19

‘Being able to see under the carpet’

In the summer of 1951 a temporary bridge with flags flying was clamped alongside the Hungerford railway bridge over the Thames, there to feed the public across the river into the South Bank exhibition, the centrepiece of a government-ordained celebration of post-war recovery: the Festival of Britain. Here, from May to September, urban designers’ hopes were briefly realised and the decrepit warehouses, the bombsites and slums of South London disappeared behind canvas screens. Those who crossed the bridge found themselves in an ideal plaza, a strange new world of pedestrian precincts picked out in what was, for then, a startling range of colours: sky blue, scarlet, lemon yellow and terracotta. They trailed up steps to viewing platforms and downstairs again, following a Recommended Circulation through pavilions housing The Natural Scene, Minerals of the Islands, Transport, New Schools, Sport, Seaside and Discovery. Never had there been a more genial exposition of British identity for, with Laurie Lee the chief caption writer (and organiser of ‘Eccentrics Corner’ in the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion), verbal sweeteners eased the onset of modernity in the Festival narrative.

Three miles upstream, in the Battersea Pleasure Gardens, Osbert Lancaster and John Piper installed Regency pleasure domes and Neo-Gothick follies approached from the main entrance by a facetious Neo-Romantic rail-link. And for sixpence visitors could attend Orlando’s Silver Wedding in the Festival Gardens Amphitheatre, a Group Theatre production with costumes, scenery and lyrics by the marmalade cat’s resourceful author Kathleen Hale. The Pleasure Gardens were designed to bounce people back to the good old days of popular culture before radio was invented, let alone television. The South Bank, on the other hand, had a Telecinema as a taste of futurity and novel features such as gas flames flaring through fountains and works of art placed beside pools so as to reflect well. Epstein’s Youth Advances was on a plinth outside Homes and Gardens and Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure was posed as a human landscape feature in the forecourt of the Country pavilion.

The organisers of the Festival had resolved to demonstrate the virtues of public art and provide employment for artists. For painters there were mural commissions: Michael Ayrton’s The Elements as the Sources of Power in the Dome of Discovery, Keith Vaughan’s Discovery, a landscape with male nudes, and John Minton’s Exploration, a complicated historical tableau. Graham Sutherland’s Origins of the Land, an array of fossil trophies on a backdrop of Festival orange and yellow with a pterodactyl dropping by, was slashed by vandals. Ben Nicholson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Victor Pasmore produced abstract murals for two of the exhibition restaurants, works complementing those of professional designers such as F. H. K. Henrion whose white plaster oak tree, a gigantic piece of shop-window Surrealism in The Natural Scene, anticipated the amplitude of later Henry Moores. Whimsicalities filled the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, the captions for which were supplied by Laurie Lee. And there were casual jobs. Frank Auerbach worked as a barman in the Regatta Restaurant, serving beer and sweeping up below a Pasmore mural.

To the Arts Council the Festival of Britain was a perfect chance to prove itself indispensable, and it was Arts Council policy to embrace all sorts of artists, within reason. The leading sculptors were readily involved. Twelve were given commissions, of whom three – Epstein, Moore and Hepworth – had their work sited on the South Bank; others, besides them, exhibited in the London County Council’s outdoor sculpture exhibition in Battersea Park. Painters, being more numerous, were awarded a competition. Sixty were selected and invited to produce ‘a large work, on a canvas not less than 45 by 60 inches, on a subject of their own choice’. The canvas was provided (since art materials were still in short supply, this was an incentive) and the assumption was that most of the resulting pictures would be suitable for display in hospitals and schools.

Freud was pleased to be asked to produce a painting, subject unspecified, his biggest yet. ‘By far. Though it was the smallest possible under the specifications. I realised I’d have to work in a freer way, working on that scale.’ He also saw that he would need money to see him through. Kenneth Clark, he decided, was worth approaching. ‘I have been sent this canvas,’ he told him. ‘The picture would take me a minimum of six or eight months and I haven’t got the money.’ Clark was happy to oblige. ‘“Oh, I’d be very honoured to take care of that,” he said.’ He gave Freud £500 in two cheques, one from Aspreys, the other from Partridges, the antique dealers. ‘He would sell furniture and buy art. When I read Alan Clark [his son] saying, “You know the sort of people who have to buy their own furniture,” I thought hmm: Kenneth Clark did that. Anyway, he gave me the money to do the painting. He was very generous: he made it possible to do it.’

