Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  In 1951, Freud was the first subject who was named as a sitter by Bacon, who went on to paint Freud in eighteen portraits. Freud returned the favour, and his 1952 portrait of Bacon was to become one of his most powerful and well-known paintings. In 1988, it was stolen from a gallery in Berlin while on loan from the Tate. Years later Freud speculated that it might have been stolen on the orders of a German Bacon collector, since Bacon was so highly regarded in Freud’s mother country.

  Francis Bacon, 1952

  Lucian’s working methods were notoriously slow, often involving sittings that lasted many months. In the 1940s and 50s, he was employing a painstaking, almost miniaturist technique with tiny brushstrokes. ‘I worked with the painting [of Bacon] on my knees rather than standing at an easel, as I do now. I always take a long time to paint a picture, but I don’t remember the Bacon portrait taking particularly long. Francis complained a lot about sitting – which he always did about everything – but not to me at all. I heard about it from people in the pub,’ he told me much later. In any case, the result was a remarkable study in suppressed tension. Robert Hughes compared Bacon’s face to a grenade a fraction of a second before it explodes.

  During this period and through the 1960s and into the 70s, Bacon was the most important man in Freud’s life, influencing how he lived and painted. The way Bacon used paint so freely and expressively to simulate emotion, tension or anxiety, was what Lucian required. He wanted his paintings to show how he felt. For many years they met most days. They were intensely close, Francis sending Lucian a frantic telegram in 1966, pleading loneliness and pledging undying friendship, so unlike his hard, iconoclastic art. Lucian kept that telegraphed message of coiled affection. But the friendship eventually splintered in jealousy and petty rows until by the end they never saw each other. The painter Tim Behrens remembered Francis Bacon in the Colony Room talking camply of Lucian’s self-portraits: “‘She doesn’t put herself through the same third degree as her other sitters.” Everyone laughed but at that minute Lucian walked into the room. Francis immediately was all polite and normal to Lucian who never heard what had been said’.10

  ‘I think Lucian couldn’t countenance the success that Francis was enjoying, particularly in France,’ observed David Hockney. ‘Bacon was also the first serious artist who dismissed abstraction as l’art de mouchoir [decorative marks on a handkerchief]. He also dismissed Jackson Pollock as a lace-maker. You have to remember that in the 1960s abstraction was the biggest thing and some thought figurative art was over.’

  Lucian had been remarkably fast out of the starting blocks in his teens and early twenties (the Museum of Modern Art in New York had bought a picture in the 1940s), but then there was a very long period when his paintings sold only to a small number of English people and he enjoyed almost no international recognition. In the early days of their relationship Freud was encouraged by Bacon and eventually he followed his more reckless, free-style approach, abandoning his Germanic tightness of line and fine surfaces. While he admired Bacon’s ambition, he envied his global success. Bacon had had a Tate show as early as 1962, enjoyed an international reputation and was revered in Paris, which was incredibly important for artists of that generation. Bacon had a second show at the Tate in 1985, while Lucian had no exhibition there until 2002, and had just one major non-commercial show in 1974 at the upstairs rooms at London’s Hayward Gallery in the less appealing South Bank art complex.

  I saw Bacon as a route to Freud. I remember how some waggish curator had wittily put together a show called ‘English Breakfast’: the painters were Freud, (Augustus) Egg11 and Bacon. As an undergraduate I was conscious that Freud remained for me the one that got away. He was a no-go area for all journalists, so it was no easy task to gain access to him. Although I never got a reply, I persisted – intermittently. Nothing was to happen for another two decades, except that my interest in him remained, and whenever a show opened, I went. Like Banquo, he was conspicuously absent. More letters, more silence. But I never lost hope.

  A large art book on the English painter Stanley Spencer turned out to be the bait with which I finally lured Lucian to contact me. One morning in April 1997 the monograph arrived on my desk when I was the Literary Editor at the Sunday Times and I whimsically wondered if I could commission Lucian to write a review of it.

