The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  John Russell summed up Freud in four paragraphs, three of them brief. He noted a capacity to talk his way out of anything.

  As a serious painter in the mid-1960s Lucian Freud has almost every possible handicap. He bears, to begin with, one of the great names of this century. He has had the burden, hardly less heavy, of adulation in first youth. He is preoccupied, finally, with a kind of painting which is now widely regarded as disreputable.

  By way of defence against all this, Freud virtually went underground: living in houses already overdue for demolition, seeing a very small number of people from the top and bottom ends of society, exhibiting his work rarely or never. In an art scene infiltrated by puffery and public relations, Freud retains an entirely radical attitude to the public.1

  Freud edgy in the Crescent, waiting for Snowdon to stop fiddling around with his camera and then come with him to take a look at the rag-and-bone shop, is the classic outsider, stylishly aloof. For Private View this was the telling image and Woman with Fair Hair – Portrait II and Resting Nude – Portrait IV, the two paintings reproduced, in black and white, postcard size, were of little more than pathological interest. ‘They might have been painted in the condemned cell at midnight,’ John Russell suggested.2

  The four McAdam children, Jane, Paul, Lucy and David, born between 1958 and 1964, were barely aware of having a father. Jane McAdam remembered Freud turning up one day when she was about seven. ‘Lucian – we always called him Lucian – suddenly appeared outside the house. “Jane, come here,” he said. “Go and get your mother.” He didn’t like to come in when we were around. We always thought he was famous, though he wasn’t really then. We had a booklet – the 1963 Marlborough catalogue – in the front room with pictures of naked people.’ That gave them something to relate to. ‘People would see it and change the subject.’ He never touched them, she said, but would look at them intently.3

  Freud avoided involvement and stood aside from responsibility, even maintaining that Katherine McAdam had said to him that on no account should he tell anybody that the children were his. Which suited him. ‘I never saw them when they were children, mine or not is not the point. I got a covenant made when I hadn’t any money so that they always had some money. They don’t know that.’ After a while Jane Willoughby acted as his banker; although the McAdams never met her, it was she, he said, who saw to it that quarterly payments reached them.

  Eventually Lucie Freud found out about the brood (Jane understood that her mother met Lucie Freud through Lucian) and for some time sent monthly cheques. ‘£15 usually,’ Paul McAdam said. ‘She was a real constant.’ Presents came for birthdays and Christmas. ‘Generous presents,’ Jane said. ‘She gave me a recorder. We saw her as a sort of fairy godmother, even with her persistent manner, which I got the brunt of.’ How she had learnt of their existence she did not know. ‘She turned up on the doorstep in Fernhead Road where we lived.’4 Freud regarded this development as yet another opportunity for his mother to do the right thing, excruciatingly so. ‘She was very altruistic and had a very noble motive. I kept out of the line of fire.’

  Lucie Freud would collect Jane from Barrow Hill Juniors, round the corner from St John’s Wood Terrace, and wait with her until Paul arrived from the infant school, Robin’s Field; or else they would both go and meet him. ‘She insisted on seeing our reports. She went through them, as she had done with Lucian’s, and was keen to rectify my failings. “Your writing shows such willpower.” I loved the attention. She sent me dictionaries as a response to a comment on my spelling and an art book on Henri Rousseau by André Salmon: it came after a good report on art. She took me to tea every day after school. A Danish pastry every day. And she wanted a copy of my school photo, but it was when my teeth were dropping out and I wanted her to have one with teeth. “Please,” she said, insistent. We felt very secure with Lucie.’5

  Paul McAdam was shy, introverted, bullied at school. On the way to meet Jane after school one day, when he was six or seven, he was knocked down by a lorry and taken to the St John and St Elizabeth Hospital in Grove End Road, St John’s Wood. ‘I was in a coma for a few weeks. Lucian was in the hospital too, apparently, having his appendix out. A parcel of toys came from someone, from the lorry driver, I thought, but how could he have known where I was? I soon did for the toys; I used to take everything apart. It was two years before I recovered.’6 His primary school headmistress got him a place at Woolverstone Hall near Ipswich, a boarding school with free places for pupils from the Inner London Education Authority deemed to need the benefit. ‘I went to this Georgian country house with horses in the fields then home to the council estate. I was homesick always.

