For a year or so from 1950 Richard Hamilton lived round the corner from Clifton Hill. Born in the same year as Freud, he had since 1948 been studying painting at the Slade, also trying out as a fashion artist for Vogue and involving himself in the ICA. Painting, he became convinced, was pretty much a waste of time for someone his age. Freud remembered him saying, ‘“You know, I can understand why Francis paints, but I really and truly don’t see why you do it.” He said it quite nicely, considering.’
They were on neighbourly terms and, looking on, Hamilton found himself, he said, ‘always wide-eyed at the way [Lucian] moved through the art world (and other worlds for that matter)’.1 Where he had left school at fourteen for a job as an office boy and had gone to evening classes in art, Freud had left school early not because he had to exactly but to evade further formal education. Socially Freud had the advantage: name and reputation already. ‘Lucian was a fashionable young painter.’ Hard to believe he was nine months his junior. Looking back he was surprised, he said, that Freud ‘would have noticed, or cared, that I had an opinion’.2 And he could never quite tell whether he was truly as untrained and impractical as he seemed to be. For instance he remembered him saying once that his canvases were ‘difficult to paint on because they flapped around like sails’.3 This from a Slade tutor whose idea of art was founded on technical accomplishments allied to design stimuli and perceptual knowingness. Hamilton couldn’t believe that Freud was so unpractised. ‘When I explained the purposes of the little triangles of wood in the corners of the stretcher he said he didn’t feel up to coping with such a tricky technical problem and asked for help. I went round to his studio one evening with a little hammer in my pocket and was lucky to find him at work. There was a beautiful girl on a dirty mattress who wrapped an equally dirty blanket around herself – more to keep warm than to protect her modesty. I tapped in the wedges. Lucian marvelled at how beautifully taut the canvas had become in only a minute or two and admired my skill no end. I still think he was having me on.’4
In retrospect, Freud thought so too. ‘I was stroking his leg when I said how clever he was; but I was amazed how handy he was. He lived in Springfield Road, he and his first wife, and they made money doing models that included 400 tiny people. They were making these models of New Towns for the Festival and their baby girl was going round smashing forty people with one hand, and they were so patient. They just said, “no no darling”. They were saints in a way. And very skilful.’ He was curious as to why Hamilton chose not to paint personal things. Why not paint his wife, for example? ‘He more or less implied that it was an improper and unseemly subject.’ When he told Freud that his sort of painting was untenable (‘You can’t work in your style nowadays’), Freud said it was the only way he could work.
Hamilton synthesised as a rule, working within quotation marks so to speak, slightly aloof. His use of colour was mainly to tint or retouch. ‘Like lipstick on the teeth’, said Freud, who was not interested in illustrative demonstration and, still less, demonstrative technique.
To Hamilton, presentation was key. For him the means of display and delivery were crucial to perception of content; he was attuned in particular to the containment of vision by viewfinder and lens; accordingly he was impressed by Bacon’s framing devices and by his offhand yet celebratory use of photographic images. For ‘Growth and Form’, an exhibition he organised at the ICA in July 1951 as something of a call to order there, following a Graham Sutherland retrospective, he devised a freestanding grid in which were suspended organic and diagrammatic bits and pieces: a variation on Giacometti’s tableau-like The Palace at 4 a.m., a refinement of window-dressing, a twinning of Surrealist legacy with quickening consumer appetites. Though not acting on Herbert Read’s advice, Hamilton held the view, frequently expressed by Read, that the modern artist should be prepared to apply himself to design problems ‘in the most efficient way possible’.5 Trawling for material in disciplines and forms of entertainment other than fine art was stimulating. And there was kudos in art advanced as a gloss on the latest scientific and sociological research. Eventually Hamilton was to be hailed, in England mainly, as the ‘Father of Pop Art’.
