Patrick Swift had tried to get Bacon to write something or talk to someone for X. Knowing Bacon, and his touchiness about younger painters, particularly those he regarded as potential rivals, Freud was not surprised that nothing came of it. ‘Francis was supposed to have written about me and Frank. He said to me, “I went round and called on him yesterday: a pupil come to see his master.” He said it in a really angry way. It was to do with having written this thing and then minding about having done it.’ In lieu of Bacon on Freud, Woman Smiling was reproduced in the fourth number (greatly to Freud’s satisfaction: he always liked seeing his work reproduced) together with Man’s Head (1959–60), his final painting of Charlie Lumley. ‘Which’, Freud remarked, ‘my mother liked best. After he married it was sort of drifting apart. Lookout man, driver, plumbing, bus driver and other jobs. Had a son, Doug.’
The penultimate X, three months later, featured ‘A Note on the Development of Francis Bacon’s Painting’ by Helen Lessore. ‘He has arrived at a Grand Manner entirely his own,’ she wrote. In 1961, only Bacon and Michael Andrews, among the painters associated with X and with the Beaux Arts Gallery, were attuned to the prevailing modes of the coming period: the enlargement of picture area and patent exposure to other media.
‘Art is always new,’ Auerbach had remarked, meaning that art resides continually in an ever-present. While Bratby’s Gulley Jimsons for the 1958 film version of The Horse’s Mouth were galumphing inserts in an uninspired production – his climactic mural spectacularly demolished in the final scenes – Bacon’s owls and popes, after-images from Goya and Velázquez, were expressions of the regenerative powers of painting. New art, late modern new art, was still, predominantly, colour-wash abstraction or textured Expressionism, complemented by skittish innovations such as the annotated samplings of gestural clichés produced by David Hockney in his last year at the Royal College. Hockney turned blond and went to New York for the first time in the summer of 1961 and exhibited Grand Procession of Dignitaries Painted in the Semi-Egyptian Style in that year’s ‘New Contemporaries’. Hockney’s fellow-student R. B. Kitaj fed fresh content into painting too with his pictorial makeovers of revered reading matter. And elsewhere Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram, the stuffed goat with a tyre around its midriff, and Jasper John’s Target motif, supplemented with plaster-cast body parts, became totemic if not iconic successors to Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
For Freud, eyeing all this output without envy, the concern now was how to perpetuate immediacy, to achieve the impact of Bacon, his so convincing perpetration, by more thoroughgoing means.
The fourth number of X, in November 1960, carried an article by ‘James Mahon’ in which he called, above all, for intuitive spontaneity. ‘A real painting is something which happens to the painter once in a given minute; it is unique in that it never happens again and in this sense is an impossible object.’26 ‘New American Painting’ at the Tate in 1958, a show of boldly expansive Abstract Expressionism blown in from abroad and ‘Place’, at the ICA, involving colour-field paintings by John Hoyland, Robyn Denny and others, were in practically every respect what X was set against; there was more ‘actual fury’, obviously so, in Willem de Kooning’s glaring women all shook up and in Yves Klein’s use of naked young women as paint rollers, imprinting themselves bodily on canvas. However, between Klein’s ‘Anthropometries’ and Rothko’s rectangular flotations of the colour-field sublime, depiction was squeezed in the mid-century until it seemed safe for pundits to declare it irrelevant. Sir Herbert Read’s Concise History of Modern Painting, published in 1959, was prefaced with a disclaimer to that effect: ‘I do not deny the great accomplishment and permanent value of the work of such painters as Edward Hopper, Balthus, Christian Bérard, or Stanley Spencer (to make a random list); they certainly belong to the history of art in our time. But …’27
Read, who also omitted Rauschenberg, Johns and Klein, saw modernity as formed within the psyche. ‘As Klee said, not to reflect the visible but to make visible.’ That saved him having to consider pictures from the life or pictures representing circumstances. Their very genres ruled them out. In an article ‘My Favourite Picture’ in the magazine Books and Art in January 1958, he declared, ‘I am rarely in a mood for Munnings or even for Manet.’28 He did, however, reproduce Freud’s Cock’s Head (painted in Paddy Swift’s studio in Dublin) postage-stamp size at the back of the book, one of over 300 extra illustrations added as makeweight.
