The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Not long after, on 16 July, Dicky Buckle staged a housewarming party for himself in Bloomfield Terrace with more than 100 guests. He noted that ‘Lucian Freud, whose baby was hourly expected, wore tartan trousers’ and kept telling people how excited he was about the imminent birth. Annie was born days later.’3

  Characteristically Ernst Freud dealt with practicalities and took a house for them – 28 Clifton Hill, St John’s Wood – on a cheap lease from the Eyre Estate for which he did a lot of work. (The Estate was founded in the early nineteenth century by Sir John Eyre to make accommodation for writers and painters.) ‘My father worried about Kitty living at Delamere and gave it to us for nothing: an 1830s, St John’s Wood-style, nice house, semi. Quite a nice garden.’ That done, Freud went to some effort settling in. He planted two bay trees in the front garden, one of which died while the other grew until it towered over the house. Lucie Freud was pleased to hear Ernst enthusing over the oil paint – barge paint – chosen by Lucian for decorating, particularly the restful matt green he used for the bedroom. The stuffed fish in its glass box, bought five years before, graced the bathroom and a drawing table went into the conservatory with the plants and birds.

  It was however an abrupt transition and Freud was unprepared for the role of householder, a role magnified when others besides Kitty – and Annie – came to live under the same roof. A couple settled into the basement: ‘Slosher’ Martin, who stoked the boiler, and his wife, who was the sister of Lucie Freud’s maid. There were also the Landers: Ron Lander, ‘very very small, somehow pretty humble, an anarchist, made architectural models, I think; he and his wife moved into our house’. His wife Joan had a baby and Freud drew her too. And Eduardo Paolozzi, a former sculpture student at the Slade who had spent the best part of 1947 in Paris, came and stayed for some months, on and off, at number 28. ‘He didn’t pay. He had white plaster marine things (sea urchins), quite nice. He would be there and we’d talk. He left to go to Paris.’ Clifton Hill was one size up from St John’s Wood Terrace and rather more shabby genteel. The publisher James MacGibbon was a neighbour (hence a commission to illustrate Rex Warner’s Men and Gods) and Melanie Klein, Anna Freud’s rival, lived a few doors down. ‘I used to see her in the street, a ridiculous-looking woman in a hat.’

  ‘We had an au pair, an Irish girl with an illegitimate child. I tried something of her, Girl with Red Hair, pastel on black paper: tried and failed. Kitty got her in as she had a baby and we thought, optimistically, that she would be good with children. Stupid really. Charlie came back rather drunk one night and went to her room and next morning she said, “I may have a baby but that doesn’t mean I can be treated like a whore.” I asked Charlie about it and he said, “I got a very good reception.” Anyway, the girl left, leaving her child behind. She became an usherette at a cinema in Kilburn and the baby was looked after by the woman in the basement. After a bit I got her address and sent a telegram using phrases like “The Year of Our Lord” – biblical language to impress her – saying “Unless you remove the child you will be completely suppressed.” That did it. The child went.’

  Though money was a problem, foraging for it could be stimulating and he was always on the lookout for opportunities to exploit. Feliks Topolski, celebrated for his drawings of personages and big events grotesquely awhirl, lived round the corner from Delamere Terrace. ‘Once I was ill and Kitty went round to Topolski’s with a painting he had liked – Still Life with Chelsea Bun – I’d no money at all and he lived in splendour and for £7 he bought it. I thought I would get £20; I thought it mean. He hadn’t got much time for me. I went round occasionally. Topolski wasn’t unfriendly, but what use would I be there? He went for well-known people. He gave a party for Picasso and I longed to go.’ Freud was not invited; Epstein was, and when Picasso arrived, late, they embraced. ‘Topolski talked about tall people as “elongated” people; “I’m going to hunt women in the park,” he would say.’

