The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  No sooner had Picasso pounced on Caroline than Dora Maar asked Freud to sit for her at her studio in the rue de Savoie. ‘Picasso made a play for Caroline so, I felt, that’s why she asked me to sit.’ He went a couple of times and she did some drawings, nothing to match the drawing by Picasso of Max Jacob with a crown on, over her mantelpiece. ‘He put “this crown that graces my head is due to you rather than to me, Picasso mon ami, mon maître, roi du peinture, peinture du roi.” Vilató said that he was so malevolent. Picasso must have liked that.’

  ‘I am working here now,’ Freud wrote to Lilian Somerville in September,13 when she asked him if he would start thinking about what paintings he would like her selection committee to see. She had already written to him in July saying that they would of course exhibit the British Council’s painting: ‘your own of your wife’, i.e. Girl with Roses, in the Biennale.14 Three months later, as plans developed, she wrote again enclosing lists for him to mark: quite certain A, second choice B and possible C. ‘Thank you for spending so much time with us this morning. I think we have assembled the basis of a very good show.’15

  The committee – Philip Hendy, Herbert Read, John Rothenstein, Philip James of the Arts Council and Roland Penrose – rejected the Minton portrait, Charlie (with white scarf, recommended by K. Clark for the Art Gallery, Adelaide) and Girl Reading which still belonged to Cyril Connolly. The idea of showing Gwen John had been dropped – replaced by artists’ lithographs – Moore, Sutherland, Scott, etc. – and, though the Ben Nicholsons were to outnumber the rest, the view was forming that Bacon should be given particular prominence. In this light Freud began to think of producing a largish painting, as big perhaps as Girl with White Dog, so that it, and Interior in Paddington, should not be the only sizeable paintings he could show.

  Freud returned several times to London that autumn while summarily, the divorce was going through, but by late November he was stuck in Paris unable to pay the hotel bill. Desperate, Caroline rang up Barbara Skelton urging her to get Cyril Connolly to buy Girl Reading; this he did since, as Skelton wrote in her diary, ‘Cyril feels paternal towards both and is keen on Caroline. I say it is not worth putting himself in a state of debt for the whole of the next year.’16 While in London he saw Bacon’s painting, after Deakin’s photographs, of the Pope flanked with sides of meat. ‘The only thing he did that had meat in it and a pope. Spectacular, made people gasp. I said I liked it. He said, “I don’t. Would you like it as a wedding present?”’

  The opposition marshalled by Maureen Guinness went on exerting what pressure it could. On one occasion Lady Astor – Nancy Astor – started pulling Caroline’s hair. ‘She considered herself the leader of London society and women like Maureen adored her. And she got hold of Caroline because she was letting the side down. I complained about her appalling behaviour, her cruelty, and wrote to her: “Don’t you think it’s disgusting when old women attack young women? Anyway I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD.”’ She answered my letter, in a slightly arch way. Another time I was smoking Gauloises. She asked, “What are you smoking?” “Gauloises. French cigarettes.” “I loathe the French. Are you French?” she said.

  ‘Caroline was Maureen’s victim as she was the eldest child and blamed, and one reason I married her was that she felt Maureen would vilify her to Sheridan and Perdita less if she married.’ Another reason was that she would have more inherited money at her disposal – £17,000 a year.

  ‘The marriage took place very quietly yesterday at Chelsea Registry Office.’ The wedding notice in The Times on 10 December 1953, two days after Freud’s thirty-first birthday, was minimal. ‘Freud’s Grandson Weds’. The couple were photographed leaving Chelsea Town Hall: Freud in his sharp double-breasted suit sporting a cigarette and Caroline in a jacket adorned with a pony brooch, holding his arm and smiling with triumph or relief. ‘Maureen was there and Annabel – Annabel Birley – was best man, also Francis, and my father and Peter Watson. And Charlie Lumley: he liked the wedding.’ The best man was to have been Ann Fleming, but Maureen Dufferin suspected her of having had a fling with her late husband and knew that it was under her roof that Caroline and Lucian had first met. She was a witness, together with her other daughter, Perdita, and Caroline’s cousin Doon Plunket.