  Leafing through the book, my instant reaction was that Spencer’s nudes, with flesh exposed in unflattering ways, were not unlike Freud’s. I wondered if they approached the depiction of the human body in a similar cold-eyed way: non-sentimental, with skin and flesh as it actually is rather than portrayed in some idealised way. Would Freud explain for me his relationship with the naked body? Would he reveal a debt to Spencer? Would he even reply? One breakthrough was that I now at least knew where he lived, and sent a printed postcard embossed with ‘From the Literary Editor’, adding the number of my direct line.

  I had discovered his address because my eldest brother Louis had moved into the ground-floor flat of a large Holland Park villa and had informed me that Freud worked on the top floor. He told the story of how Lucian had wandered into one of the other flats, and when asked his occupation, simply said that he was a painter. The neighbour then asked if he would consider decorating the kitchen. ‘Not exactly that sort of painter,’ was Lucian’s amused reply. Louis would sometimes see Lucian scuttling up the black and white marble steps to enter the building either very late at night, or very early in the morning as Louis headed off to his job at Goldman Sachs. These glimpses of a ferret-thin figure, vigilant, purposeful and intriguing, were rare. Freud had only the briefest contact with his neighbours. He desired anonymity. The doorbells at the front of the house all had names except his, which just said ‘Top Flat’.

  Off went another of my postcards, but this time it was different. He called me. ‘It’s Lucian Freud on the phone for you, or someone who says it’s him,’ said my deputy Caroline Gascoigne. I thought she was joking.

  What utterly threw me when I took the phone was his subtly inflected accent. It seemed straight from pre-war Berlin, educated, sophisticated, a slight burr but without any harshness. It was definitely very different from that of his brother Clement, the Liberal MP, broadcaster and participant on the BBC Radio 4 comic quiz game Just a Minute, whose slow, deep, sonorous voice – plummy, with a distinctive pronunciation of almost exaggeratedly correct English, and without a scintilla of German inflection – was so familiar to millions of listeners. Lucian was fast, direct and sparing with words. ‘I got your card. I would like to see the book. But I have to tell you that Spencer’s work is absolutely nothing like mine. It is the opposite. Anyone who thinks there is any similarity is simply not looking properly. But it might interest me to say that,’ he said.

  I sent the book. Ten days passed. Then: ‘Hello, it’s Lucian Freud here.’ It came out as ‘Looshan’. He said no to writing a review, but we chatted about his dismissive take on Spencer’s sentimentality and inability to observe. No article, but at last a connection.

  I tried various ploys to entice him to give me an interview, and by this stage I used to hear from others who knew him that he did see and read my letters, only there was nothing to say back in reply as he did not want to do anything with me. My only letter from him was the one in which he said that the thought of granting me an interview made him ‘sick’.

  In 2002, by which time I was editor of Tatler magazine, I again wrote to him again, saying very simply: ‘I have a brilliant idea you will like. I can only explain it in person.’ I was banking on his curiosity. The same voice: ‘Lucian here.’ It was hypnotic, more so than any other voice that I have ever heard. It had a rhythm, resonance and force that was so individual and alluring. No spare words.

  ‘Do you want to come for breakfast?’ was the sentence which changed our relationship. ‘Come at 6.45 tomorrow morning to the studio,’ he said. ‘Perfect,’ I replied, and he rang off. He never said goodbye. It was just not his style.

  I was on time, rang the bel
l and when the door buzzed open I walked up four flights of stairs. Lucian was on the top landing looking out through his open door as I came up. He stood in his chef’s trousers with a filthy torn sheet tucked round them like an apron, which from a distance looked blood-stained. There was no handshake, but there was a warm if cautious greeting, as a spider might make to a lowly fly about to enter his web. His voice was soft and his manner delicately courteous. He was staring intently. It was not rude or hostile but somehow powerful. He stood still for a moment and then darted in. He moved quickly, with athleticism.