‘I would not have rated Lucian at quite the level I put Francis [Bacon] but I liked him very much,’ Hamilton concluded.6
Sir Herbert Read, courtly anarchist of an earlier generation, was all for independent-mindedness, but in his view young Freud could not be said to be more ‘independent of groups or tendencies’ than Francis Bacon. ‘Generally speaking,’ Read wrote, ‘modern art is a personalist art, subjective in its origin and arbitrary in its conventions.’7 In his Contemporary British Art, an illustrated essay published by Penguin Books as a contribution to the 1951 Festival, he found himself in two minds as to the correct label for Freud. ‘Objective naturalism’,8 he decided, was fair enough in that Freud, one of the few notable anomalies in contemporary British art, seemed to him to be enchanted by a sort of depiction disreputable in art since, well, Ruskin’s day.
Was he a throwback? In ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse’, an essay for Aspects of Form, a symposium published to coincide with the ICA exhibition ‘Growth and Form’, E. H. Gombrich quoted Sir Joshua Reynolds: ‘A history-painter paints man in general; a portrait-painter a particular man, and therefore a defective model.’9 Freud was with Reynolds there, being all for particulars and indeed defects. Particulars gave the lie to nostrums and platitudes; particulars defined and informed; particulars led one on. And, as Gombrich said, ‘no sooner is an image presented as art than, by this act, a new frame of reference is created which it can’t escape.’10 For the painter (even Reynolds, in working practice) the frame of reference is not so much ‘art’ as practicalities. Freud, who loathed intellectual carry-on, liked Van Gogh’s idea of a portrait as ‘a complete thing, a perfection, a moment of infinity’.
There was urgency in this. Bacon told a man he met once in Monte Carlo: ‘You have so little time in life and it is important to make an impression and get it right.’ To him it was axiomatic. ‘Presentation is so important.’11
To Freud too, the thing was to conduct oneself by instinct, impulsively and resolutely if not calculatedly so. ‘The ancient Aristotelian principle of living by decision, which I think is good. It relates to that: if you allow yourself to follow the way your life goes. I didn’t want my work to lean on anyone in particular. I wanted it to be true to me, and I had an idea – a very mistaken idea – that however much I might look at art I really like and go to the National Gallery, to use it in any way which it had been used by other people couldn’t help me. I felt that what I must learn from the pictures was a way of dealing with things in paint and subject matter, rather than a manner in which to work. I’ve always loved Ingres but I’ve never even thought of in any way working like him – insofar as that’s possible.’
Picasso said, ‘Ingres drew like Ingres and not like the things he drew,’ and Freud drew like Freud, a lifelong admirer of Ingres. His ‘objective realism’, as Read termed it, wasn’t mimicry and his existentialism, if you could call it that, was – sometimes regrettably – spur-of-the-moment. Once when arguing with a girl in a club he banged her head on the table, explaining that he believed in ‘living by decision’.
Decidedly, life in Delamere Terrace had more to it than life in Clifton Hill. Freud on the prowl was irrepressible. ‘I used to put on what were then considered de rigueur burglar’s clothes, feed the dog and then start work.’
Richard Hamilton noticed – everyone noticed – that where Freud went Charlie Lumley often went too. Charlie was a sidekick, a hanger-on and a liability, Anne Dunn said. ‘He always took Charlie along as a foil, both with men and women, and Charlie would nick things from them. Lucian was like Fagin.’ Charlie saw himself more as good companion. ‘I was in the West End every night with him. He used to try and make conquests, which he invariably did.’12
Having been painted as cheesecake Charlie (Boy with White Scarf, 1949), and Charlie smouldering (Boy Smoking – Brylcreemed hair, jutting ciggy, 1951), Charlie qualified as part model, part minder. In United Casting terms he and his brother Billy (Boy’s Head, 1952) could also have served as the poster boys of Dirk Bogarde’s gang of tearaways in The Blue Lamp, the 1950 Ealing Studios crime thriller in which police cars were to be seen chasing past the end of Delamere Terrace. When National Service claimed Charlie, he wrote to Freud as 22402206 Gunner Lumley, stationed in Merionethshire, seeking home news:
Has there been any excitement in town lately any more fights with Johnny and Ricky you remember you told me about the party someone was giving and Rich was caught having a girl in the bathroom. I thought that was very funny.