  Lunch afterwards was in the top room at Wheeler’s in Soho. ‘Wedding luncheon given by Lucian a perfect expression of his taste,’ Cecil Beaton wrote in his diary. ‘This was a wedding feast of near-intimates. No strangers, no unpopular relations, and all the real friends, from far and wide.’ He listed the more notable guests. ‘My beloved Peter Watson, as teasing as ever …’ Also present were Bacon, John Minton (‘very drunk, warm and over-confiding’), James Pope-Hennessy, Clarissa Eden, ‘Ann Fleming (over-excited, her blackbird eyes blazing), the new Baths, the widow Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Harry Hambledon, Maureen, disarmingly benevolent because it cannot be the sort of marriage she planned for her daughter’.17 She was, Freud recalled, ‘pretty sort of poisonous, in pale blue’. Billy Lumley served drinks.

  ‘The curtains were drawn, candles lit, dark-red carnations splayed out,’ the diarist continued, delighted at the exclusivity and style of this travesty of a society wedding. ‘The guests drank too much champagne and ate too much caviar and lobster. By four o’clock in the afternoon one had the impression that it was four o’clock in the morning.’ He overheard some tart exchanges. ‘Kathy Sutherland, perhaps a little tactless, was telling Lucian’s father the rumour had gone round that his new daughter-in-law had eloped with Picasso. The Freud father asked: “Surely that would be a little over-indulgent of Picasso since he has just recently been married to a seventeen-year-old girl?”’ Night fell and it was time to catch the plane. ‘The young marrieds, after much wine, lost their passports; but somehow they got to Paris where they will remain in one hotel bedroom for months on end. It seems an ideal match.’18

  Lucie Freud stayed away, saying she had a sore throat. ‘I asked my mother to go, but she’d cry, I knew. I did my best to keep her out of the way, always. Never asked her to anything. She minded that I didn’t. She was very modest. You see I never liked her interfering or knowing. I never discussed anything with her. There’s a history there of my being difficult and impossible and dodgy.’

  Caroline’s perception of his relationship with his mother was unsympathetic. Her story ‘The Interview’, published in 1972, involves a painter who does not get on with his mother: ‘a disapproving old prune of a woman, and it always upset and embarrassed him whenever she came to see him’.19 The reality was that Lucie Freud did all she could to keep pride and curiosity satisfied. She had the small comfort of a New Year letter from her friend Tania Stern in New York:

  We had heard rumours and more than rumours in the shape of newspaper photographs of Lady C, sent by my brother for some while … We both had to admit that we would very much like to have been present at that lunch. The bride I met two or three times with Lux, last time after that lunch at Wheeler’s which I think I told you about, nevertheless I’m sure that you can count yourself ‘not unfortunate’ to have contracted a dose of French laryngitis for the occasion. I think I myself would have been glad not to have been there at the end. 8pm!20

  Freud remembered his father telling him, man to man, that he was doing much as he himself had done. ‘He did say something that stayed in my mind when I married Caroline. He said, “You aren’t the only one in the family who has done well for yourself. Your mother had money too when I married her, you know.” I was rather pleased that he talked to me in this way because he never ever had. “You know you aren’t so clever anyway …” he meant.’

  That Freud had married well was the line taken in the Beaverbrook press and in the correspondence of Evelyn Waugh whom Freud admired as a writer. (‘A real artist. And touching. When his eldest son is born, he writes, “Laura won’t be as happy again.” Extraordinarily detached.’) Five months after the event, in one of his harrumphing letters to Nancy Mitford, Waugh referred to the Freud marriage, rearranging
the sequence of events in the interests of anecdote. ‘You know that poor Maureen’s daughter made a runaway match with a terrible Yid? Well, this TY has painted a portrait of Ann Fleming with a tiara all askew, obviously a memory of his mother in law. It’s a very careful detailed neat picture not like some I could mention and that makes the tiara funnier.’21

  It was indeed a skewed tiara in a portrait verging on caricature: the former Ann Rothermere looked remarkably like Maudie Littlehampton.