  Privacy among his piles of rags in his Aladdin’s cave of paint was of paranoid importance, as was his drive to do only what he wanted. Lucian was obstinate. ‘If anyone asked me to do something I just wanted to do the opposite and I usually did,’ he said later. ‘If I had been dropped off at a cinema by a driver I might easily get a taxi to another cinema just so that no one would know where I was. I liked privacy,’ he said. He once changed his telephone number four times in a year; not only was it, of course, ex-directory, but the bill was also sent to his solicitor. The flat was not even in his name; it was owned by his ex-girlfriend Jane Willoughby, who lent it to him – in effect, he did not officially exist. The Kensington and Chelsea electoral register would sometimes enquire if he was Lucan Freed, or L. Frode, and he did nothing to correct their miscued attempts to identify him. He never filled in a form, preferring privacy to the opportunity to vote. ‘I suppose I would have voted Liberal Democrat if I had registered.’ He was one of life’s eels, always wriggling away from any and every grasp.

  He was not materialistic and had no desire to keep any bric-a-brac. No photographs of any of his children were displayed in his flat. It was as if such casual photographs would have seemed inconsequential, even trivial compared to the images he created over months and years when members of his family sat for him.

  Lucian always wore his scarf, either silk or light wool, in subdued greys or browns. He had at least a dozen in his wardrobe. The fashion designer Stella McCartney, a friend introduced by his daughter Bella, had taken one of his favourites when it had become too tatty and copied it exactly in her factory in Italy. She noted he had remarkable fashion sense without ever being fashionable. Long vanished were the fez and tartan trousers he had once affectedly worn in his twenties. He had an iconic look, in his grey cashmere overcoat and crumpled white shirt, scruffy-chic, breaking every sartorial rule, mixing aristocratic tweed with a shabby informality that redefined but also defied dandyism. Jerry Hall gave him cashmere jerseys when she sat for him, which he loathed. He was an odd mix of vanity with a touch of the vagrant. When he flew to New York to see a show of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a private jet chartered by his art dealer William Acquavella, he packed just one shirt which he carried in a plastic bag. ‘Nice jacket, where is it from?’ he would habitually ask in Clarke’s, always noticing what people wore. It was also a deflection, giving him an extra moment of observation. He was not predictable in what he liked, but never had what John Betjeman called ‘Ghastly Good Taste’. He never followed patterns; the world inside his studio was bohemia’s last blast.

  In his seldom used drawing room in Notting Hill, September 2009

  Finally, I had found myself in Freudland. It was all so familiar from the paintings – bare floorboards, torn sheets piled up, rickety kitchen chairs, a decadent sense of neglect. A partridge had been cooked the night before, the remains lying in an old roasting tin on the kitchen table, its cold carcass slightly congealed. A bottle of burgundy was half finished. The gas stove was stained and much used. We shared a breakfast of partridge wing, a glass of red wine and some green tea in chipped cups.

  I felt like a wannabe scriptwriter in Hollywood knowing that I had only one chance to sell my idea. ‘You do not want to be interviewed, do you?’ I ventured.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do not want to be photographed, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I have the perfect idea.’

  He waited for my spiel. I suddenly felt my confidence drain away, fearful that the idea was a terrible one, a false start, even slightly daft. But it was all I had. My idea centred around his greatest friend, Frank Auerbach. ‘You have had breakfast with Frank every few weeks for almost half a century. I am going to photograph Frank and want you to be in the picture. This is not about you, which you hate, it is about Frank, and you will just happen to be in the photograph because you are having breakfast with him.’ Lucian did not pause. He just said OK. Breakfast with Lucian had produced another breakfast with Lucian. What he did not know was that I had not yet asked Auerbach. I finished my wine and left.

  Frank had come into my consciousness back in 1978 at the small Freud show that I saw when I was seventeen. A portrait of his head was remarkable for its muscular sense of great intellect, framed with warmth and affection. It was another image that revolved in my mind, the dome of the head intensely close up. At the time I had known almost nothing about him, but when I was nineteen, I had written a letter to him and subsequently interviewed him, and we had kept in touch. Like Lucian he never gave out his telephone number, so we always wrote to each other.

  I rushed off a postcard and asked Frank if he would be photographed with Lucian. Thankfully he agreed. A date was set to meet at seven o’clock in the morning at the Cock Tavern on East Poultry Avenue, Smithfield, a cross between a greasy spoon and a pub frequented mostly by butchers in the meat-packing district of London. I was trying to time publication to coincide with Lucian’s retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain, which was to open the following month.