To show his gratitude Freud produced a study of the palm tree that had stood behind the sofa in The Painter’s Room. ‘I gave him a little painting which I sort of did with a view to giving it to him. A detail, as it were, from the painting.’ The palm, too big now for the room, had been moved on to the balcony. Its lower half made for a nifty little vignette on a copper plate. That done, he brought the plant indoors and positioned it so that its tousled crown related to the top of the lamp post below the balcony and to the bare plane tree on the far side of the canal. ‘I was always very conscious of wanting to put the things I liked together. My palm tree: I really liked that.’ Previously it had been palm and zebra, woman and daffodil, Kitty and roses. Now it was man and palm.

The stroppy figure standing between fireplace and palm tree was Harry Diamond, employed at that time as a stagehand and there because he was available in daytime. Freud’s first thought had been to use Charlie Lumley, but he was doing his National Service and had been posted to North Wales in a gun battery. ‘Hows the large painting coming along or have you finished it yet I loved the idea of the picture when I was home the palm tree with the figure I wish I could have sat for it, by the way who is sitting for it the drug addict? I think he would be wonderful for the picture,’ Charlie wrote.¹

For nearly six months – late afternoon, early evening, occasionally all day – Harry Diamond stood there in the stance of a pub regular with a grudge against society, or the painter, or the palm. Bloody thing: he feels like thumping it. He breathes resentment.

‘Harry Diamond said I made his legs too short. The whole thing was that his legs were too short. He was aggressive as he had a bad time in the East End to do with being Jewish.’ Diamond claimed, forty years later, to still being ‘slightly miffed’ about the way Freud presented him. ‘I don’t really have short legs,’ he contended.² But he did. ‘With short people’, Freud observed, ‘their bodies don’t vary as much as their legs do.’ Rather than take the bus he often used to walk across London from Whitechapel to the Harrow Road. Freud was to paint Diamond a number of times through into the 1970s. ‘I was born good-looking,’ Diamond said.³

‘Everything begins with lucid indifference,’ Camus wrote.⁴ Interior in Paddington began with the familiar leaves of the palm and developed, with the introduction of the near-stranger, into a confrontation: man versus indoor plant. Freud had known Harry Diamond casually from before the war in the Coffee An’. He worked in the Ferodo brake-block factory, then at various jobs. As a scene-shifter he had watched others perform. Fist clenched, ciggy unlit in the other hand, he doubles for Charlie, whose brother Billy is posted as lookout in the street below, lounging against the canal wall. Freud has him cornered. Were it a narrative painting, Interior in Paddington could represent the moment in Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith is arrested by the authorities. (‘There was a snap, as though a catch had been turned back. The picture had fallen to the floor, uncovering the telescreen behind … “The house is surrounded.”’)⁵ Under scrutiny, Harry could be about to crack. He and the palm are a match: same height, same dishevelment, both brought in from the cold. The shine on the palm leaves corresponds with the sheen on the raincoat, the nicotine on the fingers matches the frostbitten tips of the leaves. The prickliness is mutual. ‘I’m a person in myself,’ Diamond insisted. ‘My actual existence is a damn sight more important than any painting anyone could do of me. I’m a cooperative sort of person. I don’t usually hold a cigarette in my left hand (I’m right-handed) but it’s as he wanted. One thing he wouldn’t let me do was look at my watch. I thought it’s my time as much as yours; I’ve got as much right as you to know what it is.’ As for the palm, in 1988 he was to see it off: ‘Well, I think I’ve outlived it!’⁶

Discussing, in 1951, his Standing Form against Hedge, Graham Sutherland talked of ‘the mysterious immediacy of a figure standing in a room or against a hedge in its shadow’.⁷ Freud’s painting was more specific than any horned or topiary Sutherland; and while Sutherland admitted that he found it distracting to have someone in front of him while he was painting, Freud could not manage without that someone being there for him. The glints in Harry’s new National Health Service specs are reflections off the window; the seeing reflects off the unseeing while the silence of the canal, behind the wall and below street level, diffuses itself into the pale light of a dull day.