  23

  ‘My ardour in the long pursuit’

  The resumed stay at the Hôtel La Louisiane was no honeymoon. Rumour had it that one particular girl had walked past their restaurant table and that Freud went after her and didn’t reappear for two days. He denied the story in some respects. ‘To say “on the honeymoon” was not quite right, because we had been together for some time before the marriage. There was this girl who came round to the room. She was said to be the most beautiful girl in the world: a crazy American model called Ivy Nicholson who later appeared in Andy Warhol’s Factory and was a model and star in 1965 and then had twins. There were some rather amazing photos of her and Caroline lying on the bed. Caroline didn’t know what was happening.’ With him Freud had his indispensable Geschichte Ägyptens. ‘It had the address of a boy in it: this boy, who died, was Ivy Nicholson’s boyfriend when I met her, and I subsequently became very friendly with him.’

  The Claude Hersons, whom Freud had met in New York, invited them to Christmas dinner. ‘They had Victor Hugo’s house, rented from Jean Hugo. Giacometti was there and we all had presents and lots of guests had Giacometti drawings. Unfortunately I had a bauble.’

  With marriage came deflation. ‘My ardour in the long pursuit was spent; the whole thing exhausted it instead of happy ever after. Byron wrote in Don Juan about how lots of full-length portraits are painted but only busts of marriages. I wasn’t suited to being with someone really.’ The infatuated Cyril Connolly described Caroline as ‘a femme fatale with large green eyes, a waif-like creature who inspires romantic passion’.1 She was it seemed, to Freud almost as much as him, at her most attractive when an object of unavailing pursuit. The newlyweds were photographed lounging on a bed, a book lying open between them, he watchful in a houndstooth suit and tie, and she – heavy-lidded eyes, hands clasped, wedding ring on finger – looking warily at him, sidelong, hair brushed over one eye.

  ‘Caroline was the model for quite a while, about two years. I didn’t really settle. She was awfully quiet.’

  Hotel Bedroom (1954), the only sizeable painting that Freud ever did in Paris and completed just in time for Venice, is his version of the Arnolfini marriage: similar proportions, and equivalent concentration of fine detail; but here, far from pledging themselves to one another, the occupants of the nuptial bedchamber are singularly disengaged. Dark against the light, the artist interposes himself between the bedridden woman and the world outside. First seated (in an initial drawing that he later gave to Patrick O’Higgins), then standing centrally, then to one side as though about to slip away, he arrived at the final uneasy pose. Hands in pockets, he takes in the situation, a little less edgy than in the Poros self-portrait of 1947 and now the wiry adult in comparison with the pallid youth that he had been in Man with a Feather eleven years before; yet, virtual silhouette that he is (‘I was terribly aware that I was two-dimensional’), he has made himself aloof, inserted between bed and third-floor window (framework omitted) with no room to spare. Though laid to rest, Caroline’s head is a disturbance. Day after day through the winter she lay there, frigid under his scrutiny. ‘It was freezing,’ she remembered, with a novelist’s amendment of fact. ‘It was winter when everybody was freezing to death in Paris. And that’s why I’m sort of huddled under the bedclothes.’ The narrowness of the room cramped the composition and made work on the picture hard to manage. ‘We were tense because he didn’t have a studio. And the room was so small that Lucian broke the window, because he couldn’t get distance enough to paint and it was never repaired. That’s why I look so miserable and cold.’2 Her left hand is exposed, the nails dirty and uneven, the little finger lodged dispiritedly in the corner of her mouth like an unlit cigarette.

  The cracked façade of the building across the street and the slats missing from the shutters were facts, but the neat bend in the drainpipe behind Freud’s shoulder was, presumably, an accommodation. The windows opposite conceal and disclose like an advent calendar. At one point Freud put a man into the room opposite then painted him out, leaving his coat hanging by the door. That room reflects the discrepancies in the painting. The coat, the washstand and the light bulb are composed into a closet Morandi, a cameo Giacometti. Silence is implied. In actuality there was a metal workshop bashing away below, and street-market clatter.

  ‘You might have thought I made it up, the building at the back, like in Man with a Feather, but I used what was there. The bed was big in the room and I worked between the basin and the bed. I used the bevelled mirror in the door of the wardrobe. The whole thing is a portrait.

  I don’t think she liked posing much.’

