The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  The first post-war Biennale, in 1948, had brought Henry Moore sudden pre-eminence, thanks to the renowned Mrs Somerville. Her diplomatic chivvying behind the scenes had resulted in his being awarded the chief prize, the Golden Lion. Freud was no Moore, as Mrs Somerville made clear. His role in Venice would be to counterbalance Gwen John, who had been dead nearly fifteen years. He and Bacon would contrast well with Ben Nicholson whose drawing-board abstractions became ever neater.

  For the moment Freud put the letter aside. The Biennale was a year away and finding Caroline was all that mattered.

  ‘When I got back to London she had moved, so I lost touch with her. It was at the time of the Coronation and her ghastly mother was so worked up, angry and embarrassed that Caroline had not been chosen as a maid of honour, she arranged for her to get a job in Spain so that she could say she couldn’t leave her job. She was now secretary to a pilot who had his own plane; he had been a pilot for Franco and later flew Spanish carpets back to England for me. I got desperate. I sold one of my two paintings of bananas and used the money to go to Madrid to try and find her. I went every weekend and couldn’t find her.’ He had the door number of the place where she was staying but not the street. ‘It was terribly nerve-racking – I don’t like flying – and I nearly went off my head. I knew she lived at 85 something and went round knocking at all the 85s.’

  While searching, Freud stayed in a noisy hotel on the Gran Vía. An old acquaintance, Joan Rhodes, happened to be lodging there together with circus people. Headlined ‘The Strong Lady of Variety’, capable of tearing telephone directories in half, she was glamorous besides.

  Freud remembered her from art school days. ‘Joan Rhodes had modelled at the Central when I was fifteen. She had become a strong-woman act in nightclubs. I saw her name on a circus poster, so I met her and wandered about with her – I’d have gone crazy otherwise – seeing skeletons who lived outside Madrid coming in at night and looking through the bins and beggars, blind through congenital syphilis (which Franco said didn’t exist so it was never cured; it’s like mules: they can have children but the children are blind and sterile, so it can’t go on). Being half-Spanish, Joan Rhodes knew Madrid very well: night spots and coffee stalls. ‘We were larking about and one night a car came and I jerked her across the road and sprained her wrist, as a result of which I had to go to the circus and make inlets in iron bars so that she could still bend them. I drew the dwarfs at the circus. A lot of dwarfs are Spanish: it’s a bone disease. They don’t look like midgets; they have a strange format of nose. Later, I came across some of the ones that I’d drawn in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the theatre opposite Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street.

  ‘I also drew buildings with female angels on. And I saw a lot of the Prado.’ In the Prado of course he saw the Velázquez blind men and dwarves, Las Hilanderas, Las Meninas – King, Queen, Infanta and their dogs – the Titians too and Goya portraits. The paintings exhilarated him to exhaustion. ‘I was in such a nervous state that, walking back from the Prado to Gran Vía, where my hotel was, going through the promenade towards Plaza de las Cortes I saw someone walking beside me: I saw this person, between the trees, and it was me. I was beside myself. I was too nervous to eat very much. I was half starved, just eating callos (tripe) and tiny eels in coffee stalls, and doughnuts made of skewers of dough. In the end, about the fourth weekend, I found Caroline. I got some clue through her cousin Daphne. Quite romantic. She was quite weak.’

  They stayed at the Ritz, in Madrid, for a while then, when the money ran out, in a boarding house where, being unmarried, they met with disapproval. ‘A woman opened the door in the middle of the night and threw in a bloodied towel.’ At the beginning of May they had a photograph taken of themselves in a bar: he, ‘incredibly smart in a new suit’,5 she the image of saucer-eyed innocence in a gingham blouse, planted behind an array of tumblers and wine glasses with a cigarette in her hand. ‘The joke with the glasses: lots of glasses in front of her at the café table, which she wanted to send to Maureen. “There is drink on both sides of the family,” she said. In that Dublin club, the Constitutional Club, with carved animals playing on the mantelpiece, someone once said, “There goes the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, and they’re both drunk.”

