The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘Partly Francis had photographs because he was bored,’ Freud explained. ‘I was very surprised he wanted to include Henrietta.’ Deakin’s photographs of Henrietta Moraes lolling naked prompted dramatic elisions of form and persona. ‘Thigh going into breast: how beautiful she remained. She was good-looking for a very long time. In Ireland she didn’t wear any knickers, sat at a table, put up her legs and the pub owner came by and didn’t really like what he saw and barred her. (Irishmen are puritanical, even though Catholic.) Deakin sold these photos to sailors. They like things a bit “look, what a good bang”. Rather more than merely their stockings showing.’

  Bacon required Deakin to supply him with images readied for him, postures and skin tones sufficient to enable him to overlay in streaks and dabs the aura he associated with each person portrayed: arrogance, defensiveness, bafflement, fear. ‘One always loves the story and the sensation to be cut down to its most elemental state,’ he told David Sylvester. ‘That’s how one longs for one’s friends to be, isn’t it?’ Mostly presented as threesomes, his paintings of Freud were invested with the mannerisms that registered only on acquaintance: the quick-as-a-blink turn of the head, the dismissive wince, the screwing up of the eyes and tightening of the lips in silent laughter when a joke took effect.

  Freud’s John Deakin, by contrast, red-eared and elfish, is a saddened rake with darts of pain in the eyes.

  The ‘Modern Art in Britain’ issue of Cambridge Opinion, a student magazine edited by an undergraduate, Michael Peppiatt, and published in January 1964, included ‘A Short Text’ by Freud composed to be read out loud in a Dr Strangelove accent.

  When man finally sealed his destiny by inventing his own inevitable destruction he also gave art absolute gravity by adding a new dimension: this new dimension, having the end in sight, can give the artist supreme control, daring and such awareness of his bearings in existence that he will (in Nietzsche’s words) create conditions under which ‘a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hideouts – into his sun’.

  This heady sentence, set in a bold typeface and squashed into a narrow space on the page above a reproduction of Sleeping Head, was supposed to give pause to the readers of Cambridge Opinion following the bluff and counter-bluff of the Cuban missile crisis, by any measure the greatest gamble of the era. ‘Having the end in sight’ was that moment of mastery when ‘supreme control’ is finally exercised. Freud wanted it known that he was on to something here. Something of greater potential than anything paraded as ‘figurative’ not to say banal. He could now hope to do away with the gangling exaggeration he associated with, say, Egon Schiele. ‘I didn’t use Prussian blue because I was afraid of the disease spreading.’ He found all he needed to be daring in a limited range of earth colours. ‘Terre verte and Payne’s grey, or terre verte and charcoal grey; maybe with a bit of my staple colour which was Naples yellow even then. Mike [Andrews] started me on Rowney’s Transparent Brown.’ He told himself that virtuosity was a shortcoming; what he wanted was disclosure.

  ‘I don’t think of highlights as highlights; more the light resting on it. I never thought of them as touches. It’s what I want: to avoid accent. What’s exciting is you ignore the guarantee of the accent and see what gets lighter. Painting, for example, fire tongs not like William Nicholson.’

  Not for him dabs of highlight expertly placed; and furthermore not for him the skidmarks and dribbles, silkscreened layers and collaged jump cuts that characterised the cinematic paintings and graphics of the period.

  The sixties was a period of a more strenuous than usual cult of the spanking new during which the American ascendancy gave rise to ostensibly laconic shows of formality such as Jasper Johns’ deadpan flags and targets (exhibited at the Whitechapel in 1963–4) and ostentatiously casual trawls of consumer litter, such as Robert Rauschenberg’s combines or outsize collages. In February 1963 a thirty-year-old American in London, R. B. Kitaj, exhibited at the Marlborough paintings with provocatively abstruse titles (Nietzsche’s Moustache), paintings combining colouring-book handling and scrapbook characteristics. ‘An Eagerly-Awaited First Exhibition’, the Times said. Kitaj had recently left the Royal College where his bookishness and worldly ways (he had been a merchant seaman and itinerant art student, on the GI Bill, in New York, Vienna and Oxford) had a bracing impact on, in particular, David Hockney. Freud had looked forward to the Kitaj show. ‘There was so much written I had terrific expectations. I expected it to be organic in some way, and when I went I got no more impact than from reproductions.’