  Hotel Bedroom preoccupied Freud in daylight hours, the pent-up detail gradually accruing. Then, out of hours, Anne Dunn reappeared. She had enrolled at the Académie Julian and, though still with Michael Wishart, she remained susceptible. ‘Michael was a marvellous mentor in a way and taught me a great deal and when he wasn’t blind drunk he was wonderful to be with; but we spent the winter that Lucian painted the portrait of himself with Caroline in Paris and of course then we took up again. Then I got pregnant and I had to pretend to go to Italy; in fact I did go to Italy and sent a postcard and sneaked back to Paris and had an abortion, the third or fourth abortion of Lucian’s. The odd thing is, though Caroline was not tough, then she became quite tough.’ Afterwards, she added, she was bereft. ‘It was like being flung out of the Garden of Eden.’3

  An unwelcome fellow guest at the hotel, where Freud was concerned, was Vassilakis Takis, later to become prominent as a kinetic artist. ‘That Takis, Greek, ghastly, arrived in Paris, addressed to me at the Hôtel Louisiane; he was Nanos [Valaoritis]’s present to me. I didn’t write and thank him. Takis was very naive: drawings of pots and things. And he said he didn’t understand why, but artists like him had to live off women. He was bald, probably hairy everywhere else.’

  One day Freud heard the Pastoral Symphony being played on a gramophone in a room above, thundering away repeatedly, on and on and on. ‘I went to the room and found a bronze body, medal, crucifix. I hit him in the stomach and shoved a toothbrush down his throat to make him sick. He recovered. Others came. Obviously he had made arrangements to be discovered in his plea-for-help suicide bid.’ The unhappy man was Kenny Hume. ‘He married Shirley Bassey and successfully killed himself.’

  Another sad case at the Louisiane was Peter Rose Pulham. ‘He was dying there in an entresol room without a window. He was very much to do with the twenties and thirties, friend of Bérard and Cocteau and Peter Watson. Francis knew him: he was very successful then. Before the war he’d been a Harper’s photographer, had lived well, had an affair with Isabel [Rawsthorne] and been with elegant women a lot; he talked of having them on the kitchen table when erotic fetishism was de rigueur. He could cook. Obsessed with food and wine.’ Tired of being a photographer, Rose Pulham turned to painting – thinking, he told Freud, ‘perhaps that it would be simpler to paint a human figure than to photograph one’. In London during the war, he used a horse’s skull as a surreal motif. ‘Erica [Brausen] did a show of him: paintings of mantelpieces, and he painted paraphrases of Poussin of girls with legs crossed. I had some admiration for him. A sybarite, very intelligent, had boils everywhere, face and neck, which he ignored. Drank himself to death.’

  For English-speaking writers, a way of getting by in Paris was to write for Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press published a Traveller’s Companion series of porn and erotica, most of it paid by the page, some of it literature. The occupants of the
room in the Louisiane have that air. ‘These books, two of which I actually read (one lady is simply called “Lover”), I had some difficulty forgetting, not that I tried to, but it was clearly poignant. This girl in Paris told me she had written some. She gave them one book she’d done and they said, “Look this really is too crude …”’

  In January 1954 Freud wrote to Lilian Somerville, irritated at the doings of her Venice selection committee.

  I’m back in Paris and have just received your letter of the 11th. I’m sorry about [you] having removed ‘Girl in Bed’. Here is a photo of it. I am anxious that ‘Girl’s Head’ belonging to Cyrel [sic] Connolly of Oak Cottage Elmstead nr Ashford should be included. You told me the committee had rejected this picture on seeing a bad photograph of it. Conolly’s [sic] phone number is Elstead 272 and he is prepared to lend it. So do please show them the painting! Enclosed also is a bad photo-graph of the Berard portrait. Perhaps after the meeting you could let me know what paintings have so far been decided on.4

  Lilian Somerville reported a meeting at which they agreed to withdraw, at his request, Zebra and Sofa (The Painter’s Room), Landscape with Boat (Scillonian Landscape) and Kitty with Cat (Girl with a Kitten) and to include the drawings of Bérard and Woman with Carnation. She wanted the final selection to be made by the end of January.