The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘I was very conscious of things that were unsatisfactory to me in my work, rather than working for somewhere to aim my response. I was very aware of the terrible things I was doing in the process.’ Such paintings bulged in effect. ‘I became conscious of that and I think that it slackened the tension in some of the pictures. By that time I’d come to terms, to some degree, with working in this way and I didn’t feel debarred from any other ways in which I had worked.’

  Such ‘other ways’ included the fine restraint shown in his first completed portrait of Jane Willoughby, the bare-shouldered Woman with Fair Hair – Portrait I (1961–2), a touching study of pensive character. In the next one, done immediately after, she turned her head to her right as though asserting her privacy a little. These paintings were as refined as anything he had previously done, but to test himself further he then determined to take on the entire person, full length and, for the first time, fully naked. ‘I think like a biologist,’ he said.

  Two or three years previously he had started a painting of Anne Dunn: a nude against the light in his effortful sweeping manner. ‘It was done just before she married Rodrigo [in 1960]. I didn’t show it because it was unfinished: a document, but it didn’t look like a throw-out.’ An acceptable unfinished painting of a naked figure would be one with parts of the body unrealised maybe but with sufficient substantiality achieved from the top downwards to make its presence felt. ‘Until I started with nudes I started with the head and then I realised I very deliberately wanted the figure not to be strengthened by the head.’

  He was beginning to find it easier to get people to sit for him. And the more of them he enticed or persuaded the more his days and nights became subject to routine. Henceforward there were to be fewer periods of distraction. He began working from two sisters, Lucia and Jane Golding. ‘Lucia was really wild, very witty, amazingly abandoned and beautiful in a curious way: very much at large. The other had this passion for me at one time then lived in Spain; I started this and then one of Susanna [Debenham], for a bit. Didn’t keep it.’ Susanna Debenham had been a girlfriend of Tim Willoughby and was then briefly with Tim Behrens before marrying the journalist Alexander Chancellor in 1964 and becoming involved with Freud, an involvement that was to last on and off the rest of his life.

  When no one else could be prevailed upon to sit Freud used himself. Standing, shirt off, he looked down at himself in the mirror he had taken from the entrance hall at 20 Delamere Terrace. In two out of three portrait studies he inserted his left arm as a prop to the face and worked the paint as though modelling a bust, goading spontaneity.

  Degas said, ‘I am more interested in talent at forty than in talent at twenty.’ Freud at forty was on the verge of full maturity. The three self-portraits from around then give us the protagonist emerged from the second round, his former accomplishment sloughed off, the odds increased, the strain showing. Unlike the heads of Jane Willoughby or Red Haired Man, these self-portraits, ‘very much at gambling time’, he acknowledged, were startlingly brusque. Looking at a mirror propped on an easel, he examined himself. How to represent reflection? How to reconcile the two unaligned sides of one’s face? How did Hals manage it? He tried a pummelled look.

  ‘Goya did everything – all the portraits and I think some of those still lives – in one go. Maybe not: maybe the sheep’s eye couldn’t be so glazed in one go.’

  32

  ‘The absolute cheek of making art’

  A Contemporary Art Society exhibition, ‘British Painting in the Sixties’, involving sixty-seven artists, was staged at the Tate and Whitechapel in June 1963 and, to coincide with it, David Sylvester published in the Sunday Times magazine an article – ‘Dark Sunlight’ – in which he named those who, in his view, deserved particular attention: Bacon and Coldstream (‘I’d say our leading painters’) and Auerbach were prominent. The cover photograph, by Lord Snowdon, showed Coldstream in his front-parlour studio, steadying his wrist as he added a minuscule dab to a canvas, a sober contrast to the newly blond bombshell, David Hockney, ‘as bright and stylish a Pop artist as there is’, who was awarded a double spread. His paintings had been a hit in the Royal College Diploma Show the previous June and he sold enough of them to get him to New York.1