In his prison cell Camus’ Meursault says, ‘I made a point of visualising every piece of furniture and each article upon or in it, and then every detail of each article and finally the details of the details so to speak: a dent or encrustation or a chipped edge, and the exact grain and colour of the woodwork.’⁸ The same degree of concentration informs every square inch of Interior in Paddington. The dirt tamped down in the plant pot; the seam of grime where window pane meets window frame. Freud needed a good colour for the floor and found what he wanted in the rag-and-bone shop at the end of Delamere Terrace: a dense red carpet. ‘I very much bought it for the picture; it was huge and dirty and had a burn in it two or three yards square; I cut that out and made it fit into the corner of the room.’ To dress the room was to give it airs. Coincidentally, as another Festival attraction, Michael Weight created (or recreated, believers would have it) in Baker Street Sherlock Holmes’ sitting room; every famous detail was there, down to syringe, violin, half-eaten breakfast and telltale cigar ash. Though less elaborate, Freud’s set-up was a gathering of evidence around, and about, Harry Diamond, whose attitude was once described by David Sylvester in the Burlington Magazine in a phrase that can only sound familiar to readers of Conan Doyle: ‘the pathetic defiance of the stunted man’.⁹

The idea of rucking up the carpet – ‘being able to see under the carpet’ – came from a picture that belonged to Kenneth Clark and is now in the Tate: The Saltonstall Family, devised in 1637 by David des Granges who later became miniature painter to Charles II, in which Sir Richard Saltonstall is something of a time lord, seen showing his two elder children their mother on her deathbed and their stepmother, the second Lady Saltonstall, sitting beside the bed holding her own baby, born six years later.

Interior in Paddington preoccupied Freud in the autumn and winter of 1950/1. It would be wrong to poke around for implications in the rucked carpet, yet the painting does exude a wintry tension. The chill is systematic. (‘The cruel intentness of a frosty morning,’ said David Sylvester.)¹⁰ Attention centres on Harry Diamond’s thumb poised on the cigarette end. One false move, as it were, and he’ll press the plunger. The shadow behind his head has slipped to one side. Soft and transitory, it is Lautréamont’s ‘shadow brushing the wall like a gull’s wing’.¹¹ It is a long-drawn-out here and now.

‘I did feel I was being drained,’ Harry Diamond said.¹²

Before Freud was finished with the painting, it had to be photographed for the 60 Paintings for ’51 catalogue. Subsequently he aged the palm stem, added a crack to the plant pot, accentuated the carpet pile and filled in the floorboards. Harry Diamond remained unaltered, but a shadow disappeared from between his legs leaving a splash of sunlight on white skirting board to shove him forward a little. It pleased the painter to know that a catalogue illustration could lag behind the real thing. ‘I always thought how exciting it was for the photograph to be different from the picture.’

The painting having been submitted, there was a wait while the jury decided which the Arts Council should buy. ‘I remember being in the Gargoyle at Festival of Britain time and Lawrence Gowing was there. He was always very sour to me. I used to make for downstairs, where the high life really was, and he was upstairs and said, “You are one of those persons who’s going to win one of those prizes.”’ On 18 April a telegram arrived from Philip James of the Arts Council saying that his had been one of the five chosen for a purchase prize, followed by another from Kenneth Clark: ‘Thank heaven judges had sense recognised yr flair masterpiece which now looks better than ever congratulations.’¹³ There was nothing like the Freud among the other prize purchases (£500 each to Robert Medley, Claude Rogers – both of whom taught at the Slade – Ivon Hitchens and William Gear) or, indeed, among the rest, most of them School of Paris cover versions or doggedly celebratory romps. Gowing had no luck with his Intruders in a Wood, a flirtation with Neo-Romanticism in dappled sous-bois. The most controversial prize winner was William Gear’s Autumn Landscape, an abstract masquerading as camouflage (or vice versa) inadvertently reproduced upside down in the first edition of the catalogue. Bacon, who was in South Africa for the six months before the exhibition, submitted a pope but, once it had been approved, withdrew it.

