The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Bill Sansom, who had become well known for Fireman Flower – short stories based on his experiences fire-fighting in the Blitz – and for his prominent role in Humphrey Jennings’ 1943 documentary drama Fires Were Started, was a worthy recipient, Freud decided, for one of his early wartime paintings. Characteristically, he later regretted the gift. ‘A night sky with Valkyrie heads in it that really annoyed me and when he was dying – mid-seventies – I got it off his son and scrapped it.’

  Freud kept 20 Delamere Terrace – ‘I’d go there and come back’ – for privacy and work purposes. According to Charlie Lumley, who at sixteen was his accomplice and occasional sitter, ‘Lu would tell Kitty that they were going to work together when really they worked an hour or so then would “go down the West”.’

  Marriage, Freud gathered, involved domestic demands and a loss of privacy. Regular meals at regular mealtimes, such as his mother had always provided, were irksome and those served at 28 Clifton Hill could irritate. David Beaufort, a friend and later his dealer,7 said that Freud would sit waiting for his dinner while Kitty cooked it and then she had to sit with her face to the wall while he ate as he couldn’t bear being watched eating. Further, being married to Kitty meant supporting her to some degree (‘She was always getting new clothes’) and taking her out in the evenings, which was fine except that she tended to get tired long before he did. ‘She loved dancing. We’d be in Soho, at three or four in the morning, go up to Cambridge Circus to get a taxi and she’d burst into tears and say she just couldn’t walk another step.’ Then there was his mother-in-law. He and Kathleen Garman didn’t get on. ‘I really grew to hate her. She used to take Annie out to show her off at the Caprice and wouldn’t bring her back and I used to shout at her. Kitty was too frightened to say anything to her.’ He himself took Annie with him now and then, but this could be a bother. ‘I remember taking Annie to the Clarks’ at Upper Terrace House, she screaming and crying, and K. Clark saying “I’m afraid she doesn’t like us.” He said it as if to say, “They don’t know when they’re lucky.”’

  Because he saw no reason to curb his urges to suit a marriage there were, inevitably, occasions when his impetuosity went too far. ‘I went to the Parkway pet stores and came home with a buzzard and when I brought it back – Annie had just been born – Kitty said to me, “It’s me or it.”’ He took it back to the shop, balancing it on his bicycle in a cardboard box. ‘I said, “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve had domestic difficulties: you have to take this bird back.” They said “What? Take this bird back? We’re not having this fucking bird back. You’ve bought it.” I said, “You are taking it back.” Luckily I’d paid by cheque, so I said, “You leave me with a melancholy alternative.” And I wondered if it was the first time a cheque for a buzzard had been stopped. I didn’t go in for ages to the shop, they were so angry because they thought, “Hooray, we’ve got rid of that horrible buzzard.” Huge it was. Fastened by a chain to a seat.’

  Freud also bought his first Bacon – over the years he owned nine – in the summer of 1948. ‘Had it framed at the Chelsea Art Store. This was the first time Francis thought about Van Gogh. A head of him over the Pope, with a proper shirtfront. I sold it to Helen Lessore for £80 and some American museum now has it. They were £100 in his first show [1949]. Francis said, “It’s terribly hard to make a living so if you charge more, and if you come into luck, you might be able to make enough to live on.”’

  16

  ‘Fed sweets by nuns on the coach to Galway’

  In June 1948 Freud’s friendship with the Sutherlands, much tested on the trip to the South of France the year before, came under strain. Sutherland had had a successful one-man show at the new Hanover Gallery, run by Erica Brausen formerly of the Redfern and backed by the banker Arthur Jeffress, and he had recently become a trustee of the Tate. This had brought him to the attention of Douglas Cooper who, agitating for change at the Tate, was hoping to bounce the trustees and the Director, John Rothenstein, whom he despised, into a more receptive attitude to foreign art. Cooper was preposterously overbearing; all the same, Freud appreciated his impatience and understood his resentment. ‘He should have had Robin Ironside’s job but Douglas made it out of the question, Rothenstein being so petty and hating to be insulted.