  With Bacon, Coldstream and Hockney to the fore and abstract painters in the ascendant, Freud went unmentioned in Sylvester’s article. ‘The painter whose concentration upon his obsession isn’t diverted by professionalism has a lot to gain’ was probably him, however. The exhibition’s selector, Alan Bowness, included three Freuds, ‘deliberately hung’, Freud alleged in retrospect, ‘to look as horrible as possible’. Among them was the Nude – Portrait III (1962) of Jane Willoughby, in which the head, the character part, sits uneasily on the body. ‘Naked, upright, fragmented (not deliberately)’. Not having gone through the conventional art school, not having answered to the summons of Bernard Meninsky to knuckle down under his tutelage at the Central, Freud had now set himself the difficulties of uniting body parts beyond head and shoulders. A portrait head was manageable but portrait shoulders, portrait arms, portrait torso and thighs as a whole defeated him. The Nude – Portrait III pose looked awkward, the sitter as stiff as a reader’s wife featured in Men Only magazine. The lack of a thorough life-room grounding to fall back on was all too apparent. In Resting Nude – Portrait IV, the figure sleeps, hugging the buttoned upholstery: Fay Wray, as it were, rather than Jane Willoughby, proffered in the King Kong paw of the sofa. It lacked even the chill that had distinguished his Sleeping Nude of Zoe Hicks fourteen years or so earlier. After being shown at the Marlborough they went into the collection of an admirer not of the artist but of the sitter. Freud regarded them as write-offs. ‘Nudes of Jane, which don’t really exist any more’. He needed something of Picasso’s ringing assurance: ‘A single look and the nude will tell you what it’s all about, without any phrases.’

  Where talent at twenty feeds off impulse, talent at forty feeds off experience, and the realisation that, as Cézanne said, ‘nature has more to do with depths than with surfaces.’2 Underlying knowledge, coupled with the deepening intimacy that sittings brought about, informed the handling. With such knowledge came awareness of the peculiar nature of the painter’s task. Time stilled, flesh and air conjured into telling paint. In their different ways, Bacon, Auerbach and Andrews, the painters who being nearest to him meant most to him, showed Freud that depths were attainable and achievable through working the material with vigilance and abandon. And experience told him that while potential was a sort of impetus it could all too easily become predictable: the pull of method was something to be resisted. ‘I suppose I’d be like Wagner and I’d have themes, introducing-themes, and my character would just come on.’

  A potential theme, potentially Wagnerian in spread, was painting his offspring. Annie Freud, being the eldest, was already the most practised when in 1962–3 she sat, first for a heavily elliptical head (Child Portrait, also known as Head of a Girl) and then for what came to be called Naked Child Laughing. Annie,

  grinning, still a Lycée Français schoolgirl, was convulsed with teenage self-consciousness.

  ‘She must have been fifteen [actually fourteen] and things were easier by then. But Kitty was very upset and unhappy about that picture. She said she was very worried. But then, if you think of her father’s “scandals” and “monstrosities” and how they used certain words, almost part of an advertising campaign, about “creators of monsters”, it’s understandable. And the unfortunate title of the Epstein autobiography Let There Be Sculpture, which I think was written by Kitty’s mother …’

  To her father, getting her to sit without clothes on was no more of an imposition than dozing for the siesta watercolours had been in Greece a summer or two before. ‘It was not unnatural for me. It wasn’t putting razors round the sitter to keep her still.’ Later on he was to paint several other daughters, engaging them repeatedly as models, clothed and naked. ‘It has often been fine with their mothers, awfully
hard if not. Intention, even if it doesn’t affect the picture, counts for something. Or deliberate misunderstanding. Like the photographer joke: “Do you want it mounted?” he asks. “No, just holding hands.”’

  Annie remembered sitting in the car outside the bookie’s around this time, waiting for him, and him coming out white-faced. He was gambling uncontrollably or, rather, he was letting himself be exposed to outcomes beyond his control.

  Naked Child Laughing, intimately small, makes the onlooker intrusive. Annie has settled herself, cringing slightly on the sofa where, during other sessions over the same period, the model for Resting Nude – Portrait IV was accustomed to nestle and doze. The contrast, the adult compliant, the child not knowing quite how to react to the close attention, demonstrated Freud’s deepening ability to convey in paint his awareness of others and, for that matter, their feelings towards him.

  ‘What is important’, Giacometti said, ‘is to create an object capable of conveying a sensation as close as possible to the one felt at the sight of the subject.’