  In October 1964 Encounter published ‘A Kind of Anarchy’, a conversation between Andrew Forge – Slade tutor, painter and writer – and the art editor of Encounter, David Sylvester. Forge talked about the English attitude to art being that it was created by ‘the solitary man of conscience working simply with what God gave him in the studio’. Sylvester agreed. Take Frank Auerbach. He had said, in answer to a London Magazine questionnaire three years before, that painting is ‘something that happens to a man, working in a room, alone, with his actions, his ideas, and perhaps his model’. This was just not good enough, Sylvester argued. Auerbach’s ‘sentimental glorification of inner necessity has some bearing on his not having advanced as a painter since he started to show ten years ago; he hasn’t gone back, but he hasn’t gained ground’. And, Sylvester suggested, ‘the artist who appears to be taking his stand on everything that is associated with the idea of integrity may still be indulging himself in the repetition of a serious-looking formula.’

  This reprimand was issued on the assumption or understanding that London artists, unlike New York artists, were inclined to repeat themselves rather than push ahead. How that squared with the modified outputs of those he most admired in the School of New York (Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning) Sylvester did not say. ‘Obviously’, he insisted, ‘the big event in the experience of artists in this country was the first exhibition here of modern American art, the one at the Tate in early ’56. This really changed everything.’ Really? It seemed then, perhaps, that expansiveness, on the US pattern, was the only way of getting ahead. In his interviews with Bacon he had asked him why he tended to paint in series. Bacon had explained that he always saw images ‘in a shifting way’.9 That was enough to make Bacon a modern, attuned to film and replication, compatible with Warhol, for example, whose mimicry of industrial production was as adulatory as it was numb. Warhol’s Blow Job movie, recording the expression on an actor’s face while, implicitly, for thirty-five minutes the act proceeds off camera, comes close to parodying Auerbach’s definition of his sort of painting. And his use of the electric chair, a lynching, some movie stars and Jacqueline Kennedy’s grieving face as image-bank assets was, most certainly, the ‘repetition of a serious-looking formula’. In terms of insouciant strategy Warhol was, Freud said, ‘always so intelligent’. He particularly liked the version of the Campbell’s can with the label coming off. ‘That’s touching, almost like Hadleigh Castle tower.’ But, he added, ‘Constable’s Hadleigh isn’t Expressionist. It’s fast but it all reads.’ Warhol’s speed looks so static.

  Freud wanted each painting of someone to embody that someone. More than a correspondence, more than impersonation: more the one and only. When Cézanne said, ‘Nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces,’ he went on to say (or is reported as remarking to his biographer Joachim Gasquet): ‘You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You’d rather strip the canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know. To know, the better to feel, and to feel, the better to know.’ Cézanne’s protestations (‘I want to stay simple. Those who know are simple’) snubbed notions of progress by dint of novelty superseding novelty. ‘The half-knowing, the amateurs, only half-realise,’ he added. Truthful painting is immeasurably exacting.10

  ‘I don’t think I could paint seven or eight hours a day every week,’ William Coldstream once remarked to Freud, who was not surprised at this. ‘He said, “I can’t bear that thing of peop
le who agonise over pictures; I like to think of it as a sort of gentleman’s activity.” You do it and then you’ve done it and you don’t go on about it.’ Still head of the Slade, Coldstream had become portrait painter to the establishment (Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden, heads of colleges, tycoons) and served as Chairman of the Arts Council Art Panel, Chairman of the British Film Institute and Chairman of the National Advisory Council on Art Education under whose auspices the Coldstream Report on the organisation of art schools was published in 1960, recommending academic entry qualifications and art history courses for all students, together with pre-diploma courses involving disciplines such as Basic Design of the sort that had been developed by Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore at Newcastle University.

