The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Richard Hamilton noticed – everyone noticed – that where Freud went Charlie Lumley often went too. Charlie was a sidekick, a hanger-on and a liability, Anne Dunn said. ‘He always took Charlie along as a foil, both with men and women, and Charlie would nick things from them. Lucian was like Fagin.’ Charlie saw himself more as good companion. ‘I was in the West End every night with him. He used to try and make conquests, which he invariably did.’12

  Having been painted as cheesecake Charlie (Boy with White Scarf, 1949), and Charlie smouldering (Boy Smoking – Brylcreemed hair, jutting ciggy, 1951), Charlie qualified as part model, part minder. In United Casting terms he and his brother Billy (Boy’s Head, 1952) could also have served as the poster boys of Dirk Bogarde’s gang of tearaways in The Blue Lamp, the 1950 Ealing Studios crime thriller in which police cars were to be seen chasing past the end of Delamere Terrace. When National Service claimed Charlie, he wrote to Freud as 22402206 Gunner Lumley, stationed in Merionethshire, seeking home news:

  Has there been any excitement in town lately any more fights with Johnny and Ricky you remember you told me about the party someone was giving and Rich was caught having a girl in the bathroom. I thought that was very funny.

  ‘Charlie’, Johnny Minton told Michael Wishart in January 1950, ‘like a rat has gone off with the blood-stained suit of a friend of mine.’13 Freud explained to me what that was about: ‘Charlie was attacked by this man who was married to a later girlfriend of mine – George Barker’s younger daughter, Rose Barker – this violent person who died. Minton did a commercial thing [Leaves of Gold]14 for a goldbeating factory in Ruislip; there was a row to do with one of Johnny Minton’s friends, and a hammer for beating gold was involved, an enormous hammer. Nothing to do with me.

  ‘But Charlie wasn’t bellicose. After the fight he was put on probation. His probation officer thought Charlie was my boyfriend – everybody thought that: impossible to prove it isn’t so – so I thought if I asked the probation officer round and he saw Kitty in the sitting room, and the children, it would show this wasn’t right. Anyway, the probation officer came round, perfectly pleasant, asked me could I help get his daughter into art school. But he wasn’t in any way fooled; he went on making reports about my catamite.’

  Charlie took up boxing for a while and during his National Service talked of going in for the army boxing championships. ‘He didn’t flower in the army: not even one stripe.’ There was a spell in an army prison on the Isle of Wight.

  ‘Francis said Charlie had a queer life and went with Johnny Minton: that he was rough trade. “Charlie’s having an affair,” Francis said. “I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t think it’s true.”’

  Jaunts with Charlie took them beyond Paddington and Maida Vale. Bacon’s admirer Eric Hall, a married man, patron of the arts and cricket lover, high in the London County Council, had them to dinner a couple of times. ‘He talked to Charlie about boxing. “You know,” he said to me, “I know how to get on with these people.” Picasso had a show in Paris. He said, “You must go: ring me in the morning and I’ll get you a ticket.” Next morning I rang and said, “You said you would get me a ticket to Paris.” He said he’d never heard such nonsense. He was absolutely horrible to me: he thought I was having an affair with Francis.

  ‘Through Colin Anderson I got Charlie a job on a boat – a merchant ship – but I think he thought I was queer and getting rid of a boyfriend. “We don’t employ delinquents,” he said. He did go to sea and he didn’t get into trouble.’

  Dublin suited Freud when he felt the urge just to get away. ‘I used to go quite a bit, for weeks at a time, went on those terrible ships, from near Liverpool, to Dún Laoghaire. The cheapest was in the front part: you got so dirty from the funnels. I always liked sea journeys.’ Freud took Kitty with him at least once, ‘moving from boarding house to hotel’, she told her mother. ‘It kept erupting,’ Anne Dunn said. On his own he took a room in Lower Baggot Street with a balcony – like Delamere – recently vacated by John Berger who was about to become an art critic. ‘I took it off him. It was by chance. He left some drawings behind: so concerned with subject and trying to get a feel. They had a suspense and concentration; the romance of poverty sort of thing.’