  ‘All our security on our father’s side was through our grandmother, not Ernst. He was reassuring and friendly but it was mostly Lucie. It was her thing.’7

  Freud reckoned that he did what he could, short of exposing himself to commitments of any sort. ‘I used to give Kay money and sometimes hadn’t any. And she said – and I hate being threatened, even if it’s something I want to do – “If you don’t, I’ll go and see your parents,” and so I didn’t, she did, and I didn’t see her again. I dreaded my mother talking to me about it.’ The last thing that he ever wanted any girlfriend of his to do. In 1966 she moved with the children to a council estate in Roehampton, South London, where, as far as he was concerned, that was that.

  ‘There was a massive rift when I was six or seven,’ Jane said. ‘We did a flit: my mother gave Lucie a forwarding address so that Lucian could find us if he wanted to.’8 He did not. She had gone to his mother.

  Lucie Freud went on asking for school reports and sending money. ‘There seemed to be a sort of conversation going on through the type of presents she gave,’ Jane remembered. ‘We all looked forward to her monthly letters which always included her cash gifts. They arrived like clockwork in the same post on the same day each month. There was never any variation in about ten years and she never missed a month.

  ‘When I was eleven or twelve me and Paul went to see her. Trooped off to St John’s Wood Terrace. She had the table laid for visitors, cakes on the table, and poured the tea from a teapot with a minute long spout, her hand shaking. “How lovely to zee you,” she said. We talked about the past. Paul and I, we’d write letters talking about “Pops”. (He didn’t know.) When my mother was resentful sometimes it came out. “Write to your father,” suddenly she said.’9 The aquamarine ring that he had given her was lost and the black lacquer box, given her by Lucie Freud, got broken.

  Rationalising his undomesticity, Freud used to say: ‘If you’re not there when they’re in the nest you can be more there later.’ He often talked about being unable to treat all children fairly. ‘Fairness is a disaster. You have to go by what’s needed at the time.’

  ‘I am still mystified by how L. managed to fit in the McAdam ménage with all the others,’ Anne Dunn said. ‘Poor girls perhaps, but why did the mother comply over such a long and fertile period? L’s sometimes “monstrous philosophy” of his life does mimic certain of Grandpa’s more worrying “betrayals” in his work and relationships.’10

  Certainly Freud could be monstrously possessive over certain things dear to him. ‘I had a passion for those covers made out of Crimean War uniforms: red and white and black and insignia. I used to have them on my bed. It was folk art and I had a really good one and Kay said she’d mend it. Years and years and years went by and I said, “Could I have it?” But I didn’t get it back. Terribly odd, as I saw her very little.’

  ‘I’ve always thought of friendship as where two people really tear one another apart and perhaps in that way learn something from one another,’ Bacon said to David Sylvester in a broadcast interview for the BBC in 1966.11 At that time his friendship with Freud was still harmonious and close enough for him to send a telegram telling him how lonely he was and in need of his friendship. It was his responsibility for George Dyer that had become exasperating, an involvement that began in the autumn of 1963, as Freud
remembered. ‘They met in a club and went home and Francis was terribly pleased as George gave him an enormous gold watch which he’d stolen the night before.’

