lu,”’ Charlie remembered.3 He became attached to Freud, who drew him as an Artful Dodger sitting expectantly on his sofa and in an armchair wearing the red and blue uniform jacket, several sizes too big, from Still Life with Chelsea Buns, the ring on his finger and Brylcreemed hair denoting street savvy. ‘Going down the street he’d shout “You’re a goer” at a girl who’d been going with Yanks. He went to the Coliseum, the fleapit on the Harrow Road, and when I asked if he’d liked the film he said, “I couldn’t watch. There was a GI sitting next to me and his wallet was sticking out and I just couldn’t concentrate.” The only low life Charlie had was to do with his thieving. He used to get caught and I had trouble getting him off because in Police Courts they always read out your record. His first sentence was when he was fourteen. He’d built himself a boat on the canal, rowed up to the back of a vegetable shop and flogged the veg lower down the canal.’

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bsp; Charlie had several brothers and a sister whom Freud took out once to L’Étoile. He asked her what she would like to drink and she said, ‘Cuppa tea please.’ The next day Charlie asked him when was he going to marry her. Charlie appealed to him. ‘He did funny imitations, made me self-aware. He had a real kind of quality.’

  Earlier in 1944 Freud had approached galleries hoping to be invited to exhibit properly somewhere. ‘I had asked Erica Brausen (as everyone wanted to show at the Redfern, it was so lively) to see some paintings at Abercorn Place and she hummed and haahed and said, “Oh, Rex’s lumbago is too bad for him to get up the stairs”; so then, within days of my arranging it, [Duncan] Macdonald came from the Lefevre and offered me a show instead. I think on the strength of the Drumnadrochit drawing. And of course immediately then I got a telegram from Erica: “Rex will come any day now.”’ Rex Nan Kivell was the owner of the Redfern Gallery.

  Craxton having just had his show at the Leicester Galleries, Freud’s debut at the Lefevre came a close second. The gallery had been bombed out of its King Street premises and reopened at 131 New Bond Street, upstairs from Beale & Inman the shirtmakers, with separate rooms for each exhibitor: Freud, Felix Kelly who did soft-focus bespoke paintings (‘The Lefevre Gallery, on Mr Kelly’s behalf, will be pleased to accept commissions to paint Country Houses’) and Julian Trevelyan, formerly a Surrealist and camouflage fabricator in the Western Desert, whose gouaches of West Africa he himself described as ‘African tarts and mammies in their brilliant clothes’.4 To differentiate himself from such associates, Freud decided to have his own eye-catching private-view card. ‘I did something that was fairly unusual for an unknown: I did the card myself and had it printed myself. I didn’t want to be on the card with Trevelyan and Kelly. I did a drawing of a crab and it was designed by Anthony Froshaug, a boyfriend of my cousin Jo at the Central. He taught typography. Older than me, very odd: he’d had a bad time in the Merchant Navy being abused. Had a thing about queers. It didn’t occur to me – the word – since all the people I knew were queers.’

  Private view invitation, 1944

  The crab was not exhibited, for Freud included only drawings that he considered equivalent to paintings. Several of the most recent he signed and dated. A few had to be borrowed – Ian Phillips lent Cacti and Stuffed Bird, Ernst Freud Juliet Moore Asleep and Craxton Quince on Blue Table. This was his opportunity to demonstrate, and edit, his broadening and intensifying accomplishment.

  The private view – his first and, until his final years, the last he ever attended – was on a Saturday afternoon, 21 November 1944. Two young painters of ‘distinguished families’ were exhibiting, the Evening Standard reported, Trevelyan being the great-grandnephew of Lord Macaulay and nephew of G. M. Trevelyan, the historians, and Freud ‘the 21-year-old grandson of Sigmund Freud and Miss Anna Freud’s nephew’. Freud, the Standard added, had been co-editor, in his teens, of a Surrealist magazine called Bheuaau, which explained the Surrealistic tendency of his pictures: ‘an extraordinary variety of live and dead animals ranging from “A Skinned Hen” and “An Oil-Bound Puffin” to a stuffed zebra’s head, one of the chief ornaments of Freud’s studio over the Regent’s Canal’.5

  According to the Standard ten of the drawings and paintings – about a third of the show – sold on the opening night. Freud was embarrassed. ‘All my relatives turned up and shamed me by buying things.’ His mother had been alerting family and friends. Cousin ‘Wolfi’ Mosse picked a dead-chicken drawing and Anna Freud’s companion Dorothy Burlingham bought the large Conté drawing of the palm tree that served as the design for the covers of The Glass Tower. Other buyers included Ian Gibson-Smith, Anton Zwemmer, whose bookshop-gallery in Charing Cross Road had for years aired the avant garde and who bought Quinces for fifteen guineas, and Wilfred Evill, a solicitor and collector (the legal guardian of Honor Frost, Freud’s acquaintance from the Central) who chose the drawing of Charlie Lumley seated on the studio couch. Lorna Wishart took The Painter’s Room, at fifty guineas the most expensive painting, and Colin Anderson, chairman of the Orient Line, went for one of the cheapest, the eight-guinea Mouse in a Hand.