  ‘The Sutherlands were terribly excited about being taken up by the great collector. He invited them to dinner, so they said they couldn’t have dinner with me as had been arranged; I refused to accept this, so they came to me after all and Kathy told Douglas why they couldn’t come.’ Cooper was unforgiving, and there was more than pique behind the animosity. ‘Francis had quite a lot to do with it. Douglas loathed Francis and said that Francis had blackmailed a cousin of his. I asked him, “Did you?” “Did I? Maybe I did.” That was when Francis used to advertise as a servant: “Young gentleman: do anything, especially illegal.” Douglas bought a bit of Bacon furniture and put it in what he called his “punishment room”.’ That was a few years later, in the fifties, when he moved into the Château de Castille near the Pont du Gard, within striking distance of Picasso. Over dinner Freud told the Sutherlands what he knew about Cooper. ‘After the war, when Mervyn Jones-Evans (a friend of mine from Bryanston) was with Douglas Cooper, he offered Micky Nelson a huge sum to give up Mervyn, but this only cemented a long affair. I mocked Douglas Cooper and they – the Sutherlands – told him. He wrote me a letter saying, “As you know perfectly well, I don’t know you.”’

  Impressed by Cooper’s assurance as an art historian and entertained by his diatribes, the Sutherlands transferred allegiance with the result that Graham Sutherland became one of the names on the list of artists Cooper swore by. Freud thought it a Faustian compact. ‘Douglas Cooper, completely mad, gave him this promise to do for him what he imagined he’d done for Picasso. Graham felt he was selling himself.’ For years Cooper boosted him, asserting in his 1961 monograph that he was ‘recognised in European circles as the only significant English painter since Constable and Turner’.1 He (and Henry Moore) joined Braque, Chagall, Léger, Le Corbusier, Matisse and Picasso in Felix Man’s reverential photo essays Eight European Artists, published in 1953, the first time any such grouping had included anyone British. There was also, for a while, social success. But then came Cooper’s derision. ‘They wanted another painting,’ he would say, ‘and Kathy got her lipstick out.’ Sitting across the table from me in a BBC studio in the early 1980s, Cooper loudly denied that he had ever thought much of Sutherland. ‘He was never an artist that I was particularly interested in.’2

  Freud knew that Sutherland always needed reassurance. ‘He was so nervous and envious of other painters.’ In his studio one day Freud saw a painting that he rather liked and told him not to change it. Sutherland demurred. ‘It’s too like a Sutherland.’

  ‘Graham was very modest as a gambler. “This was the life,” he thought, very occasionally. They went gambling once a fortnight, I think. He was very timid as he had this terrible time in a drawing office when he was young; his brother was a gambler and Graham really minded; he went on thinking, until very late, that he might be a pavement artist in the end. Dependency on K. Clark was to do with it.’ To Freud the Sutherlands’ married state was unenviable. He had no quarrel with them – ‘there were never any words’ – but their mutual reliance mystified him. ‘It was almost quite sinister, because they didn’t know when the other was talking; it was like Siamese twins with the same bloodstream who shared the same brain. I remember K. Clark asking me once about Kathleen Garman. “What’s she like?” “Like Kathy gone wrong,” I said. “Kathy’s Kathy gone wrong,” he said. Jane Clark said about Kathy: “I do hope when Graham and Kathy are very rich and powerful she won’t give me dresses as out of fashion as I give her.”’

  In November 1948 Sutherland wrote to Robert Melville, ‘I think Lucian F. miles ahead of the rest although he’s horribly restricted in ideas.’3

  In the same month as the clash of dinner dates, Freddie Ashton introduced Freud to Chr
istian Bérard, who was in London designing a ballet to Haydn’s Clock Symphony for Covent Garden. They hit it off. On the opening night of Katherine Dunham’s Caribbean Rhapsody at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Dicky Buckle spotted them standing together at the back of the stalls. Freud was charmed. ‘His power was quite extraordinary. He’d go into a modiste on the Left Bank and move a hat in the window two inches and the smart women would all get a hat like that. Left-wing people would have thought of him as frivolous and flaky. I wasn’t all that aware of what went on – his funny ménage – yet he was very aware of being treated frivolously. He said, “I used to be a terrible Dicky Buckle once, but then I grew my beard.”’

  Bérard’s reputation overshadowed his accomplishments, and his versatility, ranging from sets for ballets to covers for Vogue, was often held against him. His designs for Cocteau’s film La Belle et la bête, simple at best (Belle floating through muslin curtains down a nightmare corridor), had been animated Blue Period Picasso; and rather than create chic tatters for Giraudoux’s Madwoman of Chaillot he had insisted on genuine rag-picker items of clothing being worn. Grossly self-indulgent, he had seen fit to wear as party gear the threadbare trousers he had inherited from Max Jacob after his death in Drancy, the holding centre for Jews before transportation. Picasso damned him for that.