‘Charlie’, Johnny Minton told Michael Wishart in January 1950, ‘like a rat has gone off with the blood-stained suit of a friend of mine.’13 Freud explained to me what that was about: ‘Charlie was attacked by this man who was married to a later girlfriend of mine – George Barker’s younger daughter, Rose Barker – this violent person who died. Minton did a commercial thing [Leaves of Gold]14 for a goldbeating factory in Ruislip; there was a row to do with one of Johnny Minton’s friends, and a hammer for beating gold was involved, an enormous hammer. Nothing to do with me.
‘But Charlie wasn’t bellicose. After the fight he was put on probation. His probation officer thought Charlie was my boyfriend – everybody thought that: impossible to prove it isn’t so – so I thought if I asked the probation officer round and he saw Kitty in the sitting room, and the children, it would show this wasn’t right. Anyway, the probation officer came round, perfectly pleasant, asked me could I help get his daughter into art school. But he wasn’t in any way fooled; he went on making reports about my catamite.’
Charlie took up boxing for a while and during his National Service talked of going in for the army boxing championships. ‘He didn’t flower in the army: not even one stripe.’ There was a spell in an army prison on the Isle of Wight.
‘Francis said Charlie had a queer life and went with Johnny Minton: that he was rough trade. “Charlie’s having an affair,” Francis said. “I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t think it’s true.”’
Jaunts with Charlie took them beyond Paddington and Maida Vale. Bacon’s admirer Eric Hall, a married man, patron of the arts and cricket lover, high in the London County Council, had them to dinner a couple of times. ‘He talked to Charlie about boxing. “You know,” he said to me, “I know how to get on with these people.” Picasso had a show in Paris. He said, “You must go: ring me in the morning and I’ll get you a ticket.” Next morning I rang and said, “You said you would get me a ticket to Paris.” He said he’d never heard such nonsense. He was absolutely horrible to me: he thought I was having an affair with Francis.
‘Through Colin Anderson I got Charlie a job on a boat – a merchant ship – but I think he thought I was queer and getting rid of a boyfriend. “We don’t employ delinquents,” he said. He did go to sea and he didn’t get into trouble.’
Dublin suited Freud when he felt the urge just to get away. ‘I used to go quite a bit, for weeks at a time, went on those terrible ships, from near Liverpool, to Dún Laoghaire. The cheapest was in the front part: you got so dirty from the funnels. I always liked sea journeys.’ Freud took Kitty with him at least once, ‘moving from boarding house to hotel’, she told her mother. ‘It kept erupting,’ Anne Dunn said. On his own he took a room in Lower Baggot Street with a balcony – like Delamere – recently vacated by John Berger who was about to become an art critic. ‘I took it off him. It was by chance. He left some drawings behind: so concerned with subject and trying to get a feel. They had a suspense and concentration; the romance of poverty sort of thing.’
In the mornings Freud would go round to Patrick Swift’s ground-floor room in a house in Hatch Street and work there. Swift, who later lived in North London, emulated him (Boy with Bird) to a flattering degree. Freud painted a cock’s head and Swift, similarly, painted a woodcock, both on the same red plush chair. The tiny Cock’s Head, its comb glistening like crispy bacon, its plumage exquisitely bedraggled, was seamy enough, surely, to excite in the Arts Council of Great Britain – which bought it the following year – the curatorial thought that maybe Freud could be the Géricault of existentialism. Certainly he disposed of the dead head he had used with barefaced not to say existential aplomb. ‘I made a little parcel and sent it – it was crawling – to Sean O’Sullivan. He was a painter, sort of fashionable, lived in Dublin. He had DTs and was offensive about my pictures. Not Irish rude: he was really nasty and bitter. Brendan Behan, whose great thing was being friendly with everyone – you know how sentimental drunks are – said I shouldn’t have. “That’s a terrible thing you did to Sean O’Sullivan,” he said.’