  Once in a while the possibility arose of getting the better of art dealers. Freud noticed, for example, that some works by Dufy exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in 1949 as artist’s prints were, in fact, collotype reproductions excised from a book. ‘It was a book called Mon docteur le vin. Ivan Moffat, ex-Dartington and Bryanston, gave it to me; it came from his father Curtis Moffat the interior designer, who’d just died, from his grand flat in Fitzroy Square: a rather fine book, sponsored by a wine company, with vine leaves on the front. The illustrations looked like lithographs and the Redfern was selling them framed at twelve guineas each. I was longing for a Max Ernst painting Fleurs, done with a comb, so I took the book into the gallery hoping to be seen.’ Sure enough Rex Nan Kivell of the Redfern noticed him loitering with the book and invited him into the back room where he offered to relieve him of it. Freud suggested a swap and a deal was struck: the painting was his for £50, which his father paid. And so, for a while, he had his own Max Ernst. Some years later, having met the artist only to find him supercilious, he sold it to Gimpels for £120, telling himself that he had become bored with it.

  Another time he spotted in the window of Shemilt’s, the framers in Seymour Place where he had bought a Delacroix drawing of a candlestick for £10, a promising-looking painting: ‘A beautiful Constable: London with St Paul’s in the background, from Archway, stormy sky. It cost, I think, £60, £80 – quite a lot – and I said to Mr Shemilt, “I really like this picture. If I bring someone in and they buy it, will you see me all right?” “I’ll give you half of anything over £80 they give me,” he said. He loved the idea of the picture going through his humble shop and going to a gallery. So I took K. [Clark] in and he was terrifically excited and thought he’d get it through the NACF [National Arts Collection Fund]. K. said, “You know, I’d like to buy it but without a provenance enemies would get at it …” He paid an odd sum. “How much?” “I leave it to you.” “£900.” So I got £400. I once asked Alan Clark, son of K. Clark, what happened to it. He said, “Wish it was one.”’

  Through Kenneth Clark, Freud had met Colin Anderson, finding him ‘huge and handsome, and soft (for a shipowner)’. Anderson was Chairman of the Orient Line, lived in Admiral’s House, Hampstead, and owned a number of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, among them The Awakening Conscience and two late Sickerts based on news photos: one of Churchill and the other of George V at the races. These in themselves made him worth visiting, but Anderson was also known to be good for a loan. ‘Somehow Lucian thought it was a gentlemanly transaction,’ Frank Auerbach thought. ‘If he gave somebody a drawing he thought, or knew, that in the course of time they got it very cheaply.’ So anyone who baulked at his request for a loan could be considered short sighted or unimaginative.

  Freud was rather astonished by Anderson’s reaction (‘Is Lucian Freud living with proper frugality?’ he queried on being approached for £200). ‘I’m not psychologically minded, but a curious thing was that Colin Anderson liked to get round to a situation where he’d suddenly lie on the floor. I asked him two times for money and before he gave me an answer he knelt down, then lay on the floor, then said, “Well, I must think about this … You may have a certain amount of talent and I may have a certain amount of money …” He was very odd. He didn’t really like my work. He had one of my drawings hanging in the loo and he and his wife had a drawing of themselves, a secret one. And he bought a mouse from my first show. His daughters had a poem: “Coming to the house / The man who drew the mouse”.’

  Later on, when he happened to have some money, Freud told Anderson that he would like to repay him. ‘But he didn’t like my idea of repayment; he said, “Give me something that means a lot to you personally,” so I gave him the Freud–Schuster Book.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Freud said to me once when we were discussing his borrowing habits, ‘I think you make me more moral than I am, less amoral than I am. I don’t suffer from guilt.

  ‘Asking for money made me feel so nervous. The odd thing is, the need for money wasn’t as straightforward as that. The money itsel
f became an issue. It wasn’t that I wanted money for something; it was that I wanted a bit of money to have in my pocket.’

  Freud knew that the purchase of Girl with Roses by the British Council didn’t mean that he could count on making a living from painting. No young artists did, everyone knew that, and few of any age, except those society portrait painters who had waiting lists and might make as much as £10,000 a year. To sell to the British Council or to the newly established Arts Council or the Contemporary Arts Society was a boost; to be taken up by Kenneth Clark, choosy in his patronage, ubiquitous in his influence, was advantageous; but the usual, most reasonable ambition was to secure a teaching post, part-time, just enough to survive on. Having told himself that any money he might make from painting should go into buying time in which to work, and only ambitious work made the investment of time worthwhile, he more or less ruled out the obvious alternative which was illustration: the highest form of commercial art.