‘Francis had a good picture and destroyed it. It was in there and then it wasn’t; he said he hated it; he was really upset.’ Coldstream had been invited to take part in the exhibition but refused: the scale was too big for him. Johnny Craxton, preoccupied with sets and costumes (contemporary tavern wear) for Daphnis and Chloë (Covent Garden in April 1951) was to complain in later years that he and Freud decided not to put themselves forward for the Arts Council project but that Freud completed and showed his painting after all. Frank Auerbach’s view of this was that Freud was hardly surreptitious given the many months he spent on the painting while Craxton was otherwise occupied. Though it was true that a Craxton would have suited the general run of entries, which tended towards mural statement. Grudge to rift to feud: the Freud–Craxton friendship was ended. Freud, slightly younger than Ayrton and Heron, was the youngest exhibitor.

Fifty-four of the 60 Paintings for ’51 (six failed to show) went on tour around the country, starting at Manchester City Art Gallery in May after a two-day preview at the RBA Galleries in Suffolk Street. The collector Colin Anderson noted in his catalogue of the Bacon (not yet withdrawn) ‘not a good example’, of the Gear ‘good’. As for Interior in Paddington, he thought it ‘Very good indeed – vision, design and craftsmanship’.

The liveliest thing about the catalogue was the Sutherlandish red, black and green cover design by Gerald Wilde (Sutherland of course, Wilde relentlessly maintained, had pinched his ideas in the first place). Looking through the illustrations fifty years later Freud marvelled at what those involved had seen fit to produce: a Duncan Grant (‘so horrible’), Edward Burra’s comically blood-curdling Judith and Holofernes (‘hopeless’). Michael Ayrton’s The Captive Seven, a family group glumly representing the seven deadly sins, elicited a sigh.

Interior in Paddington was reproduced opposite Still Life by William Scott, a spread of ovals: office foyer material. Freud murmured approvingly over the Lowry and he quite liked Victor Pasmore’s The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White, the painting in which he formally abandoned the figurative baggage of the Euston Road School. ‘Peter Watson told me in ’46, “You know Pasmore has gone into Zwemmers and ordered every book on abstract painting”; it holds up (if you think on the other hand of William Scott or Ben Nicholson); it’s got a very odd, individual insistence; his things were made for their own sake, not done for a gallery or show. Better than Ben Nicholson keeping up with Europe.’

On 16 April Matthew Smith, whose ’51 painting Freud thought ‘a bit good’, took him and a girlfriend out to tea. Freud, he reported to his mistress Mary Keene, ‘could not bring himself to say anything about my effort so I assumed he did not think much of it’.¹⁴ Freud remembered that when asked about the exhibition, he told him it was awful. ‘In that case I won’t go,’ Smith said.

News of Freud’s success got around. A Delamere neighbour, passing him in the street, said, ‘You ’ad it off, Lu. Don’t know me now do you?’

The Arts Council presented Interior in Paddington to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Harry Diamond, whom Freud was to paint again, several times, went on walking for hours daily and took up photography. ‘It was like someone finding Jesus. He did some shocking and extraordinary ones in the French pub. And weddings.’

As for the palm: ‘I had it a very long time. Then it became a stump left on the balcony in winter, and then it died.’

Talking to me about Girl with a White Dog, Freud quoted William Blake: ‘When a man marries a wife he finds out whether her knees and elbows are only glued together.’¹⁵ The painting, begun towards the end of 1950 and half the size of Interior in Paddington, turned out to be his last portrait of Kitty. ‘I thought of it before getting the canvas.’ Kitty sits resignedly in what others would have used as the dining room, overlooking the garden at 27 Clifton Hill. The setting is neither boudoir nor a genteel salon like those where Balthus girls preened themselves and dozed. It is a contrived shallow space, reasonably comfortable, with the mattress pushed against the wall and a grey blanket draped behind, in which Kitty is a living effigy at floor level, one breast bared, the other cupped through the towelling of her bathrobe. ‘It’s not a nude at all. The breast is a feature.’ Statuesque but nervous, attended by their watchful terrier, she displays her birthmark on one hand, her wedding ring on the other. Her shoulder rests against the woodwork of the unseen window; her foot points towards an unseen fireplace. This is an ordeal.