Lucian Freud and Brendan Behan in Dublin, 1953
Augustus John’s fourteenth ‘Fragment of an Autobiography’, published in Horizon in December 1945, laid down precepts for the portrait painter:
No moral bias, to affect his attitude to the sitter. The exploration of character should be left, with confidence, to the eye alone. Heaven knows what it may discover! With a mind as blank as his canvas he sets to work concerned only with the phenomenon before him and its relation to its surrounding within the shape and area at his disposal.15
The reassertion (a bit like the elderly Sickert bent on getting his name in the newspapers) was also a repudiation of the fanciful. Augustus John portraiture was supposedly face to face without preconception. Whereas in the hands of Graham Sutherland – from the late forties his obvious successor, it seemed to many at the time – portraits took on an attitudinised look easily mistaken for severity.
Between 1949, when he painted Somerset Maugham, and 1954, when his portrait of Winston Churchill was unveiled, Sutherland became famous for showing up eminent personages. His Maugham was bitterly jaundiced, his Beaverbrook was crabby, his Churchill, seated as though enthroned, pinstriped yet legless, had a fading obstinacy. Such portraits were newsworthy. ‘They made a terrific splash,’ Freud remarked. The painter himself achieved celebrity. ‘He has passed beyond taste,’ observed Benedict Nicolson in his Burlington Magazine review of Sutherland’s 1951 retrospective at the ICA. That August Sutherland delivered a talk on the BBC’s Third Programme in which he put a gloss on his motives. ‘Perhaps one of the reasons why I have recently tried to do portraits is that it is possible I feel the need to narrow the gap between my “stand in” monuments and the real human animal.’16
That gap thwarted him, Freud thought. ‘Graham said that his Churchill portrait was iconoclasm and that the Maugham was better. But he hated people’s presences.’ He treated them therefore as cosmetic composites and latterday figureheads. ‘He gave Helena Rubinstein Kathy’s legs (though her Australian Jewish legs were better than Kathy’s little Irish dog legs). I don’t think Kathy actually did the pictures, but she could have. I don’t think he could have done without her.
‘Francis said that Sutherland’s portraits were “coloured snaps”. Well, they weren’t actually as good as that, because the one thing about coloured – or uncoloured – snaps that it’s impossible not to marvel at is that it is tonality. Anyone who’s alive to painting recognises paintings done from photographs because the tonality’s always subtler than the drawing.’
Admiring Sutherland’s fabric designs as much as his paintings, and recognising international potential there, Hans Juda, the owner of Ambassador, a trade magazine dedicated to the British export drive, published in 1950 an impressive-looking monograph on Sutherland with text by Robert Melville declaring him, in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, the greatest British painter since Turner. A grateful Sutherland gave Melville Men Walking, a newly completed painting that he hoped might release him from the two narrowing options that so confined him: trophy monstrances (desiccated finds spiked on Riviera palisades) and trophy portraits. Melville would have known, indeed anyone could have seen, that Men Walking was an attempted breakthrough. A tall picture of moderate size, it featured two traipsing figures with triangulated necks and hands, and a dog to one side, clamped into a compressed arrangement of palms, railings, sea and sand and deep-blue sky. Freud saw through it: this was Sutherland being Baconic. ‘It comes out of a misunderstanding of Francis. His extravagant ideas – like leaving off the feet and so on – was a terrible influence on Graham. He gave Graham the idea of people trying to get on to a train and he had this marvellous description of them fighting and Graham tried to do that, but of course he couldn’t draw. But then not being able to paint was a quality that worked in his favour I think.’