  Immediately after the war artist-illustrators had found themselves suddenly and surprisingly in demand. Continuing paper shortages meant that would-be publishers of magazines issued them in hardback formats, thereby evading restrictions on periodicals, and these needed illustrating. Besides which, publishers decided that a public starved of luxuries might appreciate added value in books. King Penguins and Picture Puffins flourished, and other imprints, notably David Gottlieb’s Peter Lunn and John Westhouse, were set up in the hopes that good design and illustration would compensate for poor paper. John Lehmann launched his own publishing house; Paul Elek achieved a livre d’artiste look at moderate cost with Camden Classics, assigning Huckleberry Finn to Edward Burra and Treasure Island to John Minton who transformed the Corsican banditti of Time Was Away into chorus-boy pirates. Working in a style patently his own, Minton suffered a terrible diminution, his originality skewed and his spirit sapped through frantic generosity and conviviality. Others profited from his imitability. Michael Ayrton’s imagination went to work on The Picture of Dorian Gray, producing a quick rendition of the ageing process, youthful aplomb giving way to spidery wrinkles.

  For some, Ayrton and Minton especially, illustration was a job, or series of little jobs, an agreeably limited paid discipline, a means of keeping one’s hand in. Mervyn Peake developed a frosted roguish manner for Treasure Island, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and Grimms’ Household Tales, while also producing novels of his own – the voluminous Gormenghast trilogy; for him illustration was key.4 For others, most notably Francis Bacon, it was unthinkable. They felt they could not afford to curb their distinctiveness or let rip with it to become, say, another pervasive Ronald Searle. Freud was not too concerned about this (he had little to lose), but obviously illustrators could never be independent of text or editor. He liked seeing his work reproduced.5 And, beyond that, if existing drawings could be sold as illustrations so much the better. He was happy to be prompted by given texts, even happier if his eye lit on phrases that coincided with what he had already drawn, as had happened with The Glass Tower.

  The Freud–Schuster sketchbook – more or less filled and with Stephen Spender inserting the odd poem – and the Black Book, compiled with Michael Nelson, had been private not to say unpublishable, whereas his drawings for Rex Warner’s Men and Gods were done with reproduction in mind. For these tales of gods with foibles and everyday metamorphoses it was advisable, Freud decided, to try a timeless look, which was not what James MacGibbon of MacGibbon & Kee, who commissioned the drawings in 1949, had in mind. Instead of typical scenes off Greek vases Freud delivered startling close-ups: mainly heads with fancy-dress attributes. There was himself (‘me with horns’) as Actaeon at the onset of his transformation by the goddess Diana into a victimised stag; Charlie Lumley posed as Narcissus (hands cupping face and reflection) and as Hercules, sporting a lion hood. He adopted a peppering technique associated with Robin Jacques, art editor of the Strand Magazine and a prolific illustrator, whose speciality was stippled costume drama. Freud did acknowledge a ‘slight technical similarity’ to Jacques’ busy half-tones. ‘The stippling relates and is a recipe, which is rather horrible, related partly to reproduction.’ This it could be said derived from Aubrey Beardsley, particularly the wigs and dimples of the Beardsley Lysistrata. (‘My big influence.’) Anyway, MacGibbon rejected the drawings and Men and Gods appeared a year later adorned with placid little illustrations by Elizabeth Corsellis.

  Charlie Lumley as Hercules (1948) – rejected illustration for Rex Warner’s Gods and Men

  In the late forties illustrative drawing came neck and neck with the photography that paralleled it but eventually overshadowed it. Francis Bacon relied on photographic images to get his paintings going; Freud – well versed in drawing – was conscious of being inhibited as a painter. For Bacon drawing was out of the question: he was unpractised and in effect useless at it. For Freud, friendly with and impressed by Johnny Minton, illustration was worth a try. Following The Glass Tower and before Men and Gods he had done drawings for Princess Marie Bonaparte’s novel, Flyda of the Seas, about to be published by John Rodker’s Imago Press. ‘I was to get fifty or sixty pounds for them, I asked for an advance from Princess Marie and she said, “Yes yes of course. What would you like? Five francs? Or would a thousand do?” She had a strange sense of money; money was just a commodity to her. You just want a helping of it, she thought, I felt. She gave me a cheque and the banking house it was drawn on was Paul Cocteau, brother of Jean, who kept him.

