The Blue Lamp was played out in the setting of the Harrow Road and Westbourne Grove, police cars screeching past the crossroads with Delamere Terrace and Clarendon Crescent. Cast as a low-life location in British film noir, this part of Paddington became the epitome of the decrepitude of post-war London. Which made Freud’s 20 Delamere Terrace something of a frontier post for his visitors from higher society. Waldemar Hansen (Peter Watson’s boyfriend at the time) was one of those who ventured there, as he described to his friend John Myers in the United States:
Saturday afternoon we went to Lucian Freud’s studio to see his work. His portraits are very hyperthyroid and schizophrenic and rather compelling. He obviously has talent, but is very undisciplined and self-taught. Not being a primitive, this works against him. Lucian himself is very charming, rather wistful with mad, schizoid eyes, and a very shrewd perceptive ability. His studio is in an old Georgian house, in an elegant faded-splendor part of London. There is a zebra head on the wall, an old-fashioned phonograph with a huge horn, and a live falcon, which swoops around the room and alights on the master’s wrist!! I think he is going to do a drawing of me, and I’m rather intrigued to see what I’ll look like after going through that strange personal prism.9
The drawing, nothing like as sympathetic as the one of Peter Watson two years earlier, was just what was required: a male glamour study involving deft highlights in white Conté.
That month, May 1947, Freud painted Small Zimmerlinde, a reminder of his grandmother’s apartment in Berlin. Michael Hamburger remembered him calling at his parents’ house to pick up the plant. ‘Lucian collected several in succession as some died. They were very common in Germany but I think unknown when we came to England. The original was raised from a leaf sent by post from Germany to my mother.’10 At about the same time he was included in ‘Known and Unknown’, a mixed show at the St George’s Gallery, organised by Mrs Lea Jaray (‘Mother Jarra’, Mesens called her), who had managed the one contemporary gallery in Vienna before the Anschluss. ‘She really loved art. I bought a big Masson drawing from her. A bullfight. Like a Ceri Richards, after Picasso, only more intelligent.’ He exhibited Scillonian Beachscape rather than a recent work because these were being saved for showing at the London Gallery later in the year, and was photographed standing in front of it for Time magazine which, having recently launched an ‘Atlantic Overseas’ edition, was extending its London coverage. Their reporter, June Rose, had spotted the name and asked to interview him. Freud refused but invited her round the corner for a drink. It was her first assignment for Time and, anxious to do well, she wrote up their non-interview conversation. On 26 May 1947 an edited summary of this appeared under the heading ‘Don’t be a Gentleman’. Freud, the story went, was ‘like his late, great grandfather suspicious of reticence. Grandfather Sigmund thought it frequently concealed all manner of ugly things; grandson Lucian, like Joan Miro, thinks it inhibits art.’
Last week Lucian, a tousled, 24-year-old painter with dreamy eyes and frayed cuffs, exhibited a craftsman-like beachscape that was the standout of a not-too-brilliant show of ‘New Generation’ art in London. He took the occasion to blast at what was wrong with British painting.
Said he: ‘In Britain everything is so foul and filthy that artists either go crazy, become surrealist, or get into a rut. The clockwork morality of Britain that one feels on a bus, the inhumanity, the rigidity – it’s a wonder that anyone paints at all.’ His Two Minute Hate ended with the remark that British art ‘is all just inspired sketching. That’s what the people want. It’s not considered gentlemanly to have ideas, so even the best only dabble.’11
The ‘tousled’ painter decided to sue; the exploitation of his surname for Time Life purposes was bad enough, but what made him particularly angry was seeing his remarks rehashed. ‘Obviously I didn’t say that. All that talk about licensing hours and so on: it read like John Osborne’s Damn you, England.’ Graham Sutherland’s solicitor, Wilfred Evill, a collector of works by artist clients (‘a collector to baffle cynics and realists, a collector of almost dramatic proportions’,12 he had drawings of Charlie Lumley and of a beached Scillonian boat), advised Freud that if he lost he could always go bankrupt which, since he was skint, wouldn’t affect him; and Sutherland sent him a telegram, signed ‘inspired sketcher’, agreeing to be a character witness. Even so the lawsuit was risky. ‘It was a terrific gamble.’ There was a long delay before it came to court. He and Kitty went off to France.