Mindful of Sutherland’s shortcomings Freud resolved to enlarge the scope of his concentration. Interior in Paddington had followed on from Sleeping Nude and the painting of Kitty at Clifton Hill, with dog, took him further. It was, intentionally, an emulation of Ingres’ intense even-handedness. ‘The way [Ingres] liberated pictures seemed so potent. Through his extraordinary discipline: the drawing is as good as any drawing there is, you get really excited about an Ingres fold in a curtain. Said in such an incisive and economical way.’ So too with Bacon whose men in suits, as detached from the outside world as ghostly slivers in laboratory slides, were similarly all of a piece: not fussed, not contrived, but discovered and left, marvellously just so. Everything about them stimulated Freud.
Anne Dunn saw friendship develop between Freud and Bacon with Ingres an idol in common. ‘They had been suspicious of each other. Circling dogs. Then the relationship between Lucian and Graham soured and between Francis and Graham soured. Lucian had a sort of crush on Francis – non-sexual – and Lucian, who was never very generous in the years I knew him, would run after Francis with great wads of banknotes and give them to Francis to go gambling with. To my knowledge, Lucian was never a gambler until his relationship intensified with Francis. He may have been. I was completely ignorant of it. I never thought of Lucian as having a gambling nature. He’s retentive.’17 She had a Bacon painting: the base of a crucifixion with a stricken figure vomiting a bunch of flowers. Years later Bacon tried to get it off her but she resisted and he agreed that she could keep it until her death, provided that then it would be destroyed. In the end she sold it18 and it went to Bacon’s avid emulator Damien Hirst.
Bacon was possessed by the desire to achieve vitality, not – as Ingres did and Freud tried to do – by dint of application but by fluke. His heads, three or four years before, had been bared in front of dirt-grey curtains: Eliot’s yowling Sweeney over and over again, the ‘Oval O cropped out with teeth’.19 These roaring men, ‘imprisoned in transparent boxes’, as Robert Melville hailed them,20 were arresting enough to attract fashion victims. Freud saw it happen. ‘Nina Hulton, wife of Edward Hulton (owner of Picture Post and Lilliput), went with Robin Ironside, her walker, to enquire about having a portrait done by him. Francis said, “Tops of Heads? You know I’m actually putting them in this season.”’
Frank Auerbach and Joe Tilson, students at the Royal College in the early fifties, were taken up by Johnny Minton; neither was gay but, as Tilson himself said, both were good-looking and went along with him to the Colony Room, the Gargoyle and other haunts. Tilson particularly – and resentfully – remembered going to a party at Delamere Terrace with his girlfriend Sally Ducksbury, a student at the Central. Freud spotted Sally and moved in on her and Tilson became aware of toughs hanging around, one of whom – Charlie Lumley, as it happened – was told to get rid of the boyfriend. He threw Tilson down the stairs. There was, Tilson said, a culture of thumping. ‘Lucian and Francis would engage that way. In Notting Hill there were Irish pubs, which everyone took care to avoid late at night, as there would be fisticuffs at chucking-out time and violence in the gutters. Getting into fights was a kind of rite of passage: being streetwise.’21
Freud was to become keen on the Reg Smythe cartoon strip ‘Andy Capp’ involving the workshy northerner Andy and his fearsome wife Flo in which pay-off lines and direct action were briskly, ritually synchronised day after day. ‘Man lying on ground: “I thought the policeman was going to hit me so I hit him back first.” Awfully good, don’t you think?’
‘If Lucian saw somebody with somebody he thought he might fancy he’d immediately make a beeline for her,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘I’ve seen men, boyfriends, driven mad by him using his extraordinary power of picking people up at a party by the side of their boyfriends and taking them to the bathroom and the boyfriend looking absolutely furious, distraught and so on outside.’22 With sideburns and conspicuous trousers he cut a dash; to his elders he had something of the style and manners that were to be associated with ‘Teddy Boys’, first so called in the Daily Express in 1953.