  ‘He waddled rather than walked,’ Freud remarked. ‘And yet, when staying at the Pastoria Hotel in Leicester Square and walking to Covent Garden in the morning, workmen recognised him as “one of them” he said. Extraordinary cufflinks and open neck and crazy smile.’

  Bérard was a fount of gossip, new and old. He told Freud why he thought the death of Christopher Wood, who had fallen under a train at Salisbury station in 1930, hadn’t been suicide. ‘Bérard said Wood, whom he knew, was very ambitious, with career, friends, etc., but he had an opium-induced paranoid obsession that he was being followed. In France, where he travelled, the stations had no platforms unlike in England and, thinking he was being followed, he was taking evasive action by crossing the line. Bérard thought that he was quite OK, had seen his mother, got a bit of money off her, wasn’t in a bad way, but he instinctively ran from the platform and it was high so he fell and the train went over him; it was unlikely to be suicide: he was so full of himself, quite tarty and vain.’

  While in London Bérard had to go to St Thomas’s Hospital to be detoxified. ‘One day, when I was showing him round near Leicester Square we suddenly saw this shambling figure appear.’ It was Mervyn Peake, looking for illustration work and already showing signs of the Parkinson’s disease that was to overcome him. ‘Tall, gaunt, aged: I remember him possibly having sores. “Romantique,” Bérard said.’ Peake’s colossal Gothic novels, the first of which, Titus Groan, had been published in 1946, defeated Freud. Why he hadn’t read them through, he said, was because ‘they’re all about a man going up a corkscrew staircase and finding nothing at the top.’

  Bérard the wheezing flâneur was a master of guises. In Triple Self-Portrait he represented himself in parallel: as a young man, a young girl and a middle-aged woman on a beach. To Freud he was socially fascinating and physically a potential subject. ‘The Clarks thought he was very good. K. said, “We ought to get him to paint Vivien Leigh.”’ Bérard himself asked him to do a drawing of him when he was next in Paris. Through Bérard he met Cecil Beaton, the pre-eminent society photographer and, as the critic Clive Barnes once put it, ‘the rich man’s Christian Bérard’.

  Beaton thought Freud very decadent, Bérard told him. He promptly invited Freud down to Wiltshire that August to stay at Redditch House, ‘Mr Beaton’s Petit Trianon’, as Lilliput magazine described it, previously owned by Christopher Wood’s parents. There he drew Beaton – a prissy impression save for the eyes – his dog, his apples and his summerhouse, and Beaton photographed him posed in a harvest field with Clarissa Churchill and a Polish prince, Stanislas Radziwill, a trio meeting the requirements of a Vogue pastoral.

  ‘His mother said, when I was drawing him, “Are you having trouble?” “Yes,” I said. “You aren’t expecting him to look natural are you?” I said yes, rather playing along. “Cecil hasn’t looked natural since the day he was born.” Beaton loathed his mother. When Greta Garbo came to stay Mrs B. moved out.’ On the table in the hall there was, invariably, a letter to Garbo ready for the post. ‘I’m not sure it wasn’t always the same one.’ Freud was delighted to be there once at the same time as Garbo. ‘I thought she was wonderful. She said, “Comm and sit ’ere,” and it was a chair for one, not two and I squeezed in. She looked marvellous. She drove Cecil mad and he’d become gruff and manly and say, “We must go for a walk,” and she’d say, “I’ve left my shoes in New York.”’ Beaton wanted Freud to go on holiday with him to Sicily but took Truman Capote instead; according to Freud, ‘Cecil was shocked as Truman was a writer but was only interested in stock exchange news.’

  Paying tribute the following year to the dead Bérard, Beaton described how he had showed him round London. ‘In a poor region of Paddington he was captivated by the ballet danced by the poor children who lived their lives in the mean streets. Suddenly in our walk he stopped still. “We can’t go down there,” he said. “That is a bad street where even policemen don’t enter, for as soon as they do people throw pots of geraniums from the windows on to their heads.”’4 The warning had come from Freud. ‘Direct from me: it was Clarendon Street. They did that; it was famous for being no-go-ish. The “ballet” was children skipping in and out and making those squares (hopscotch); they’d sing an early feminist song:

  We’re in the Boy’s Brigade

  Covered in marmalade,

  The marmalade is mouldy,

  So’s the Boy’s Brigade.