  Freud hung around the gallery. ‘I went and saw the show a lot. It was very much “yes, look what I can do.”’ Tuberous fingers and staring eyes were what he could do particularly well, also earlobes, feathers and claws, pelt and leaf. He was pleased to see that he had style and, unlike Craxton, more than style. He had application. His patience tracing individual strands of hair, where Max Ernst would have dragged a comb through the paint, was phenomenal and most lapses into facility were redeemed by sudden brilliance: the glint in the eye of the dead rabbit. A drawing of Craxton, done just in time to be exhibited (he dated it ‘22.11.44’) featured what he saw as ‘that narcissistic look’ through breathless attention to the zigzag texture of the jacket and the cultivated parting in the hair; this drawing caught the eye of L. S. Lowry, who had been taken on by the Lefevre and liked anything that smacked of Rossetti. Later on he bought it.

  There were a few mentions (among them David Sylvester in Tribune) and two reviews. In the Listener John Piper addressed himself to Freud’s technique. ‘His youthful mannerisms add up to a personality. Too many of the forms are depressed by having to deliver unimportant literary messages, but he has a cultivated feeling for line, when he can be bothered with it, and a natural feeling for colour.’ Coming from an artist who in his own work tended to deliver architectural messages in startlingly heavy weather, this was heartfelt comment. Michael Ayrton, heady still with Neo-Romantic vapours (‘a sense of pain provoked my painting of Gethsemane in Wiltshire …’), wrote loftily in the Spectator: ‘The human figure defeats him because he does not observe it as he does dead birds but merely lets his pleasant line wander trickily round the form without relevance to construction.’6 This could be construed as retaliation, maybe, for Freud’s lack of enthusiasm for his own work. He was equally dismissive of Craxton’s drawings. ‘In that they lack a direct visual reaction to nature,’ he said, ‘they are empty.’7 Craxton was to take a pop at Ayrton later in life as ‘so puffed up with his own importance, he was the last barrage balloon over London that never got taken down.’8

  Edmund Dulac, whose bejewelled illustrations for The Arabian Nights had excited Lucian as a child, saw the exhibition and said that he liked it. He was a family friend. Others too were approached by Lucie Freud to lend support. ‘My mother was not excessive, quite modest, with all her pride. Herbert Read was a friend of my parents – his wife was German – and my mother said, “Why didn’t you write a preface for Lucian?” And he said, “I only write prefaces for refugees.” I thought: fuck him.’ One such refugee, exhibiting coincidentally at Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery in Charles II Street, was Kurt Schwitters. Read had been persuaded to pen a few lines for him. ‘My life is of an unimaginable complexity,’ he protested, but obliged, Schwitters being so much the opposite of young Freud.9 ‘The bourgeois loves slickness and polish; Schwitters hates them,’ he wrote. Schwitters, he declared, was ‘one of the most genuine artists in the modern movement’.10 Freud missed this Schwitters exhibition, as he never went to Jack Bilbo’s gallery if he could help it. ‘It smelt so horribly. Sylv [David Sylvester] once showed there: brown paintings.’ Bilbo, an ebullient chancer previously named Hugo Baruch, whose gallery operated from 1941 to 1948, complained to Freud once about being a dealer. ‘It’s much more trouble than painting the bloody things.’ His own paintings were shamelessly Picasso-ish, Freud remembered. ‘He did a painting of Owo, his wife: Owo after a Beating, a red-striped painting.’

  Despite lacking the Herbert Read stamp of approval, Freud was entitled to consider his debut well received. (‘He certainly arouses interest’: the Studio.) Craxton was recognised as being more obviously stylish than he, and Duncan Macdonald of the Lefevre did not consider him to be in the same league as Robert Colquhoun. More, perhaps, a match for Felix Kelly though with a sharper taste for detail. But it was a start. At least he did not resort to sw
eeping mannerisms. In his drawings he did his utmost with increasing capability. ‘I always drew all the time, I never questioned why. Later, I deliberately stopped because I thought it was holding me up.’ As for the paintings in the show, ‘I thought some pictures were no good because they were too infantile. It irritated me when people talked about them being “primitive”. They mistook an inability for an affectation.’

  When copies of The Glass Tower were delivered from the printers, however, Freud was disappointed. He knew that the book, advertised as being ‘illustrated in colour’ and published at 8s 6d – two shillings less than The Poet’s Eye – was not going to be magnificent, but there was no excuse for everything except the binding being skimped, even by the prevailing austerity standards. The colours – yellow and cyan-blue inks – on ‘that funny wartime paper, very shiny lavatory paper’, were distasteful but the cropping of some of the images infuriated him, and the silly discrepancies in the layout: images facing the wrong way and, at the end, a gull parked arbitrarily opposite a blank page. ‘I made a terrible fuss. I remember being in the office of Mr Roberts, the director of Nicholson & Watson [Ivor Nicholson and Peter Watson] who had assumed financial responsibility for Poetry London, and saying to him: “Look at this one: you’ve cut off two fish tails at the top.” And he said, “What about our boys in Burma? They’re having more than their tails cut off.” I smashed the photograph of his wife off the desk and said I was going to the Society of Authors, so I was offered some money. And then he said, “Look, we’re sending these books to Australia and New Zealand. No one will see a copy in England.” I accepted the extra money.’