John Masefield’s The Widow in the Bye Street, a narrative poem that had appealed to the schoolboy Freud, contains the lines:
Your father liked his cup too, didn’t he?
Always ‘another cup’ he used to say
He never went without on any day.
In his memory Freud abbreviated this, making it, as he recited it, more to his way of thinking. ‘“Your pa he was fond / Of a nice bit of blonde, he used to say.” Awfully good don’t you think?’
One time, returning to the Slade after the holidays, Richard Hamilton happened to bump into him.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘Three breakdowns.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘No, not me.’23
Though not denying the story, Freud demurred. ‘I don’t know.’
The biologist J. Z. Young, whose dancing at the Gargoyle Freud admired, taught at the medical school next to the Slade. Coldstream remembered walking up the street towards the Slade with him once and him saying, ‘Please don’t talk to me, I’m thinking important thoughts.’
‘John Young took things very far,’ said Freud. ‘He was very much to do with reptile brains and he made things seem so interesting. The last book of his I read was about the sexuality of fish. He says when you start studying these fish you might think that God (if you believe in him) must be obsessed with sex. He didn’t take me seriously, thought I was a playboy. I asked him things occasionally: when I was at the Slade he’d be in the common room.’ He tried to persuade Professor Young to give him access to the pathology lab; Young refused, but that didn’t stop him.
‘There was a basement room with nothing but beds with corpses, grey, pinky grey, bluey grey, as they had been in formaldehyde. I took a look through the window at them then went into the room. An orderly in a white coat was standing with his hands inside a hole in a body. What do you do to get him to take his hands out of the stomach? I wondered. ‘What’s the time?’ I asked. Squelch, and he peeled back the rubber glove and told me and put his hands back, quick as a wink. These people get addicted to dead bodies, you see: one is fascinated by them. Though I’ve never been drawn to the corpse, it is part of life. Or the end of it. When I saw John Young later he was pretty hostile. Called me morbidly exhibitionistic. He was not interested in art.’
The philosopher A. J. Ayer – understandably nicknamed the ‘Juan Don’ – was another acquaintance of Freud’s and even less friendly. ‘Our dislike which was almost instinctive had nothing to do with his marriage,’ Ayer wrote.24
Freud maintained that he always thought Freddie Ayer ridiculous. ‘He was at the Gargoyle a lot and had been a Jewish Guards officer: very rare.’ Ayer gave a party at which Freud overheard Henry Yorke warning someone against going out with him. Yorke, nom de plume Henry Green, whose recreation, listed in Who’s Who, was ‘romancing over a bottle of wine, to a good band’, took up with Kitty. ‘Henry Yorke used to take Kitty out sometimes. There were shouts outside Clifton Hill once and Kitty and Henry were outside and he grasped my hand and shook it: he was congratulating me on having the drunkenest wife in London. He was amorous, awfully nice. A good writer.’ His last novel, Doting, published in 1952, a chronicle of an extramarital pursuit that comes to nothing, ends with a shrug: ‘The next day they all went on very much the same.’25
Freud’s involvements, by contrast, were apt to be spontaneous. One night in the Gargoyle, according to David Tennant, ‘Sartre was there with his governess Simone de Beauvoir, sitting with Sonia Orwell. Lucian and I were both invited over to their table. Sartre got up and sat on it, waggling his short legs, and said, “Who is that good-looking one?” Jabbing his Gauloise at Lucian.’26 She, Simone de Beauvoir, complained about the failings of Englishmen, spotted Freud and disappeared with him into the night.