  Bacon painted Dyer swerving on a bicycle, intently shaving, shying away as though just slapped, paintings that had the stamp of ardour and affection then degenerating into impatience and, finally, drear remorse over the sad, sozzled cipher that Dyer eventually became. He came to treat him as a dramatic projection, his own worst enemy, victimised and puking, baring the exposed neck; unlike Freud, who painted him in friendly fashion. ‘All sorts of people liked George. He had been with a gang – the Richardsons, I think – he had to carry something for them and Francis said, “I can’t believe George could do it.” Useless.’ When he came round to Gloucester Terrace and sat for Freud, the idea was that this would occupy him regularly while Bacon was working. ‘Francis said to George: “Just let him do a head, not more: he’s only good at heads.”’ Head and upper body only, shoulders slumped, Man in a Blue Shirt is the engaging and inept petty criminal, a man appreciative of this prolonged and unaccustomed attention. ‘Really sympathetic. He wasn’t tough. He had a cleft palate, a strange voice, a hand-washing mania and a tidiness and cleaning-up mania: never so shocked as when he went into Isabel [Rawsthorne]’s flat. He was having lunch once with Francis and I and Hermione Baddeley, and her slave Joan Ashton Smith, who couldn’t understand George, because of his common accent, and his stutter. She wore a huge toque, as women then did; George took his fist and rather gently hit her on the hat, which went over her face.

  ‘George had never looked at any painting ever in his life. He’d been a sort of lookout man for a gang, a very bad one, and he saw a book of Hals, he looked at it, and his face absolutely lit up. He said, “What a marvellous idea, making people look like that.” He thought they were modern. That’s right really. George was always looking at books. He was very amused by things I took for granted: girls and whatever. His point of view was interesting. He was intrigued by some people and couldn’t understand why, or what, or how; or being patronised by Deakin, who called him Georgy Porgy.’

  Once, in the Colony Room, Michael Andrews offered to buy Dyer a drink but he refused, insisting that he had more money than Andrews, as he understood him to be a painter. ‘What do you do?’ Andrews asked. ‘I’m a thief,’ he said. Living with Bacon, he had found, was demoralising; there was kindness and indulgence, but the work habits and lordly ways plus the masochistic requirements took it out of him. The relationship drained Bacon’s generosity. Freud regarded this as characteristic behaviour. ‘Francis used to say, “I take up with these people because they are strong and tough and then it turns out that I’m so much tougher than them.” He said to me it was hard being with George, with someone he couldn’t talk to, to do with ideas. He got terribly lonely. Queers do. Also Francis liked being knocked about a bit.’

  Bacon and Dyer went to stay at Saint Estève in the South of France with Rodrigo Moynihan. Anne Dunn, by then married to Moynihan, was not there but, she remembered, their child Danny was, and his nanny. ‘Francis was cruel to George. The s/m started upstairs and the nanny fled to Rodrigo’s bed.’

  Freud took Dyer up to Scotland with him to stay at Glenartney, Jane Willoughby’s Perthshire shooting lodge, passed on to her in a semi-derelict state (‘a ruin, shepherds sleeping on the floor’) after Tim Willoughby died. He painted him in an upstairs room at the end of a long corridor hung with antlers. ‘I took him there to get him off the drink. Francis was very odd about it. I said, “We had a nice time, played billiards,” and Francis said “No he didn’t: he was very cold there.” I think that he wanted to go on tormenting him in London. Going to Glenartney wasn’t remotely done in any secretive way, I talked to Francis about it and said that when things are bad I go up there quite a bit and work. I know it annoyed him. It was a bit like interfering in marriage rows. Francis said George was freezing there, but he could have asked for another blanket.

  ‘George was the sort of person who would be protective if someone was in a bad way. He was incredibly brave and had been knocked about by the police. He was completely unvenal and had proper feelings. He had one ambition: he wanted to have a newsagent’s; when he got more far gone Francis suggested it but it was no good by then; it was awfully tragic really: Francis stopped fancying him and George was in love with him. Francis got him these marvellous – horrible – grand flats, but he wanted to be with him. Francis hoped he’d get off with someone but, Francis said, under drink he was impotent and so people took him home and in the morning didn’t want him any more. He had DTs.