  In the mornings Freud would go round to Patrick Swift’s ground-floor room in a house in Hatch Street and work there. Swift, who later lived in North London, emulated him (Boy with Bird) to a flattering degree. Freud painted a cock’s head and Swift, similarly, painted a woodcock, both on the same red plush chair. The tiny Cock’s Head, its comb glistening like crispy bacon, its plumage exquisitely bedraggled, was seamy enough, surely, to excite in the Arts Council of Great Britain – which bought it the following year – the curatorial thought that maybe Freud could be the Géricault of existentialism. Certainly he disposed of the dead head he had used with barefaced not to say existential aplomb. ‘I made a little parcel and sent it – it was crawling – to Sean O’Sullivan. He was a painter, sort of fashionable, lived in Dublin. He had DTs and was offensive about my pictures. Not Irish rude: he was really nasty and bitter. Brendan Behan, whose great thing was being friendly with everyone – you know how sentimental drunks are – said I shouldn’t have. “That’s a terrible thing you did to Sean O’Sullivan,” he said.’

  Lucian Freud and Brendan Behan in Dublin, 1953

  Augustus John’s fourteenth ‘Fragment of an Autobiography’, published in Horizon in December 1945, laid down precepts for the portrait painter:

  No moral bias, to affect his attitude to the sitter. The exploration of character should be left, with confidence, to the eye alone. Heaven knows what it may discover! With a mind as blank as his canvas he sets to work concerned only with the phenomenon before him and its relation to its surrounding within the shape and area at his disposal.15

  The reassertion (a bit like the elderly Sickert bent on getting his name in the newspapers) was also a repudiation of the fanciful. Augustus John portraiture was supposedly face to face without preconception. Whereas in the hands of Graham Sutherland – from the late forties his obvious successor, it seemed to many at the time – portraits took on an attitudinised look easily mistaken for severity.

  Between 1949, when he painted Somerset Maugham, and 1954, when his portrait of Winston Churchill was unveiled, Sutherland became famous for showing up eminent personages. His Maugham was bitterly jaundiced, his Beaverbrook was crabby, his Churchill, seated as though enthroned, pinstriped yet legless, had a fading obstinacy. Such portraits were newsworthy. ‘They made a terrific splash,’ Freud remarked. The painter himself achieved celebrity. ‘He has passed beyond taste,’ observed Benedict Nicolson in his Burlington Magazine review of Sutherland’s 1951 retrospective at the ICA. That August Sutherland delivered a talk on the BBC’s Third Programme in which he put a gloss on his motives. ‘Perhaps one of the reasons why I have recently tried to do portraits is that it is possible I feel the need to narrow the gap between my “stand in” monuments and the real human animal.’16

  That gap thwarted him, Freud thought. ‘Graham said that his Churchill portrait was iconoclasm and that the Maugham was better. But he hated people’s presences.’ He treated them therefore as cosmetic composites and latterday figureheads. ‘He gave Helena Rubinstein Kathy’s legs (though her Australian Jewish legs were better than Kathy’s little Irish dog legs). I don’t think Kathy actually did the pictures, but she could have. I don’t think he could have done without her.

  ‘Francis said that Sutherland’s portraits were “coloured snaps”. Well, they weren’t actually as good as that, because the one thing about coloured – or uncoloured – snaps that it’s impossible not to marvel at is that it is tonality. Anyone who’s alive to painting recognises paintings done from photographs because the tonality’s always subtler than the drawing.’

  Admiring Sutherland’s fabric designs as much as his paintings, and recognising international potential there, Hans Juda, the owner of Ambassador, a trade magazine dedicated to the Br
itish export drive, published in 1950 an impressive-looking monograph on Sutherland with text by Robert Melville declaring him, in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, the greatest British painter since Turner. A grateful Sutherland gave Melville Men Walking, a newly completed painting that he hoped might release him from the two narrowing options that so confined him: trophy monstrances (desiccated finds spiked on Riviera palisades) and trophy portraits. Melville would have known, indeed anyone could have seen, that Men Walking was an attempted breakthrough. A tall picture of moderate size, it featured two traipsing figures with triangulated necks and hands, and a dog to one side, clamped into a compressed arrangement of palms, railings, sea and sand and deep-blue sky. Freud saw through it: this was Sutherland being Baconic. ‘It comes out of a misunderstanding of Francis. His extravagant ideas – like leaving off the feet and so on – was a terrible influence on Graham. He gave Graham the idea of people trying to get on to a train and he had this marvellous description of them fighting and Graham tried to do that, but of course he couldn’t draw. But then not being able to paint was a quality that worked in his favour I think.’