Dolled up, Kitty sat for Girl in a White Dress with Holbein neckline and lacework worthy of a rococo bust. This was done in July 1947, when she and Freud were in Paris, staying in the Hôtel Pas de Calais on the Boulevard Saint Germain. She mentioned the portrait, a flawless take on Ingres’ Madame Moitessier, in a letter to her mother (‘I do so hope you will like it’) and went on to tell her how things were. ‘We stayed 2 nights in a cupboard on a level with the top spire of Saint Sulpice, then found that we could not stay with the girl that we were going to because she is not going away yet, so we are in a very nice hotel, rather expensive with flowery wallpaper and a bird cage (we had a humming bird in it but it flew away) and a fuchsia plant.’13 Freud remembered Kitty being ‘fond of Epstein but a bit scared. The first time we went to Paris she said, “I’ve got to get a chapeau d’artiste for him,” and she did: a funny blue hat with a broad rim.’ They had themselves photographed together perched on a wooden donkey – he in attentive pose, she amused: a pretend Flight into Egypt. And they went to the opening of what proved to be Breton’s last major throw as impresario with ‘Le Surréalisme en 1947’ at Galerie Maeght for which Duchamp made arrangements at the New York end and devised the catalogue, the 999-copy ‘limited edition’ of which had a foam-rubber falsie (‘Prière de toucher’) on the cover with a hand-painted nipple. Kitty remarked on the Rain Room that Duchamp also devised. ‘Water was pouring from the ceilings!’ ‘My pains are better,’ she added.14
From the hotel he wrote to the painter-heiress Meraud Guinness. ‘The Surrealist exhibition is very dark and rainy and beautifully built and arranged like the Ideal Home Exhibition,’ he told her. His aim in writing was to get her to invite them to stay with her in the South. ‘I would very much like to come down for some days with a friend. Have you a place on a shelf where we could sleep?? Or under a Bed? Do let me know I am at the Hotel Pas de Calais Rue de Saint Pere VI …’15 Paris, he wrote, had become unbearable, it being August (‘hot winds like from an electric hair dryer’), adding, ‘I am working in a dizzy state in my fifth thermos hotel room.’ Meraud Guinness was used to accommodating artistic spongers: David Gascoyne went there, ostensibly to cook, ten summers running. However her place, Parador near Aix-en-Provence, lacked amenities, Freud discovered. ‘It was primitive, a big barn with bedrooms off it, no sheets or anything and the kitchen was lumps of coal in an ancient fireplace.’ Rainwater was heated in a tin can. ‘What more could one need?’ Meraud Guinness said, having painted the exterior ultramarine and planted cabins on a hillside for artists, writers and forty cats.
His thank-you note, dated 4 September, was effusive and apologetic. ‘I am sorry not to have written before now but as soon as I reached England I went completely stiff from head to foot and my blood got hotter and hotter and I’ve only recently got out of bed feeling very weak and light.’ Planning ahead, he piled on the gratitude: ‘The most delishers, luxurious and tranquil series of days I have EVER spent. I think you have done what everyone dreams of doing: you have perfected a mode of summer life which is in such comlete accord with your own tastes and desires that for you and all those around you the days pass in dreamy winy Harmony Parado has an atmosphere of mystery and of content and I long to be there again SOON.’16 Decades later he backtracked on the enthusiasm: ‘I never actually stayed there; Kitty couldn’t stand it, so we left and went to the Hôtel Nègre-Coste in Aix.’ Kitty suffered an insect bite and her thigh swelled so alarmingly that he went to find a doctor. It was lunchtime but, regardless of etiquette, he barged int
o the dining room, Kitty remembered, and a doctor with pince-nez emerged to examine her, irate at being disturbed.