Freud had no reason to resent being a supernumerary in the bestselling Concise History for, besides being indifferent to the shaping and naming of art movements (‘That horrible word “curator”: what does it mean?’), he had no illusions as to his standing in the art world. To the Marlborough his work was unimportant, that he knew. He heard that they had recommended Mrs Drue Heinz, one of their most valued clients, to buy, in preference to his head of Charlie Lumley, a Sidney Nolan; but then Nolans were in ready supply (Kenneth Clark championed his work) whereas Freud produced slowly and what he did produce John Berger had written off. Nolan, if not Bacon, had to be the better buy.
Manet, inspiration of Baudelaire’s The Painting of Modern Life, maintained that one must be of one’s own time and paint what one sees. Freud saw no option but to paint what he saw and therefore knew. He alone. ‘I’ve got a strong autobiographical bias. My work is entirely about myself and my surroundings.’ This was not the narcissistic bias, the Wildean slant (‘We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography,’ quoth Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray). It was the arm’s-length principle with brush in hand. Standing close enough to touch, close enough to feel the body warmth. ‘As a man is so he sees,’ said William Blake.
Where Bacon clapped his figures into situations resembling the exposed privacy of shop-window displays, Freud painted his sitters just as they were, just where they happened to be, in whichever room was serving as his studio, aiming to accomplish paintings that held true. Which involved not so much a shift in handling (sable brush to hogshair was as much to do with scale as touch), more a relentless capacity. Delacroix wrote about ‘amplifying where it is possible and prolonging the sensation by every means’. To amplify is not to distort. Cedric Morris had treated faces as social masks; Bacon saw faces as betrayers of character; Freud wanted to take what was there and make what he could of it, inching outwards, from sinuses to eyes to cheekbones, consolidating the accretions. With any luck the painting would be more than a depiction, it would be a perpetuation, a feat to match Flaubert’s vaunting authorial assurance: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’
Kenneth Tynan, best friend of Caroline’s admirer Deacon Lindsay, referred in his diary to that ‘reptile Freud’ when David Astor, the editor of the Observer, took him and Freud to the Mermaid Theatre. They never got on. Kitty had an affair with him.
‘Tynan completely lost his temper with me at Cecil Beaton’s once. Because he said somewhere “a critic is equal as an artist” and I said this idea wouldn’t do. I said critics, as such, were parasites and it was up to them to be go-betweens between artist and public. It’s not a question of it being interesting or not as writing. But Tynan did a marvellous demolition of Truman Capote: “Mr Capote has a new art-form: the semi-documentary tantrum.” Capote was toxic.’
Writing to Michael Andrews in March 1960, Helen Lessore described how Derek Hill, son of the interior decorator John Hill and in Freud’s view one of painting’s silliest pretenders, reacted to a cold-shouldering. ‘We’ve just had a visit from Derek Hill, who said, “Last time I was here, Lucian Freud was here, and I’ve never felt such an emanation of hatred from anyone before. Did he say anything afterwards?” Henry [Lessore] with graceful alacrity turned a portrait of Lucian by Frank [Auerbach] to the wall …’ This was a drawing. ‘A girl bought it,’ Freud remembered. ‘She knew neither of us, so I wondered why.’
‘The real is never beautiful,’ Sartre says in The Psychology of the Imagination, a sharp thought t
hat he proceeded to bloat: ‘We must forget that she is beautiful, because desire is a plunge into the heart of existence, into what is contingent and most absurd.’ Freud found the real beautifully stimulating. ‘I hardly ever want to paint anyone from mere appearance. The idea of starting with an existing beauty and trying to do something with it isn’t in itself at all an exciting idea, really. I can think of one or two people whose behaviour deteriorated because they were considered beautiful and sailed through on the flag or passport of their generally acknowledged beauty; not that, very often, there was any further it could deteriorate. Because you were immediately forgiven, excused and admired because of your beauty, when the beauty disappeared – as in the case of Lee Miller – the filthy manners remained. (I’m assuming her manners were as filthy when she was beautiful as when I knew her in the war.)’