  ‘Rodker came from one of those Russian-Jewish families, was very intelligent, a poet, and had furniture painted by Duncan Grant. He did a superb edition of The Lay of Maldoror, the one Peter Watson gave me; I’d heard about him through Cedric and Lett[-Haines] and, as he published my grandfather and translated him, my father knew him. (One of my father’s few remarks of a philosophical nature was, “I have yet to hear of one translator speaking well of another.”) There was turmoil in his life: he looked very vulnerable and was obviously in a terrible state, an erotic state, over loves past present future. He had a lot of wives. My aunt was quite a strong influence on him.’ To Freud’s annoyance Rodker advised Marie Bonaparte against using his drawings. (Flyda was eventually published in 1950 in an edition of thirty copies on hand-made paper with elaborately dull colour litho plates by John Buckland Wright.)

  ‘Princess Marie had no visual sense and Rodker found the drawings offensive; they were, oddly enough, influenced by being in Greece.’ Among them was a recumbent head of a girl representing Gina the temptress (actually Anne Dunn, a student at Chelsea School of Art, with whom he was becoming involved), also a stylised study of Kitty and a large one of himself as Man at Night (‘I was on my own one month in Paris’), a feat of pen-and-ink dotting and flecking suitable for translation to collotype or line block. ‘I really wanted to get a strong image.’

  Most of the Flyda illustrations were done in Paris, as was a pencil self-portrait with a hyacinth in which a sallow yellow background sours the gap between squirming petals and Neo-Classical wavy hair. This was Freud using crayon on paper as a hotel-room substitute for paint on canvas; it was also something of a dapper Showtime graphic. The look was too groomed, too measured. Man with Hyacinth (listed as Man at Night) was included in ‘Forty Years of Modern Art’, the inaugural exhibition of the Institute of Contemporary Art, staged in a basement beneath the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street in February 1948. (Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, too big to go in through the door, was manoeuvred through a hole created by bomb blast.) The exhibition was declared an unchallenged success by its chief organiser Roland Penrose. Freud disagreed. ‘The show should have been very good but it was an awful dose of medicine. Very much not Peter Watson but Penrose.’ Yet, disregarding what he considered Penrose’s lack of acumen, being included meant that he was already, at twenty-five, recognisable, locally at least, as one of the moving spirits of Modern Art.

  Given its air of cold appraisal, Man with Hyacinth could have served
as a frontispiece for The Equilibriad, a Kafkaesque novella by William Sansom published in 1948 in a limited edition by the Hogarth Press, by then part of the firm Chatto & Windus. (‘They thought let’s have an edition de luxe; Sansom might have suggested me.’) Sansom had aimed to achieve a sense of hallucinatory disorientation and Freud followed this through with literal illustration, as though clicking from contact to contact, closing in on Paddington brickwork, poking the crossbar on a lamp post into a man’s eye. ‘The thing in the book about losing balance with the street: so I put the lamp in front of the face.’ Ron Lander posed on the Clifton Hill balcony for the ‘walk to the office’ drawing, awkwardly balancing himself in mid-stride (‘swaying in an excess of excitement’, Sansom wrote,6 describing the derangement of Paul, his protagonist, in cinematic terms (‘a sudden shadow caught the top lid of his left eye’), which suited Freud, who used himself as the model for Paul staring. Cut to another character, Cousin Ada, in a monkey-fur hat, seated nervously at a café table, her mind elsewhere. She was Ruby Milton from next door at Delamere Terrace, whom he had also drawn as La Voisine. Charlie Lumley’s younger brother Billy posed too as a savvy jackanapes.

  Startled Man, illustration for William Sansom’s The Equilibriad, 1948

  Although Freud’s drawings for The Glass Tower had been more striking than the poems, the review in the Times Literary Supplement had failed to mention them; those for The Equilibriad, excellently reproduced in collotype, could not be ignored. Yet, remarking that ‘the influence of Kafka on English writers has been almost wholly bad’, the TLS observed only that the work was ‘rather heavily illustrated by Mr Lucian Freud’.