  Mindful of Sutherland’s shortcomings Freud resolved to enlarge the scope of his concentration. Interior in Paddington had followed on from Sleeping Nude and the painting of Kitty at Clifton Hill, with dog, took him further. It was, intentionally, an emulation of Ingres’ intense even-handedness. ‘The way [Ingres] liberated pictures seemed so potent. Through his extraordinary discipline: the drawing is as good as any drawing there is, you get really excited about an Ingres fold in a curtain. Said in such an incisive and economical way.’ So too with Bacon whose men in suits, as detached from the outside world as ghostly slivers in laboratory slides, were similarly all of a piece: not fussed, not contrived, but discovered and left, marvellously just so. Everything about them stimulated Freud.

  Anne Dunn saw friendship develop between Freud and Bacon with Ingres an idol in common. ‘They had been suspicious of each other. Circling dogs. Then the relationship between Lucian and Graham soured and between Francis and Graham soured. Lucian had a sort of crush on Francis – non-sexual – and Lucian, who was never very generous in the years I knew him, would run after Francis with great wads of banknotes and give them to Francis to go gambling with. To my knowledge, Lucian was never a gambler until his relationship intensified with Francis. He may have been. I was completely ignorant of it. I never thought of Lucian as having a gambling nature. He’s retentive.’17 She had a Bacon painting: the base of a crucifixion with a stricken figure vomiting a bunch of flowers. Years later Bacon tried to get it off her but she resisted and he agreed that she could keep it until her death, provided that then it would be destroyed. In the end she sold it18 and it went to Bacon’s avid emulator Damien Hirst.

  Bacon was possessed by the desire to achieve vitality, not – as Ingres did and Freud tried to do – by dint of application but by fluke. His heads, three or four years before, had been bared in front of dirt-grey curtains: Eliot’s yowling Sweeney over and over again, the ‘Oval O cropped out with teeth’.19 These roaring men, ‘imprisoned in transparent boxes’, as Robert Melville hailed them,20 were arresting enough to attract fashion victims. Freud saw it happen. ‘Nina Hulton, wife of Edward Hulton (owner of Picture Post and Lilliput), went with Robin Ironside, her walker, to enquire about having a portrait done by him. Francis said, “Tops of Heads? You know I’m actually putting them in this season.”’

  Frank Auerbach and Joe Tilson, students at the Royal College in the early fifties, were taken up by Johnny Minton; neither was gay but, as Tilson himself said, both were good-looking and went along with him to the Colony Room, the Gargoyle and other haunts. Tilson particularly – and resentfully – remembered going to a party at Delamere Terrace with his girlfriend Sally Ducksbury, a student at the Central. Freud spotted Sally and moved in on her and Tilson became aware of toughs hanging around, one of whom – Charlie Lumley, as it happened – was told to get rid of the boyfriend. He threw Tilson down the stairs. There was, Tilson said, a culture of thumping. ‘Lucian and Francis would engage that way. In Notting Hill there were Irish pubs, which everyone took care to avoid late at night, as there would be fisticuffs at chucking-out time and violence in the gutters. Getting into fights was a kind of rite of passage: being streetwise.’21

  Freud was to become keen on the Reg Smythe cartoon strip ‘Andy Capp’ involving the workshy northerner Andy and his fearsome wife Flo in which pay-off lines and direct action were briskly, ritually synchronised day after day. ‘Man lying on ground: “I thought the policeman was going to hit me so I hit him back first.” Awfully good, don’t you think?’

  ‘If Lucian saw somebody with somebody he thought he might fancy he’d immediately make a beeline for her,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘I’ve seen men, boyfriends, driven mad by him using his extraordinary power of picking people up at a party by the side of their boyfriends and taking them to the bathroom and the boyfriend looking absolutely furious, distraught and so on outside.’22 With sideburns and conspicuous trousers he cut a dash; to his elders he had something of the style and manners that were to be associated with ‘Teddy Boys’, first so called in the Daily Express in 1953.

  John Masefield’s The Widow in the Bye Street, a narrative poem that had appealed to the schoolboy Freud, contains the lines:

  Your father liked his cup too, didn’t he?

  Always ‘another cup’ he used to say

  He never went without on any day.

  In his memory Freud abbreviated this, making it, as he recited it, more to his way of thinking. ‘“Your pa he was fond / Of a nice bit of blonde, he used to say.” Awfully good don’t you think?’