He had more of a relationship with Andrée Melly, sister of the jazz singer and ex-London Gallery assistant, an actress who went on to title roles in The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954) and Hammer Horror’s The Brides of Dracula (1960). ‘I didn’t paint her, I just used to see her some nights; never went away with her nor was she there for long.’ He gave her the etching Girl with Fig Leaf, subsequently – decades later – buying it back from her.27 And there was Wendy Abbott, renamed Henrietta by Michael Law, a film-maker with whom she lived, and who became Girl in a Blanket (1953), seated in the window at Delamere where the palm tree had stood, a painting reminiscent of Bellini’s Young Woman at Her Toilet, the painting that Freud had most admired in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He stippled Girl in a Blanket to excess; technically ambitious – ‘I was trying to do what Daumier does: contre-jour’ – what had begun alert (the sitter sitting not sleeping) went numb, so much so that later on Freud dismissed the painting as a ‘graphic artefact’. It reproduced well on the dust jacket of Henrietta the autobiography, published in 1994, in which she wrote, ‘I was in Lucian’s power, like a mesmerised rabbit, but being in a trance doesn’t stop pain and after I discovered somebody else’s menstrual fluid in what I thought of as my bed I decided that I could take no more.’28 Freud explained that the inadequacy of the painting stemmed more from his lack of conviction than from her lack of concern.
‘She stayed quite a bit, but she left because I was so promiscuous. She was casual in her degree of involvement, liked scoring but had a funny temperament. Sometimes when we were out, a bad lot, David Milford Haven, the Marquis of Milford Haven, friend of Prince Philip (his best man), would follow us and obviously she was carrying on with him. Henrietta liked quite a lot of angles to these things, and one thing I realised: there was this very odd thing with mothers. She took up with people she said were tricky and dangerous, young men who had affairs with their mothers, and she had to get in their way. She was a devil for a threesome: a terrific rivalry with the mothers. This wasn’t fantasy: some people make their inventions. She was good-looking for a very long time.’ The relationship did not end with the last sitting. ‘It drifted on a while in a fairly spasmodic way long after the picture. She came to Paris.’ Her second marriage – following the one to Michael Law – was to the actor/body-builder Norman Bowler and her third, in the sixties, to the poet Dom Moraes. Bacon’s portraits of her, worked up from photographs by John Deakin, upstaged Freud’s laborious picture.
Among the alternatives to Henrietta was Caryl Chance (Girl in a Dark Dress painted in 1951), blonde and determined-looking. ‘She was more fastidious, rather amazing, and was around Soho a lot.’ Once, at the Gargoyle, someone tried to rob her. ‘Don’t be so silly, darling,’ she was said to have said. ‘You look absolutely lovely and I’m going to dance with you.’ She too went to Paris with Freud. ‘During the night, in a hotel on the Île Saint Louis, someone came and took her handbag. No one can do these things with me about, I thought, and I told the landlady. Tears started running down her face. “We’ve had a thief here for years,” she said, “and it’s so awful: because we have seven residents and it’s one of them and we don’t know who.” I did go with her, but I never lived with her. She was loud and tiresome, lovely-looking, and never stopped talking; could be funny, but not brainy. I’d ring a number and get her. She was very much about.’ She had her eye on Tony Strickland Hubbard, the Woolworth’s heir.
Kitty went round to Delamere Terrace one day, saw Girl in a Dark Dress on the easel and reacted. Freud regretted this. ‘Kitty smashed it.’ The painting was repaired and Caryl went on to become, briefly, a cat burglar, enjoying the buzz and initial success. This did not last. Her partner in crime, Henrietta Moraes, fell out with her. ‘“My idol had feet of clay,” she said.’