  Lucian Freud with Caroline Blackwood and assembled wine glasses, Madrid, 1953

  ‘She had this strange sort of Irish nose and then, because of smoking all the time, several hundred a day, her nostrils were tinged with black like the entrance to a tunnel, which I must say I loved. She smoked in her sleep. When she lit a cigarette the match always went out and I used to watch in fascination. After five, six, seven, eight, matches she just got a light, but she never ever held it downwards, it always went up and then went out. I once asked her about it and she just laughed and went on doing it. It’s a nervous thing.

  ‘I got her out of Spain. We went to France. I was married still. Her mother said, “You know it’s not that I mind Lucian being married; if only he was nice.” I asked Caroline what did she mean by “nice”? Caroline said, “Oh, a title, of course.” Her mother tore up her passport.’ ‘Sunny’ Marlborough, a future duke, had been her preferred suitor for Caroline.

  ‘Caroline told me that her father barricaded himself in with his girlfriend at Clandeboye and Maureen tried to starve them out. And a bit later he was begging her for money and said, “If you give me some money I’ll have a cure” (he drank) and she did, so he took his girlfriend to Brighton. At Oxford, when he was twenty-two, he suddenly inherited a title and married Maureen. He was extraordinary about money, he’d pick up the phone to the bookie every day and say, “Put the money on anything likely,” and would occasionally win. Caroline said he’d never written to her, but she and her brother and sister, Sheridan and Perdita, had identical letters saying, “Look after your mother.” He was in Malaya and walked into the jungle.’ He died in a Japanese ambush.

  Forty-five years later, interviewed for a television documentary on the Guinness dynasty, Maureen Guinness accused Freud of making Caroline drunk on neat whisky. She said that when she asked him whether he loved Caroline (who, according to her, was in tears all the time) he replied, ‘in a frightfully affected way, “I don’t know … if you do love someone.”’

  Freud found himself an object of press attention and held the Marchioness responsible, thinking her determined to see him off whatever it took to achieve this. ‘I went to Lord Beaverbrook’s flat, Arlington House next to the Ritz, a boiling-hot flat with a eunuch butler. It was at the time when I was being chased by the press, to do with Caroline and me, and they were camped outside Delamere. I said to Beaverbrook: “It’s a waste of your time; I’m never going to do anything interesting.” “A great pity,” he said.

  ‘The press was all Maureen’s doing. She then tried different things, crooked gangster things; tried to get my father deported. She thought he’d have to take me along.’ Representations were made to the authorities and investigators were sent. ‘Father didn’t take it in at all. He thought that it was people to do with giving me an honour. When Caroline was being pestered, by my arrangement she stayed with my parents.’ This gave rise to slight perturbation in St John’s Wood Terrace. ‘My father asked, “Does she take wine with meals?”

  ‘I rather got Caroline off drink. Afterwards she felt better with one.’

  In May 1953 Ann Fleming drove Freud with David Sylvester (‘well mannered and vastly intelligent’, she told Evelyn Waugh)6 to Oxford where they stayed the night with her friend the convivial classics don Maurice Bowra. Freud was nervous at having to perform. ‘I gave a talk – a lecture called “Lightning Conductors” – to the Art Club and took Sylv as stooge. (I used to think of him as a huge Turkish lady in a harem.) My idea was that if he asked questions it would get me going. After he transcribed it, I put it into English in my Viennese dialect and he edited it, and in that way he was good.’ As a thank-you he gave him his half-realised spectral head of Gerald Wilde.

  ‘Caroline
was so excited I’d been asked, but there were twenty-five people only in a huge auditorium. Alexander Dunluce [a future chief restorer at the Tate and Earl of Antrim] was drunk and asleep in the front row.’

  With Sylvester egging him on, Freud subsequently read the revised transcript on the BBC Third Programme. Then, edited down to 1,000 words, it appeared as ‘Some Thoughts on Painting’ in the magazine Encounter, of which Stephen Spender was the editor and Sylvester the arts editor: two pages of text, four of illustration. The drawing of Bérard and the paintings of Minton and Bacon, together with Girl Reading, more than complemented the article, their clarity exemplary, their sensitivity attuned to the wistfulness, the weariness, the detachment that he had perceived and, in the case of Caroline as Girl Reading, a slightly pert air of self-possession newly achieved.