  One time, returning to the Slade after the holidays, Richard Hamilton happened to bump into him.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Three breakdowns.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘No, not me.’23

  Though not denying the story, Freud demurred. ‘I don’t know.’

  The biologist J. Z. Young, whose dancing at the Gargoyle Freud admired, taught at the medical school next to the Slade. Coldstream remembered walking up the street towards the Slade with him once and him saying, ‘Please don’t talk to me, I’m thinking important thoughts.’

  ‘John Young took things very far,’ said Freud. ‘He was very much to do with reptile brains and he made things seem so interesting. The last book of his I read was about the sexuality of fish. He says when you start studying these fish you might think that God (if you believe in him) must be obsessed with sex. He didn’t take me seriously, thought I was a playboy. I asked him things occasionally: when I was at the Slade he’d be in the common room.’ He tried to persuade Professor Young to give him access to the pathology lab; Young refused, but that didn’t stop him.

  ‘There was a basement room with nothing but beds with corpses, grey, pinky grey, bluey grey, as they had been in formaldehyde. I took a look through the window at them then went into the room. An orderly in a white coat was standing with his hands inside a hole in a body. What do you do to get him to take his hands out of the stomach? I wondered. ‘What’s the time?’ I asked. Squelch, and he peeled back the rubber glove and told me and put his hands back, quick as a wink. These people get addicted to dead bodies, you see: one is fascinated by them. Though I’ve never been drawn to the corpse, it is part of life. Or the end of it. When I saw John Young later he was pretty hostile. Called me morbidly exhibitionistic. He was not interested in art.’

  The philosopher A. J. Ayer – understandably nicknamed the ‘Juan Don’ – was another acquaintance of Freud’s and even less friendly. ‘Our dislike which was almost instinctive had nothing to do with his marriage,’ Ayer wrote.24

  Freud maintained that he always thought Freddie Ayer ridiculous. ‘He was at the Gargoyle a lot and had been a Jewish Guards officer: very rare.’ Ayer gave a party at which Freud overheard Henry Yorke warning someone against going out with him. Yorke, nom de plume Henry
Green, whose recreation, listed in Who’s Who, was ‘romancing over a bottle of wine, to a good band’, took up with Kitty. ‘Henry Yorke used to take Kitty out sometimes. There were shouts outside Clifton Hill once and Kitty and Henry were outside and he grasped my hand and shook it: he was congratulating me on having the drunkenest wife in London. He was amorous, awfully nice. A good writer.’ His last novel, Doting, published in 1952, a chronicle of an extramarital pursuit that comes to nothing, ends with a shrug: ‘The next day they all went on very much the same.’25

  Freud’s involvements, by contrast, were apt to be spontaneous. One night in the Gargoyle, according to David Tennant, ‘Sartre was there with his governess Simone de Beauvoir, sitting with Sonia Orwell. Lucian and I were both invited over to their table. Sartre got up and sat on it, waggling his short legs, and said, “Who is that good-looking one?” Jabbing his Gauloise at Lucian.’26 She, Simone de Beauvoir, complained about the failings of Englishmen, spotted Freud and disappeared with him into the night.

  He had more of a relationship with Andrée Melly, sister of the jazz singer and ex-London Gallery assistant, an actress who went on to title roles in The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954) and Hammer Horror’s The Brides of Dracula (1960). ‘I didn’t paint her, I just used to see her some nights; never went away with her nor was she there for long.’ He gave her the etching Girl with Fig Leaf, subsequently – decades later – buying it back from her.27 And there was Wendy Abbott, renamed Henrietta by Michael Law, a film-maker with whom she lived, and who became Girl in a Blanket (1953), seated in the window at Delamere where the palm tree had stood, a painting reminiscent of Bellini’s Young Woman at Her Toilet, the painting that Freud had most admired in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He stippled Girl in a Blanket to excess; technically ambitious – ‘I was trying to do what Daumier does: contre-jour’ – what had begun alert (the sitter sitting not sleeping) went numb, so much so that later on Freud dismissed the painting as a ‘graphic artefact’. It reproduced well on the dust jacket of Henrietta the autobiography, published in 1994, in which she wrote, ‘I was in Lucian’s power, like a mesmerised rabbit, but being in a trance doesn’t stop pain and after I discovered somebody else’s menstrual fluid in what I thought of as my bed I decided that I could take no more.’28 Freud explained that the inadequacy of the painting stemmed more from his lack of conviction than from her lack of concern.