Woman Smiling, Freud’s portrait of Suzy Boyt, and Bacon’s Miss Muriel Belcher, similar in size and both completed within a year of each other at the end of the 1950s, are brilliant opposites. Bacon’s Muriel is a sudden apparition, a mocking tongue-lasher, pink on green; Freud’s Suzy is withdrawn slightly, slower on the eye. ‘I wasn’t caught up with her. I never really knew her.’ Both still breathe the then Modern Life.
Woman Smiling was painted at 357 Liverpool Road, Islington, a house where Suzy lived with Ali and Rose. ‘The house I took off Norman Bowler, Johnny Minton’s boyfriend, who was in Z Cars and had a mouth like a zip fastener someone said.’ Bowler had married Henrietta Law in 1955. ‘He left and I rented the house for years and years – Ken Brazier [A Young Painter] lived there too, and Tim number 357 – and then I bought it or something. I tried to do some pictures of Suzy in the garden of the house, but she was so busy always. I scrapped them all, except one: I worked a lot on it and I remember putting it away because of the children. The house was hers and the children’s for a long time, until her mother died and she inherited a lot of money.’
Suzy had a Morris Minor and once, when he went to see Frank Auerbach in Camden Town, he left it and returned to find little boys clambering in and out of it. He didn’t say anything and one of the boys asked: ‘Why aren’t you narked?’ And he said, ‘Should I be?’
Another house, another milieu: at Chatsworth, on a sheet of notepaper, Freud drew the Duke of Devonshire, bow tie askew, sunk into a snooze. While staying there he also began a mural in a bathroom off a bedroom decorated in full-blown Baroque manner by Hogarth’s father-in-law James Thornhill. The Duchess had in mind something to distract from the bedroom, it being ‘stuffed all up to the ceiling with Sabine Women being tweaked. It is Horrific, so whatever Lu does will go nicely.’29
Cyclamens inched across the wall, as they had done a few years before when Freud was playing householder at Coombe. Four leaves, five blooms, six stems. The nightwatchman looked in every now and then saying, each time, ‘Oh, so you’ve landed, then.’ The Duchess remembered him coming in to breakfast saying, ‘I’ve had a wonderful night taking out everything I did yesterday.’
In his The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud tells of having dreamed that he saw in a shop window a copy of Friedrich Hildebrand’s Die Gattung Cyclamen eine systematische und biologische Monographie. Cyclamens were his wife’s favourite flower and in this dream he reproached himself for not bringing her any. What sort of metonymic trigger was this? His grandson was unaware, as far as he could remember, of the significance of cyclamens to his grandparents and he had no idea why he himself had chosen them for the drawing-room mural at Coombe. ‘I mightn’t have done it if I’d known that.’ The Chatsworth greenhouses supplied fresh specimens whenever he wanted, but he liked to see them wilt. Their fleshiness appealed to him, and their operatic aspect. He painted them again, in 1964, rearing up over the edge of a kitchen sink. ‘Lovely forms certainly. They die in such a dramatic way. It’s as if they fill and run over. They crash down, their stems turn to jelly and their veins harden.’
Outsize and diva-like, the specimen cyclamens were left floating around the bathroom mirror, late expressions of hothouse Baroque, livelier than the Thornhill murals crowding walls and ceiling around the adjacent four-poster bed but, as a decorative scheme, far from completion. Ten years later, when painting the Duke, Freud decided to give them a mention in Who’s Who. ‘Cyclamen Mural, Thornhill Bathroom, Chatsworth House’, making it sound important rather than discontinued, as it was. The entry appeared in a couple of editions and was then deleted. ‘A joke gone too far, so I took it out.’
Since first appearing in Who’s Who in 1953 Freud had made an unusual number of alterations to his entry. Being listed a mere fifteen years after getting his British passport and fifteen years ahead of his Aunt Anna (and eighteen years ahead of Clement) was a bit of an achievement and far from being blasé about it he tinkered with the details. For some years he was ‘painter; teacher at Slade School, London University’, and even after he stopped teaching he put the Slade as his address, not the Marlborough let alone Delamere Terrace. There were shifts of emphasis. Only in the mid-seventies did he insert, under ‘Educ.’, the East Anglian School in place of Goldsmith’s and he omitted to mention his first marriage until the late sixties; yet he retained the ‘m. 1953, Lady Caroline Maureen Blackwood, d of 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava’ intact until 1970, when he added ‘marr. diss. at Juarez, Mexico, 1957’. From 1972 onwards ‘two d’ were listed, but no further children. Who’s Who records conventional accomplishment from volunteered information only and on personal matters he was reticent. ‘Naturally I’ve always had a feeling about covering my tracks. There’s an enormous difference between preparing a crossword complete and putting things as they were.’