  The aim was to improve the professionalism and raise the standing of art schools, maybe to the detriment of ‘people who agonise over pictures’. Those art schools approved by the National Advisory Council set up to monitor standards became art colleges empowered to bestow degree-status diplomas; thereupon, as a token of their commitment to modernising themselves, most colleges keen to keep up took to abandoning traditional teaching methods. Plaster casts disappeared from life-room corridors and life classes were demoted. Lawrence Gowing, who in 1975 was to become Coldstream’s successor at the Slade, went through an abstract phase himself at this time, though he argued eloquently and persistently for the central importance of painting from life. ‘Linked to a growing sense of painting in time, painting as narrative, painting in his model’s life and in his own and most of all to painting as the image of mortality’.11

  In 1964 the new Principal of Norwich School of Art, John Brinkley, applied for diploma status and made Edward Middleditch Head of Fine Art. Among the visiting lecturers invited that year by Middleditch was Freud, who did not get on with him. ‘Unfortunately. He was a horrible man, had a real grudge, and he was semi-anti-Semitic.’ Freud went to Norwich one day a week, usually driving down for the day but sometimes staying in a hotel overnight. For a two-week life-painting course he demanded a studio where he could work uninterruptedly with those students who wanted to do life painting – a novelty at Norwich – and full-length mirrors for all.

  ‘There were only eight or so students and they were duds as a rule as Norwich couldn’t give diplomas. My swansong was in the last week: this project about doing naked self-portraits. And I gave them this talk: “You’ll be dead very soon and I want you to do naked self-portraits and put in everything you feel is relevant to your life and how you think about yourself and not think that this is a picture on the way to perhaps doing a better picture; I want you to try and make it the most revealing, telling and believable object. Imagine you are going to be painters. Tell people you’ve been alive and haven’t been negligible, or little worth it. Make a visual statement and forget your inhibitions and be over the top. Take your clothes off and paint yourself. Just once.”

  ‘The one thing the students had in common was a sort of innate timidity of a very agreeable kind but the antithesis, really, to the absolute cheek of making art. So I thought the best thing I can make them do to reveal themselves is naked self-portraits. I tried to get them to do something really shameless.’

  A life-room rule was that male and female nudes were not allowed within sight of each other in the life room. Word got to Principal Brinkley about the project. ‘The head of the school said, “I’m very worried about what you’re doing.” He said, “I’ll go along with you, but I don’t mind telling you I feel really uneasy about this.” Some of the parents objected.’ As it was, several of the girls agreed to take their mirrors and paint themselves in the privacy of their bedrooms. Lynda Morris, who came later to the Art School as curator and lecturer, was told about the peripatetic teaching practice to which Freud resorted. ‘The legend is that he spent most of the time driving around in a big white Bentley going round to each of the girls’ homes to give them individual tutorials.’12

  Freud knew that misunderstandings were bound to arise. ‘I realised some of them felt they’d got to do it at home: they couldn’t do it in the school. I went round and got bad receptions from one or two parents.’ He also recognised that getting others to paint themselves was a vicarious way of painting himself.

  ‘I realised I was doing about eight pictures: “look no hands”. I mean, I tried too hard; in fact it was a kind of winding-up: the end of teaching. And there was a bit of furore. The head said this put him in an awkward position as there were phone calls from parents, and so on, even to alert the police.’ Freud assured him that they were overreacting. ‘I drove around for a week or longer going round blowing on these little embers. I was so keen to do it myself. They did specimens of my sort of work.’

  To paint oneself naked is a bracing exercise, not least because it obliges the painter to face up to the difference between bare truth and wishful thinking. A distinction laboured by Kenneth Clark in The Nude, published in 1956, a lecture series picking up, as he saw it, on the endeavours of ‘eighteenth-century critics to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practised and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art’.13

  Freud found the book uninspiring. ‘I’ve got a copy. I couldn’t read it all. I was put off by things like “How come some naked sculptures in the ancient world gave a view of generosity, especially when the knees are apart?” Even the most unadventurous person knows about knees apart. Even Henry Moore.

  ‘I think K. loved a nude and that he was rather the opposite of some people who, through sex and love, become more loving and precious. His temperament sealed it off: it was “pas devant les …” I remember being rather puzzled, and slightly shocked, when he said, “God, Picasso certainly knew …” “What a wonderful figure,” he would say. And “good legs”. Which was absolute bollocks. Though I can concede “there’s a damned attractive woman”. He made it clear he liked imparting information. It was something in his nature: being very strong, autocratic and rich.’