Initially the dog was black. ‘I had a pair of dogs: bull terriers. One was white and one was black. I preferred the black, which was in the painting, but it got run over and so I painted the white one over it.’ The dogs had been a wedding present from Joan Bayon in Cambridge. Kitty said that his grief over the dog’s death was the only time she had seen him so upset.

Where Interior in Paddington was to do with Harry Diamond’s intrusive impatience, Girl with a White Dog is resignedly composed. This is how things are: stripes and folds, panelling and pelt, muzzle, mouth and exposed shoulder, every form and texture meticulously filled out. Where Sleeping Nude was a tryst with the unconscious, Girl with a Dog (as it was initially called) was on the defensive. ‘Different, very, very different. Slightly Greekish.’ Freud wasn’t quite prepared for this: the painting became a testimony. ‘If you focus on their physical presence you often find that you capture something that neither of you were aware of before.’ Freud sat facing Kitty, looking down slightly, giving the same degree of attention to heads, hands and foot, to the sour yellow bathrobe, the plaited belt, the sag and pallor of the breast.

To their daughter Annie, speaking when she herself was twice the age her mother had been at that time, the painting is especially telling. ‘The other ones [portraits of Kitty] are girls-legend-reverential-madonnas: “all of her loveliness”. This one I feel phooor it’s almost like defiance: “Do what you can with me while you’ve got me.” And also you’ve got to remember England and the nude and obscenity and it went on being very big until the mid-sixties and even then, when Yoko Ono and John Lennon took their clothes off, it was huge news. Henry Moore’s naked people are not really people, they are all sort of lumps. That’s a real breast with proper skin that someone’s kissed and touched and felt and worn a bra. It’s a real person. My mother was very very proud of this painting. Terribly proud of it. To the extent it was an ingredient in difficulties in later life.’¹⁶

Looking back Freud himself saw in it ‘a sense of sadness, even some anger. I think a more complicated person is being portrayed here.’

Marriage put years on Kitty. Still, she had agreed to pose and that was all there was to it. Conversation, once begun, would be bound to end in reproaches. She, ‘the consistent critic, the patient misunderstander’ of T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, sits there, studiedly remote. ‘All there is of you is your body and the “you” is withdrawn.’ The canine stare and human demoralised detachment are all the more acute for being couched in what could be the makings of a padded cell. Expressive in its restraint, the painting is an exposure. ‘Finally’, Freud said of it, ‘you only want people to understand what the point is.’

‘One night I was leaving a club at two or three in the morning, pretty dark, and I hailed a taxi, opened the door, and on the floor was an enormous snake: Donald Maclean. “Hello, Donald, is this taxi taken?” I said. He said, “You …!” in a fury, so I shut the door. It was just a few days before he left.’ Maclean and Guy Burgess, unmasked traitors, disappeared to Russia at the end of May 1951.

In July Cecil Beaton’s play The Gainsborough Girls opened in Brighton. ‘Loyal friends went down, Ann Fleming and a lot of people. He got a young man to help him write.’ The play was not a success. ‘Two sample lines: “Grind up the lapis lazuli, boy. We’ve got to finish Blue Boy in the morning.” What fascinated Cecil were the daughters, who went mad through snobbery, which took the form of illusions of grandeur. The costumes were marvellous; one exciting thing was the changes of clothes.’ The next night Lord ‘Grubby’ Gage threw a coming-out ball for his daughter at Firle, near Brighton. Everyone who had been to The Gainsborough Girls was there. ‘I was wandering around and George Gage kept getting people up and setting them down at tables. He came over to me and he said, “I’m making patterns.”’

During the late summer of 1951, Freud and Kitty went to stay for nearly a week with Anne Dunn and Michael Wishart in a house she rented at Cashel, near the pub. ‘I think she must have known about us (Lucian and I) because I was friendly with Kitty on and off, and she was Michael’s cousin.’

In November 1951, at a party celebrating the opening of Coward’s play Relative Values, Princess Margaret alternated between Freud and Orson Welles, Ann Rothermere noted.