  In 1960 the first of what were to be three summer expeditions with the Lambton girls had begun in Paris where the whole party went up the Eiffel Tower and then proceeded down the Rhône valley in Bindy Lambton’s Land Rover and fifty-foot caravan, complete with nanny and maid. The caravan became stuck on a tight corner in a village in Burgundy and one morning Annie awoke to find a big fat inflatable Michelin Man, lifted by her father from a garage forecourt, wobbling outside the door of the caravan. The children were left in a hotel while Bindy and Freud went out all night to dine and sleep elsewhere. Their destination was a villa at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat next door to the Chaplins. Jack Heinz photographed the girls there playing with hula-hoops. Two years later, in August 1962, they went, again by caravan and Land Rover, to Venice where Freud was delighted by the swish Boldoni watercolours in Daisy Fellowes’ palazzo. At the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido, they met up with Diana Cooper (and Cecil Beaton) with her granddaughter, Artemis. There were parental discussions. ‘I used to have arguments with Diana about how she brought her up,’ Freud said. ‘I took Artemis to see certain Renaissance things. She said to me, “I absolutely loathe Picasso.” “Why do you say that?” “Because he imagines himself a better painter than Mummy,” she said.’

  Until that encounter in Venice Freud barely knew Lady Diana Cooper. She had enjoyed success in 1924, posed as a statue of the Madonna in Max Reinhardt’s production of The Miracle and was the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s Mrs Stitch, an absurdly erratic driver; she was, Freud found, ‘pretty curious in her way. I occasionally saw her at Ann’s and Bindi’s and had always loathed her, as I was keen on Pandora Jones, her sister-in-law who looked like Bardot and was then married to Michael Astor. I heard her being bitchy about her, saying that she had every tooth a different colour.’ Her late husband, Duff Cooper, Ambassador to France in 1944–7 and a descendant of one of the illegitimate children of William IV, once referred to Freud, or so Freud claimed, as having ‘crawled out of the gutters of central Europe’. After his death, in 1954, Diana Cooper bought a house in Little Venice only to have the radiators stolen before she had even moved in. ‘There are more burglars than occupiers in this dusky district, who laugh at locksmiths,’ she wrote. Freud was soon on friendly terms with her. ‘I went there quite a lot. Christmas parties, where Paddy Leigh Fermor would say: ‘Diana, do sing “Shit hole”.’

  ‘Oh no. Must I? Oh all right:

  Shit hole, Shit hole …

  She told him he must be

  Arse hole, Arse hole…

  A soldier for the Queen …’

  ‘Applause … We went round listening to election speeches by a very dud man, a Liberal, and her friend Quintin Hogg. He was talking and people started to heckle him and he turned the hecklers against each other, and people took to fighting and she held her ground.’

  One night in January 1966, when Diana Cooper was alone in her house with her friend the actress Iris Tree they were tied up and robbed, Freud recollected. ‘“Who were they?” she asked me. “You know all these people,” she said, thinking I knew all the criminals in the area. I said, “I’m a terrific criminal snob; I wouldn’t shit on people who did that,” and she was pleased and used to mention this.’ While being questioned after another burglary she spotted his name in the policeman’s notebook. By then they were friends. ‘She said, “I do hope Lucian Freud’s not in trouble.” “Oh Lady Diana,” said the policeman, “you shouldn’t look at my notebook.” And she walked round to Clarendon Crescent. “Do look out,” she said.’

  A collision with a police car had triggered worrying repercussions. ‘The trouble was, I was paying the police to tear up a document and then their advice was go abroad for a bit. “Then, if you wait, somebody bigger will get their attention,” they said. It was for driving under a ban. I always got off lightly. Two subjects I can’t read about: one is the police and the other is drug-taking.

  ‘The minute gossip becomes interesting it’s social history. I remember reading Osbert Sitwell and complaining about the name-dropping and John Lehmann saying, “It’s social history.” It’s Mayhew. The thing of who was there, rather than who mattered: the test is if one notices names not events. Generalisations are a mistake.’

