The day we first met, in 1973, I told Lucian that for interview purposes I just wasn’t interested in his private life. All that mattered was the work.
Time passed and in later years whenever he taxed me with having been so artless my response was that what perhaps had sounded like a pledge had been a mere clearing of the throat. By then of course it had become obvious to me that the work reflected the life and embodied the life, and because the life Lucian led was spent more in the studio than anywhere else that was its commanding peculiarity. As he himself said ‘Everything is biographical and everything is a self-portrait.’ Since his relationships tended to be compartmented and the vicissitudes that eddied around various passions so clearly affected him, it seemed to me that some sort of consolidated account of them extending beyond self-portraiture was now needed.
Initially this book was to have been a brief account of Freud the artist, but in the late 1990s, as the tapes accumulated and reminiscences flowed, we agreed that what Lucian had taken to referring to as ‘The First Funny Art Book’ was outgrowing its prospectus, so it was shelved for the time being, Lucian half-heartedly assuring me that he would have no objection to ‘a novel’ appearing once he was dead. Working with him on a number of exhibitions made the oeuvre ever more familiar to me and we went on talking, primarily on the phone, almost daily. The notes I took from the countless conversations (‘How old am I now?’ he would often ask me or, less specifically, ‘How goes it?’) are the chief source for these two volumes of biography.