In Aix a further image of Kitty was achieved. Graham Sutherland had given Freud some of his etching tools (he had no use for them as he no longer considered himself a printmaker) and he had brought some copper plates with him thinking it would be better to use one of them in a Provençal hotel room rather than try to paint; so at his window overlooking the Cours Mirabeau he worked on Girl with Fig Leaf, an etching composed of an impressive variety of marks – dots, dashes, hairlines, cross-hatchings – on a larger scale than he had previously attempted. ‘I remember thinking I’d done a really big one. There’s a peekaboo look which I wasn’t trying for.’ Also an affronted look: Kitty under strain, her by now familiar features – hair, forehead, eye and hand – employed as competition to the masking leaf. Getting hold of nitric acid for the biting-in was a problem. ‘I remember walking about and the old-fashioned chemist being reluctant to sell me any. He suspected me of planning a crime de passion. I remember thinking how Provençal that was.’ Back in Paris the plate was printed up in time for his exhibition at the London Gallery in November.
In late October the Sutherlands, who were developing a taste for abroad, took Freud with them to the South of France, more as passenger than protégé. ‘Maybe he was paying for me. Certainly driving. Graham wouldn’t drink ordinary wine. He had a delicate digestion, of course, but I’d drink the ordinary wine from Algiers and say lovely and he would have to have estate-bottled.’ Though the Sutherlands had been to the Riviera earlier that year it was still pretty new to them so they fell in with Freud’s proposal that they should stay at Meraud Guinness’ place. Almost within sight of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, he told them. He wrote to her. ‘Tell me what your plans are and when you go to Aix to take up your winter quarters. Could I really borrow the house? I thought of coming over with the painter Graham Sutherland and his wife. They have a car so we could motor down from Paris to Parador and if a mistral makes us to vicious we could quickly drive to a cinema. We would be most careful housetrained and domestic with the house of course! Write soon.’17
They stopped in Paris for longer than they intended, as Sutherland was ill and in bed for three days. ‘He had prep-schoolboy dodgy health.’ While he was laid up Freud took Kathleen Sutherland to bars. In the Café Flore they came upon Brian Howard, the original of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, making an exhibition of himself as was his habit. ‘Terrifically drunk: she hadn’t seen anything as extreme as that.’ She was even more startled the next morning when she found that Freud had had a girl, whom he met in the Bal Nègre, in his room all night. ‘Christiane she was called. Kath was shocked to find I wasn’t queer, which she’d hoped I was. She did imitations of her coughing all night.’ Once Sutherland had recovered they drove south, Freud taking with him two finches that he had picked up in Paris and let out each night to flutter around his hotel room. They lasted until he returned to London. There they died. ‘I was allowed these through customs. It was only the ones with curved beaks you weren’t allowed.’
Parador was not a success with the Sutherlands. ‘In the sixties it would have been desirable to stay there, but Graham was terribly proper, he had to have proper wine: everything had to be all right. It was to do with his background. I’d thought hooray, stay at this marvellous place, but he was shocked. There were all those large, Provençal, people-size pots and afterwards whenever I ate with them Graham and Kathy would roll bits of bread into little urns and say “Paradoux” – “Parador” – because with Meraud everything was local pots. Kathy didn’t want to be bog Irish (which was her background), so we went on to the Hôtel Nègre-Coste in Aix. While there I went to Monte Carlo to have a look at the flowerbeds. Hadn’t got ammunition to gamble: just enough to stay at the Nègre-Coste.’ After a few days he returned to Paris by himself. The Sutherlands went on to Villefranche where they met Tom Driberg, the egregious MP and former gossip columnist for the Daily Express, who jollied them into calling on Picasso and Matisse with him. Sutherland was keen to launch out, trying the Casino (‘there are times when one makes all the right movements, and one’s whole interior mechanism places the chips’) and emulating Picasso.