  ‘My object in painting pictures’, he began, ‘is to try and move the senses by giving an intensification of reality.’

  ‘Some Thoughts’ shaped up to being an argument for the necessity of achieving ‘a certain emotional distance from the subject’, sustained scrutiny being entirely preferable to the ‘aesthetic emotion’ cultivated by ‘painters who deny themselves the representation of life and limit their language to purely abstract forms’.

  ‘The picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own.’

  In what Maureen Guinness, had she cared to read it, could only have taken to be outrageous special pleading, he linked this to personal behaviour. ‘I say that one needs a complete knowledge of life in order to make the picture independent from life … A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his use and pleasure.’ Priding himself on being instinctual, not intellectual, he argued that the model served ‘the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement’; it followed that ‘the aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.’

  ‘The painter must give a completely free rein to any feelings or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn. It is just this self-indulgence which acts for him as the discipline through which he discards what is inessential to him and so crystallises his tastes.’ Ruthlessness justifies itself, therefore, as necessary concern. ‘A painter’s tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what is suitable for him to do in art.’ And if the painter is to truly illuminate – not to say transmogrify – he must relay the fierceness of loving attention. ‘Unless this understanding is constantly alive, he will begin to see life simply as material for his particular line in art. He will look at something, and ask himself: “Can I make a picture by me out of this?” And so his work degenerates through no longer being the vehicle of his sensation.’

  Disappointment of course was bound to set in. ‘A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realises that it is only a picture that he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life. Were it not for this, the perfect picture might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on.

  ‘The process in fact is habit-forming.’7

  Evelyn Waugh, who drew a bit himself, or had done in earlier years, wrote to Ann Fleming after hearing Freud on the wireless. He waxed jocular. ‘How dare Mr Freud lecture to the young about art while he can’t even paint a tiara straight on a lay figure?’ Freud’s comment on that was a near disclaimer: ‘My only tiara.’

  Through the summer of 1953, Freud painted Caroline at Arcachon near Bordeaux (Girl in a Green Dress) and in Paris, where they stayed at the Hôtel La Louisiane in the rue de Seine, where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had lived and where Cyril Connolly (‘writing from the table by this my window where I can watch the streets light up’) had installed himself twenty-five years before, extolling its cheapness and atmosphere. ‘I am for the intricacies of Europe, the discrete and many folded strata of the old world, the past, the North, the world of ideas,’ he wrote: ‘I am for the Hôtel de la Louisiane.’8 But even here, initially at least, Caroline’s mother tried to thwart them, foisting on them Venetia, an eighteen-year-old deb acquaintance, telling her that she and Caroline would share a room. Freud found Venetia, and the arrangement, annoying. ‘I didn’t like the threesome aspect.’

  Freud’s paintings of Caroline, from 1952 to 1953, were acts of courtship. Four times over, and more, she was all that Kitty had formerly been, and more an enchanting object of attention. She was amazed at his demand not to alter the folds of their bedclothes so that he could paint them. As she posed, mostly in bed, she got on with her reading. ‘Nice long books,’ Freud said. No longer Lady Addle: now it was The Idiot and The Tragic Muse. She came to identify with the title. ‘I used to read, and just look up when it was necessary for him to do the eyes,’ she said. Forty years later, by then a novelist, she recalled ‘the amazed interest that he once took in the human vulnerability of his sitters. The portraits he did of me were received with an admiration that was tinged with bafflement. The results were only half-me, I think – after all it was Lucian’s vision.’9 They were trophies achieved in the course of a long elopement, each a radiant defiance of the Marchioness.