  Called upon by Herbert Read in 1958 to name his favourite picture, Clark nominated Miss O’Murphy, his explanation being that ‘Boucher has enabled us to enjoy her with as little shame as she is enjoying herself. One false note and we should be embarrassingly back in the world of sin.’14 To him, the student of ideal form, nakedness needed rectifying. ‘Photographs of naked models are almost always embarrassing. In almost every detail the body is not the shape which art has led us to believe that it would be.’ More than once Freud heard Clark state, with an air of off-hand profundity, ‘There are three great mysteries in life: sex, fear and death.’15

  Mysteries? Freud preferred the Goncourt brothers in aphoristic mode: ‘Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.’ And: ‘As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.’16

  Sickert’s essay ‘The Naked and the Nude’, written in 1910, lingered on the need to treat the nude, in studio or life class, as an unadorned proposition. No talk of mysteries, no lofty parallels. He argued that any ordinary naked person was better to paint than a statuesque nobody and that drapes – sheets, towels – were desirable. Degas had shown him that. ‘Perhaps the chief source of pleasure in the aspect of a nude is that it is in the nature of a gleam – a gleam of light and warmth and life.’17

  33

  ‘I can’t be pressed really’

  A hazy shot of the sun setting between the shoulder and legs of a Henry Moore reclining figure was used for the dust jacket of a lavish seven-guinea coffee-table book. ‘A new kind of book about a new situation,’ the blurb claimed, the situation being that, arguably, London had become as much an artworld capital as Paris and New York. Published in October 1965, Private View was designed by Germano Facetti in collaboration with Lord Snowdon – husband of Princess Margaret and ‘artistic adviser’ to the Sunday Times. Though it proved too expensive for the English market, it sold well in the United States, where Time Life were the pub
lishers and where Time magazine was soon to carry a cover story on ‘Swinging London’.

  Many of Snowdon’s photographs of dealers in their galleries and painters in their studios had already appeared in the Sunday Times colour supplement. He tried, he said, ‘to echo the mood of their work’, meaning that most of his photographs had the pace, the swinging pace, of bright Sunday journalism. Beyond Sir Kenneth Clark, suave in Albany, and Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld and Harry Fischer yelling at Frank Lloyd over a business letter, the sixties scene unfolded, a world of veteran Surrealists and pullovered Constructivists, Eduardo Paolozzi testing his strength against one of his colourful Moloch sculptures, Hockney dazzling and nearly every art school busy discussing life-class replacement and the desirability of fibreglass sculpture. Kokoschka, Epstein and Moore, Hepworth and Nicholson, Sutherland, the St Ives School, the ex-Royal College Pop Art squad, as they came to be labelled (Blake, Caulfield, Hodgkin, Kitaj), dealers (Erica Brausen, Helen Lessore), administrators (Lilian Somerville, John Rothenstein), critics (David Sylvester, John Berger) passed in review, commented upon by the Sunday Times art critic, John Russell, and Bryan Robertson, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

  Bacon’s face filled a page, full face. As Freud had painted him and Deakin had photographed him. He was among the pre-eminent. Freud, now in the middle generation, came later in the book, inserted between Roger Hilton and Frank Auerbach. ‘Few painters can be more hypnotic in close-up,’ the caption read.

  Freud’s face over-exposed by Snowdon and enlarged to amazing graininess (‘looking’, as he said, ‘like a Mervyn Peake’) was the biggest head on any page. ‘I had a letter and so on and he came over and we talked. I didn’t want my room to be photographed so I said, “I’ve got a really good place,” and when he came to photograph me I took him round to the rag-and-bone man’s place under the canal-side arches.’ Over the page was a double spread, also grainy, of a deserted Clarendon Crescent: empty, that is, except for Freud in shirtsleeves with cigarette, standing in the middle of the street (‘didn’t know it was being taken, which makes it sort of good, surely?’), a van parked at a distance and, close enough to read the number plate, his own car parked outside a house with broken windows and crumbling windowsill. He could be a landlord collecting rents. ‘He has a habit of living by extremes,’ the caption says. ‘It happens that the car is a Rolls-Royce.’ The shots of him seated among heaps of old clothes as though he owned them were omitted.