  A few weeks later Freud took a break in Ireland with Anne Dunn, the other woman besides Kitty in the Flyda illustrations. She was eighteen, a daughter of Sir James Dunn, the Canadian financier by his second marriage, to the ex-Marchioness of Queensberry. They had met in a nightclub, Antilles. ‘I stalked him,’ she said. ‘Saw him flickering about. I never quite understood what was happening: when he was young he was so beautiful. And the way he moved: like quicksilver.’5 Enamoured as she was, she had made friends with the actorish Miltons next door in Delamere Terrace in order to be near him and had seen Girl with Roses unfinished on the easel. This she thought was more alive and exciting than any painting she had been exposed to as a student. ‘When I first knew him I didn’t know about Annie. Then I overheard conversations with him being asked how the baby was, but I didn’t put two and two together or think that there was someone else in the background. When I found out, I used to lurk outside the house in Clifton Hill: I was frightened he would never speak to me again if he thought I was lurking.’6 She wrote to him adoringly from Ireland. ‘In church the mission priest put us all under pledge not to drink for a year but I said privately to myself, “Until I next saw you again” … save me Lucian.’7 They arranged to meet in Connemara, which she knew because she had been there once during the school holidays and camped on the beach with her sister. Freud liked the sound of it for there was no food rationing in Ireland and maybe he would find distant Galway congenial.

  ‘She went on about this strange hotel pub, the O’Neill Arms, I think, in Cashel.’ Peter Watson ‘lent’ him some money and he set off with pastels and paper. ‘I started alone; got the boat from Liverpool to Dún Laoghaire. I remember walking through Dublin and it being so exciting, like Joyce. Having read Ulysses it added to my enjoyment; I was amazed by the Irish and how all the cream in their buns turned sour by four in the afternoon; the butchers were amazing in Dublin too: because they were Catholics you saw blood and guts. I asked, “Can you tell me where the coach station is?” and a man – he was a policeman – said, “Don’t be in so much of a hurry.” I was fed sweets by nuns on the coach to Galway.’

  Anne Dunn’s memory of their rendezvous was that it was at the railway station. ‘The Zetland Hotel was forty miles from Galway, quite a long journey, ar
riving at midnight, and I’d come to meet him and he got off the train so fast that I missed him. There was one more train after that and, of course, he wasn’t on that either.’8 It was midnight, no trains until morning and no way back to the hotel. ‘So I went and got drunk, desperate, and lay down on a bench and found myself being raped by a porter. Rather a sad beginning to that romantic interlude. Next day I went back to Cashel thinking that he hadn’t turned up and found, of course, that he had been there all along. Got a taxi somehow from the station.9

  ‘He seemed to be happy at that point. It was quite a primitive Irish life. There were ceilidhs at the schoolhouse opposite with the girls all dancing with each other. He was light on his feet and he’d go bounding around, not realising that there were hazardous patches in the bogs and suddenly he vanished from sight which was, unfortunately, hilarious.’10 He reappeared with muddied tartan trousers and, back in the hotel, drew Interior Scene, on black paper, keeping on at it over the weeks as it darkened in tone, sharpening the pastels for fine lines. ‘Anne looking like a real Red Indian; she had Red Indian blood through her father.’ Net curtains, billowing into the room, veil her face (looking remarkably boyish) and a sprig of blackberries with browned and tattered leaves binds her to the rose-pattern wallpaper. He later said that he disliked the composition. ‘Too illustrational.’ Tensions arose. ‘The husband of Audrey Withers (a very nice woman, lived on the canal-side, a communist, and Editor of Vogue) was also staying at the Zetland Hotel, in tweeds. I’d met him some time on the canal and as I was talking to him Anne was standing outside the door with a huge knife. We went back to Dublin and met a friend of Bo Milton’s, an arty woman, Deirdre McDonagh.’ This led, Anne Dunn said, to ‘intense embarrassment. I’d done two paintings which I took, and Lucian had his between two sheets of paper and she said, “Oh Lucian, what progress you’ve made,” looking at mine. “You’ve come on, Lucian!” We stayed there a couple of weeks. Did that several times.’11