  In September 1953 Ann Fleming organised a fiftieth-birthday dinner for Cyril Connolly, and they were there, together with Cecil Beaton (‘a lot of talent, brilliance and erudition was gathered here’),10 Freddie Ayer, Maurice Bowra, Elizabeth Cavendish and Clarissa Churchill, newly married to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. Shortly after, on 29 September, James Pope-Hennessy wrote: ‘Lucian and Caroline turned up here unexpectedly this morning, had baths and breakfast and wandered away again … They were sweet, but like somnambulists and wrapped in that impenetrable unawareness of people in love … entirely unaware of the outside world, and rather expecting everybody else to do things for them. People in love are rather like royalty, I think. I can’t see any sense whatever in their marrying; but this, in Paris, they propose to do.’11

  They needed money. Caroline ‘wasn’t allowed to have any’ and he objected when she said she’d get a job. ‘He said if I did that he’d give up painting and become a baker. And I did think it would be rather awful if he gave up painting.’12 So, reverting to the sort of work he had done during his first stay in Paris seven years before, he painted birds in a cage, on copper plates, one for Caroline which, characteristically, she lost, another for Fleur Cowles. His strawberries – lustrous flanks pitted with pips – were exquisitely fleshy. ‘It was a way of getting £50.’ A ready buyer, he found, was Leonora Corbett. ‘A sort of sinister woman – friend of Cecil Beaton, a well-known county lady who made a success in New York and Hollywood and told me interesting things to do with people; she was very English and abandoned, like Ann Fleming. I made her little pictures. I said, “Give me a clue, what do you want in them?” Two I did maybe, of flowers and fruit: two things I liked doing. She lived then with an old man called Baron Egmont Van Zuylen, much older than her, who had a castle in Belgium.’ They died in 1960, gruesomely, Freud was inclined to believe or liked to think: ‘He ate her. They found a half-eaten body and the disconsolate Baron.’ Nolwen de Janzé-Rice, ‘then married to a Frenchman who had a hunt in Normandy, gave me money in advance but I didn’t happen to do paintings for her; later, when she was married to K. Clark, she wrote about helping the Brompton Oratory: would I help them? And she made a snide remark: “You owe so much.”’

  Ever the patroness, Marie-Laure de Noailles again recommended Freud to Count Alexis de Redé. He sounded interesting to paint. ‘His father shot himself (he was a banker, lost his client’s money) and friends got together to put Alexis into something back in New York. Arturo López-Wilshaw, who was married – like all South American queers – walked into a bank there, cashed a cheque
and said to Alexis, who was behind the counter, “I’d like you as well,” and set him up as second-string boyfriend in terrific style: he bought him a house, the Hôtel Lambert, on the end of the Île de St Louis. I went there to do my little portrait.’ This painting (‘Didn’t like it: kept it’) on copper, postcard size, was undeveloped: face emerging from a grey ground, cupid lips and dark eyes, highlight on the forehead, a polished look.

  ‘I was sent back afterwards to the Hôtel Louisiane in a basketwork Rolls.’

  Lesser cars, parked in the streets around the hotel, served him as stepping stones when in nocturnal dashes he reverted to schoolboy rowdy. ‘Rushing down the rue des Grands Augustins and jumping on top of cars, which were generally parked with more gaps at night, all cars the same, all black and one or two oxtails; and if people were in a car they looked up through the sun-roof with absolute horror. A wing-brush by a huge bird. A marvellous chase feeling.’

  David Gascoyne took to coming round and reading his poetry to them. He was unstoppable. ‘One night we went to bed and in the morning he was still there, on the chair, still reading.’

  Being with Caroline meant that he saw more of the artists he had met before, particularly those who liked the look of her. ‘Balthus was very good company. He’d take us out and say in English to Caroline, “I’m afraid I’m not at all hungry,” and by the end he’d have had five courses. I went round to Cour de Rohan and he showed me things. I thought it all came out of Courbet and nothing like as good.’ Once, when they called on Picasso in the rue des Grands Augustins, he took Caroline into another room, and when they returned ten minutes later it was obvious that something had happened. ‘She was whiter than white, paler than usual, wide-eyed and dishevelled. I said, “What happened?” She said, “I can never ever tell you.” Something shocking. Naturally I never asked her. He drew on her fingernails faces and a sun shape in black ink. We were leaving and looked back and he was very high up, in the top floor of this house, and there was a bare bulb outside the window and he was doing shadow pictures against a blank wall with his hands, birds and creatures. To be observed, knowing that we were going to look back. Really marvellous. It was something he learnt in Spain: birds and creatures. I saw him about six times.’