  On a fresh Tuesday morning the two painters turned up, both in scarves and overcoats. Kidneys on toast with bacon and cups of tea were ordered. One or two traders in the street shouted out, ‘Morning, Lou.’ He was amongst some of his old friends from Paddington. The two men did what they almost never did in public. They smiled. They chatted. They laughed. A portrait was taken by the photographer Kevin Davies showing their friendship, and Lucian was happy for it to be published in Tatler, even supervising the design of the page layout, as I ferried proofs back and forth from my office in Mayfair to his studio.

  Frank Auerbach and Lucian at breakfast at the Cock Tavern, Smithfield, 2002

  Frank admired Lucian, and told me: ‘I was interested in his work and, slightly against my will, impressed by its intensity because mine was a different idiom, and when one is young one tends to think there is a particular virtue in one’s own idiom. But as time has gone by … I think perhaps there is something that linked us through our common historical bond. Actually, our backgrounds were intertwined too. A cousin of mine was an assistant to his father, my aunt knew his parents.’12

  Like Lucian, Frank had escaped from Hitler’s Germany as a small boy, but his parents were unable to follow him and were murdered by the Nazis. ‘During the war there were Red Cross letters which had just twenty-five words, so all you got was a very brief message, but then these letters ceased coming to me in 1943. It marked an end but I can’t even remember someone saying your parents are no longer alive. It was just gradually leaked to me. I think I did this thing which psychiatrists for very good professional reasons frown on: I am in total denial. It’s worked very well for me. To be quite honest I came to England and went to a marvellous school, and it truly was a happy time. There’s just never been a point in my life where I felt I wished I had parents.’

  He was often virtually penniless in his early days, spending almost all his money on paint. ‘Until I was fifty I never had a bank account, always lived from hand to mouth. I used to lie awake at night wondering if I’d be able to go on with my paintings or whether the paint would run out.’13

  After the breakfast in Smithfield, Lucian drove me back to Notting Hill in his Bentley, seeming to ignore every other car and all traffic lights. His conversation was warm, witty and incisive; his driving was insanely hazardous. I wondered if my first journey with him would also be my last.

/>   * * *

  A link to Lucian had been formed. He started to ring me, at all hours – 6 a.m., 2 a.m. – and we began to talk. Sometimes he seemed to have ages to chat, other times it was just five minutes. It led to him suggesting we meet again for breakfast, which invariably meant Clarke’s.

  He was never ever anything less than surprising to me and to others. He would quote the Northern poet Tony Harrison as well as the verse of Bertolt Brecht. He liked the seventeenth-century poet the Earl of Rochester and his obscenities, particularly the quatrain ‘Lines Written under Nelly’s Picture’:

  She was so exquisite a Whore

  That in the Belly of her Mother,

  She plac’d her cunt so right before,

  Her Father fucked them both together.

  Rochester was very different from Lucian but they shared an exuberance and a disregard for what anyone else thought.

  Freud also enjoyed Anne Somerset’s historical books. A copy of Unnatural Murder: Poison in the Court of James I was in his Holland Park studio. So were Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Douglas Dunn’s poems, short stories by Henry James and the letters of Flaubert. Often he would remember ephemeral or trivial lyrics or old dance tunes which he would share. A lifelong friend from the 1940s, the legendary Sunday Times Magazine editor and literary éminence grise Francis Wyndham, liked to reminisce with him. Lucian would recite to him the couplet ‘I’m gonna change my tall dark thin gal for a short blonde fat/I’m even changing the number where I’m living at’.14 Wyndham remembered how Lucian would recall deeply obscure anthology pieces learnt during his English schooldays, such as ‘The Everlasting Percy’, a parody by E. V. Knox of John Masefield’s ‘The Everlasting Mercy’ which was, as Wyndham puts it, ‘an inspirational verse narrative once celebrated but now equally forgotten’. He tailored his conversations for whoever he was talking to.