  ‘I took him down to Ian Fleming’s awful place, Sevenhampton – Ann must have liked him – and drove him back in the middle of the night because of his DTs. He saw things and was terrified. Francis would always hide his strong pills for blood pressure and stuff. “If I don’t hide them I know George would eat them all and I just can’t let him,” he said. And then he said “I’ve often thought of forgetting to hide them.” Francis was really concerned. George was so demoralised and jealous of Francis. It’s impossible to judge, but Francis was horrible to him; it’s very hard to behave well …’

  Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud (1967) presented them as an odd pair on a bench in some eternal anteroom, stuck with one another behind a glass-topped table, heads irritatedly blurred, nothing to look at but an ashtray and a stuffed cat.12

  There had been better times. In 1964 Freud, Bacon and Dyer went to stay in the Balmoral Hotel, Monte Carlo. ‘Francis invited me, so the three of us went, for a fortnight or ten days. We went swimming in the pool. Then there was a fuck-up as we lost all the money in the Casino.’ That left them idling at the hotel until relief came from London. ‘Miss Beston [Bacon’s assiduous minder at the Marlborough] was away and when Francis sent for more money only dud Gilbert [Lloyd] was there and he said, “How shall we send the money?” Miss B. would have just sent it. It was really hard and we had a couple of days without gambling money.’

  Both Freud and Bacon regarded Monte Carlo as a little Emerald City, for Bacon a familiar resort representing glamour and risk, for Freud the place where his grandmother Brasch had enjoyed a historic stroke of luck. ‘My grandmother married this wealthy grain merchant, very much older than herself, a man of the world who travelled and decided to go to Monte Carlo for their honeymoon. In my grandmother’s journal she says her mother was really worried about this and sent her a letter: “Can’t sleep: a relation of yours ruined herself at Monte Carlo, lost a fortune. Promise me you won’t go to the Casino.” Grandfather after a delightful dinner said, “For a treat tonight we are going to the Salon Privé: I’ve often played roulette, very interesting game.” My grandmother thought OK, she wouldn’t tell her mother, dressed up to the nines and went to the Casino. Even so they said, “Have you got any identification?” Grandfather had his passport; Grandmother had nothing except, in her handbag, she had the worried letter from her mother and she got in on the strength of it, had three bets at the roulette on zero, which came up three times. Treble Zero. To her it was the most memorable occasion of her life.

  ‘Francis was rather obsessed with a mysterious house, high up, at the end of the bay; he said it was where Pavlov had done those experiments with monkeys, and he talked about this Russian who had information on Pavlov. Miss Beston told me that she and Francis were walking somewhere there once and he suddenly said, “This is where we lived,” meaning him and “the Russian”, a real influence pre-war. He said to Francis, in French, “You don’t know how to behave yourself,” meaning how to hustle like the boy in Warhol’s Flesh. He lived off his wits, anything negotiable – and women perhaps – and certainly had an affair with Francis. He made Francis feel that his strange eccentric behaviour needed style.’

  Hanging around, waiting for money to arrive and the Casino to be open to him again, Bacon had fretted. ‘Francis couldn’t swim or walk, or only for short distances, and I wanted to draw George and Francis told him I wasn’t any
good at bodies, only heads, therefore not to do it.’ Accomplishment being in his view decorum, he was quick to decry aptitude. Not that he ever badmouthed Freud as witheringly as he dealt with those he really despised. As when he met Michael Ayrton who had asserted in a broadcast on ‘The Nature of Drawing’ that he, Bacon, couldn’t draw. ‘Is drawing what you do?’ he asked him. Pause. ‘I wouldn’t want to do that.’

  To Bacon, drawing, Ayrtonic at worst, was something he liked to think he needn’t be bothered with, it being – one way and another – the pursuit of stylishness if not exactitude. For him there was plenty to be done by other means, by shadow play and calculated swipe. He insisted that the reflections of onlookers and splashes of light added extra layers of accident and obscurity to his pictures. Freud too liked having his paintings glazed, not so much to gain reflections but (particularly when the quality of non-reflective glass was improved to near-invisibility) because of the protection it affords. ‘Mine is a substitute for varnish, plus keeping the London dirt from seeping into the paint when it’s drying. I like people to be aware of the form and not the PAINT, which glass, by its nature, obliges them to do, to some degree and that suits me.’