  During the spring and summer of 1963 the Macmillan government suffered a run of scandals and debacles, the most resounding of which involved the War Secretary, John Profumo; Christine Keeler, a model and call girl; a Russian naval attaché; a West Indian pimp; and Stephen Ward, an allegedly pimping osteopath. The themes of the Profumo Affair were deceit and betrayal compounded with startling shifts in social codes. Peter Rachman and his entourage were drawn in. Privileged lives were rudely exposed to common view, blanched and captioned faces suddenly famous as, circle nudging circle, the fallout spread with a neatness of coincidence and proliferation of reference worthy of a Hogarth moral narrative. Stephen Ward, for instance, had rented a cottage in the grounds of Cliveden, owned by Michael Astor, a close Willoughby connection. And one of Christine Keeler’s best friends, peripherally involved in all this, was Paula Milton, who had been the child in Father and Daughter (1949), wide-eyed between the droplets of the parted bead curtain.

  (‘There’s a lot I suppress, right through. Things should be in the book because they are interesting, because they are illustrative, not to do with me.’)

  In 1963 June Keeley left Tim Willoughby and took up with Michael Andrews, becoming thereafter June Andrews. Her first sighting of him had been some years before, in 1958, at Delamere Terrace. ‘Tim and I had been out to dinner and Lucian had served oysters and Guinness, sort of thing. We arrived, sat around talking, and I saw Mike running down the road waving his arms as an aeroplane. The first few times I met Mike he was always pissed, bless his heart: crippling shyness. Tim would say, “I’ve got a nice artist coming. Do look after him.” The door would open and in he would sway. Always pissed. I was scathing, but Mike said, “You were wonderful. All dressed up, and you were so wonderful I fell in love.” I was being such a cow.

  ‘Tim went round saying Mike had taken his girlfriend away. He couldn’t bear it: he liked to drop people, not the other way round. He said, “June, you’re so common.” I said, “Thank God I’m not a blue blood like you.” He used to ring me up and say, “When you’ve finished with your artist in his garret, come back, I’ve got a cocktail party I need you to hostess.”

  ‘“Fuck off, Blue Blood.”’

  Freud, too, had had enough of Tim Willoughby. ‘He couldn’t bear anyone standing up to him or anything. I think he wanted Jane to be something different. He said, “My father told me that, to get out of death duties, he’d give Drummond or Grimsthorpe [castles] to me. The minute I get it, out he goes.” His father had all kinds of illusions about Tim. Didn’t know him, hardly. Thought he was sowing wild oats. He opened nightclubs all round: London and Spain. The most successful was Whips in the West End but it wasn’t making money because he wouldn’t let anyone in, so he
sold it. The year before he died he spent £400,000 on things, going through the money rather.’

  On 19 August 1963, Tim Willoughby and Bill Lloyd, a South African painter friend who had tended refugees in Austria with Dr Moynihan six years before, set out from Cap Ferrat to Calvi in Corsica, five to eight hours by power boat: he called the boat Zero as he had won it at roulette. Two days later, under the headline ‘Lord Willoughby Not Found’, The Times reported that the naval and air search had been called off. Wreckage was sighted off Corsica on 27 August.

  ‘I was at Clarendon Crescent, painting those nudes of Jane. She hired a plane and flew up and down searching for him, very shaken. Dr Moynihan who was in love with Bill Lloyd’s sister said, “Do you think that Tim is alive?” A lot of people thought that. Stupid. (When Dr Moynihan’s wife died her last words were “Does anyone know a good doctor?”)’ Bill Lloyd’s easel was passed on to Freud.

  June Keeley had asked Tim Willoughby if his sister would ever marry Freud. He told her she never would because she was so afraid of her mother. Freud was not so certain. ‘I was asked quite a bit to Grimsthorpe. I liked Jane’s father: a one-legged courtier. Jane’s mother wouldn’t sleep with him because of the leg missing. He was lonely, didn’t want to bother his friends when he was in London but would have liked to have seen them. And then there was Jane’s mother’s pressure, to do with my marrying her. So they can’t have disliked me that much.’ His own father, brought in to convert the roof at Wilton Row, remarked on the difference between the Lady Jane Willoughby of public perception – presumed to be of a certain age – and the young and glamorous reality. ‘I remember my father saying, “They’ll be rather shocked if they learnt that this kind lady is rather beautiful.”