Though it was his name primarily – Freud as in ‘Sigmund Freud’ – that had brought him to the attention of Time magazine, it was his newly achieved distinctiveness that secured his inclusion among the fifteen artists in ‘La Jeune Peinture en Grand Bretagne’, a British Council exhibition at the Galerie René Drouin early in 1948; in which, as Herbert Read observed in his usual catalogue introduction, all involved were Expressionists of one sort and another, with three exceptions: Ben Nicholson, the Nicholsonesque Edgar Hubert and, all on his own, Lucian Freud. Read still preached the virtues of psychologically induced Surrealism. ‘The universe of painting – the universe seen by the painter –’, he wrote, ‘hasn’t been the same since [Sigmund] Freud showed the importance of irrational sources of inspiration.’18 The grandson was either proof of this or an exception. His Dead Heron and the drawing of a bathtubby boat in the Scillies looked to be odd ones out in an exhibition bristling with thornscapes. The exhibition went on from Paris to Brussels where Matthew Smith, L. S. Lowry, John Tunnard, Louis le Brocquy and Stanley Spencer were added. Freud was dropped – as was Edward Burra – but he did get a mention in Painting since 1939, a 1947 British Council pamphlet written by Robin Ironside, an assistant keeper at the Tate, an enthusiast for the Pre-Raphaelites and himself a painter of fey phantasmagoria. To him Freud’s work was wilfully childish. ‘The very amateur pictures of Lucien [sic] Freud have a distinctly idiosyncratic nature, though the grotesque naïveté of his vagrant humour seems indebted to the almost philosophical infantilism of some of Klee’s pictures.’19 Freud liked Klee’s artful doodling but by then he was well beyond being influenced by it. Witness his singularly lucid drawing, reproduced in Ironside’s essay, of a stuffed owl in a glass case posed on a chair.
‘Robin Ironside was strange, twisty, very odd. I went to his house once. He said, “I’ll show you the view,” opened the shutters and there, less than a foot away, was a brick wall.’
The paintings that Freud had brought back with him from Greece were shown at the London Gallery in Brook Street in November 1947 together with works completed subsequently. Three of them were reproduced in that month’s Horizon, tangerine, lemons and Girl with a Kitten presented in tart contrast to a Craxton scalloped shoreline.
This was the one occasion when Craxton and Freud showed as a duo, Craxton in the front room, Freud in the back room, down three steps. The Studio’s review gave equivalent prominence to each in terms of column inches, noting Craxton’s ‘desire to produce results notwithstanding the continual responsibility of show following show’, while Freud, it said, with the inevitable Freudian spin, ‘continues to display a curious mind’.20
Such reviews as there were ranged from the bland to the dismissive where Freud was concerned. Bernard Denvir in Tribune talked of ‘a quality of Germanic linear accuracy of the kind we associate with Albania, with a perfectly planned introduction of apparently irrelevant detail which is typical of some of the surrealists’.21 In Time & Tide Maurice Collis was even more dismissive: ‘He may be described as having an exquisite talent. As it has been revealed so far it is a small one.’22
Parallels were drawn with the advent of the Pre-Raphaelites a century before. On the BBC Third Programme Patrick Heron, at that stage in his career more critic than painter, talked about Freud’s ‘modernised Pre-Raphaelitism’, a topical reference in that 1948 marked the centenary of the Brotherhood and, accordingly, Robin Ironside had organised Pre-Raphaelite exhibitions at the Whitechapel and Tate. Freud was happy to be associated with certain Pre-Raphaelite works such as The Awakening Conscience, Holman Hunt’s painting of a kept woman suddenly stricken with shame in the confines of a St John’s Wood love nest. ‘Holman Hunt had a number of pictures that, if you didn’t know about the Pre-Raphaelites, yo
u would think: what a lot of marvellous paintings.’ He did object to being lumped in with the overweening poeticising of the Brotherhood. ‘I’ve always tried to avoid doing anything which had a double-entendre symbolism.’ Graham Sutherland lent The Birds of Olivier Larronde, a bright but doleful little picture. To him it was a souvenir of their journey south with the oiseaux-mouches; to Freud the image of the decorative red cage with two button-eyed occupants hung high on a wall was a far cry from – yet distant echo of – The Awakening Conscience.
The Lives of Lucian Freud Page 30