During these years there were more births and one or two paintings related to these. ‘I can’t help noticing that some of my children are born awfully near each other, from different mothers. Some are a bit double: I think Ib and Esther. All one can say is that’s how it was,’ he said once when we were discussing birth rates. ‘You ask me why are these children all the same age. Don’t you realise I had a bicycle? …
There are some [children] which I haven’t come across as I didn’t paint the mother or them.’
The impetuosity that had startled George Millar on Poros (‘a wild figure burst through the foliage above me and slithered rashly down the bank’)30 landed Freud with heavy debts of one sort and another. Relationships might yield paintings or be brought on by painting; involvements could depend on painting relationships; painting demanded subject matter and subject matter, in human form, was apt to become disheartened or irate at the threat or onset or discovery of replacements.
‘People being monogamous seems to me an extraordinary and imaginative situation. One thing why it’s hard to imagine is, if one’s happy and someone you really like … The actual happiness makes me very attracted to other people if feeling very buoyant. And conversely I don’t feel abandon and freedom when I am unhappy.’
The need for models kept him on the lookout. Cyclamens could be replaced once they flopped; suitable and reliable sitters were rare. For him, as for Matthew Smith and Augustus John (who died in 1961), sitter recruitment tended to be tantamount to courtship and emotional turnover was unavoidable.
Pregnant Girl (1960–1), belly draped, breasts bared, heavily asleep, was Bernardine Coverley, her head averted into the buttoned upholstery on which, a few months later, Freud placed their daughter for Baby on a Green Sofa: Bella (as he named her) with a glint under one eyelid. He had recommended Dr Brass, Bacon’s doctor, for an antenatal examination but the doctor distressed her by saying that he didn’t give abortions to girls like her. She wanted the baby and was outraged. She was ‘about seventeen’, according to Bella, when Freud met her and she became pregnant. Esther, their second daughter (‘called Esther, thinking of Kitty’s sister, Esther Amaryllis Garman’, Freud explained), said that her mother was never one for domestic set-ups and that her father appealed to her because of that.
Bernardine, Freud found, was not necessarily
available to sit. Not that this was uppermost in his thoughts. ‘I didn’t paint her before she was pregnant, and I did one small one, on copper. Either she really wanted me to or really didn’t. I can’t remember. I remember a letter: how she hated it if I did, or didn’t. There was resentment one way and another. A lot of tension.’ Six weeks or so after Esther was born he took Bernardine off with him to the South of France. Someone photographed them there sitting outside a restaurant, he intent on her and she in a gingham dress looking back at him radiant and overwhelmed. She had wanted to escape a dull upbringing and live life to the full and there she was carefree. Except that he scared her quite often and there was always the risk of possessive violence. ‘I didn’t really see Bernardine for all that long. She wouldn’t sterilise bottles, which I’m sure you are supposed to. She thought I was completely Victorian and absolutely mad. It was hippiness. Bernardine as a hippie said, “Never say no to a child.”’
Lucian Freud and Bernardine in the South of France
Though Freud liked to keep his involvements separately contained, June Keeley became aware of Bernardine being around. ‘She was suddenly there. Terribly young and had beautiful legs. Through Tim, Jane found out about her; and she must have known about Suzy. I remember Tim saying to Jane – yah yah, sing-song voice – “Jane, you want to drop your boyfriend, he’s got two new children.” Bernardine’s Irish parents knew nothing about her having two kiddies either. Lucian told Jane that he liked debby women “because they’ve got such good manners”.’ More so than Freud himself, were one to believe some of the stories. (‘Apparently Lucian came down and the husband came in and Lucian saw a suede and sheepskin jacket on the chair and he said, “What a horrible man,” and took it.’) Brought up to be socially confident, debby women tended to take for granted the freedoms that were to be enjoyed, purportedly, by all young women in the sixties. Debby women were quite likely to be married, births might occur and ‘everyone’ might know, but the less said the better. The cuckoo told itself that it could only behave as cuckoos do.
The Lives of Lucian Freud Page 58