When in the spring of 1951, after some months in South Africa, Bacon returned to England it was to be devastated by the death of Jessie Lightfoot, his nanny, housekeeper, surrogate mother and, on occasion, bouncer. Freud heard him out. ‘He told me the sort of things that were happening to her, shitting herself in the bed. And about his making things easier for her. She then got much worse. After she died he painted me.’ This was the first portrait from the life that Bacon attempted; that’s to say, the first to enter the oeuvre. It was done at the Royal College of Art where, for a year or so, Rodrigo Moynihan gave Bacon the use of a studio. Freud expected to have to be there, to make his presence felt as Harry Diamond had done for him. ‘He asked me to sit and when I came the first time this painting was already virtually finished.’ Bacon never normally worked with someone else in the room. He talked, mainly to himself – ‘exasperation, explanations, self-criticism, unselfconscious’ – and there was ‘a lot of movement and noise and lots of mixing colour on the forearms, very, very, strenuous. And a lot of irritation, but not for me though: he’d got such good manners, making it clear that him and it, not you, were the problem. He had a photograph of Kafka leaning on the doorway and he had been using that. I was amazed; it looked terribly good to me. First time he just did the foot. Then I came and stood about four or five times and it got worse and worse every time and then, at the end, not very good. It isn’t very good, but it’s lively.’
The Bacon Portrait of Lucian Freud (1952), in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, bears no resemblance to Freud and little to Kafka. A coltish young man enters through what could be a revolving door into blinding glare. Soon after this Freud rejected an approach from a Slade student, Lorenza Mazzetti, for him to play the lead in her film adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It would have been, he thought, an impersonation too far. Another Slade student, Michael Andrews, took on the role.
Michael Hamburger, who had known and quite liked Freud longer than most, liked him least, he said, when he saw him in Soho with Bacon. ‘He adopted a sort of manner, which I disliked: being very sophisticated and smart and making remarks supposed to be shocking.’29 Bacon, a practised exerciser of charm, urged him to think about how he presented himself. ‘I thought the best thing was to be rude. I don’t mind being on no terms or bad terms. I just don’t want to be on false terms,’ was Freud’s response. But Bacon insisted that good manners were useful. ‘Francis opened my eyes in some ways. His work impressed me, but his personality affected me.’
During the war, when he was summoned to a tribunal to assess his fitness for military service, Bacon had hired a dog from Harrods and spent the night with it knowing that this was a good way to bring on an asthma attack. ‘He had got this idea about Harrods: if he was near Harrods he couldn’t go too wrong, he thought.’ The store was his universal provider. ‘Everything was linked to Harrods. At first, early on, the bills came and they got more and more nasty but he took no notice and eventually they just pretended that they had been paid. He had a little man there who made these round-cornered suits for him that suited nobody but him.’ And he used to filch from the Food Hall, initially out of necessity, then out of habit. It was, Freud thought, simply a case of him helping himself rather than exercising sleight of hand.
‘Francis made a great thing about the sensuality of treachery (which wasn’t original) and he used to go on about the cult of the hands, which, in his pictures, he tended to miss.’
Bacon turned to advantage his lack of conventional expertise. To adapt William Empson’s phrase, he learned a style from a despair.30 Or, in John Berger’s equally arresting phrase, ‘horror with connivance’.31 It obliged him to be summary, to skirt formal difficulties, exaggerating to disguise incapability, swiping in the hopes of hitting it off, passing off anguish as hilarity and, occasionally, hilarity as angst. He said, ‘We live our life through our whole nervous system’; he thrilled to violence, or to the image of violence. Orwell’s image, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of the fascist state ‘stamping forever on the human face’ is verbal Bacon. The paintings were as showy as figures of speech, as impressive as the ludicrous warning from Mrs Joe in Great Expectations when Joe and Young Pip hurry off to watch convicts being recaptured: ‘If you bring the boy back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don’t look to me to put it together again.’
Where, intuitively, Picasso used to slice profiles and reposition eyes, Bacon, relying on reflex, made faces that loomed blurrily: ghostly monoprints lifted from the sticky tonalities of photo culture. Like André Gide not knowing ‘whether I feel what I believe myself to be feeling’, Bacon found expression in having a stab at things. ‘Art is a method of opening up areas of feeling rather than merely an illustration of an object,’ he told a reporter from Time magazine in 1952. ‘Real imagination is technical imagination. It is in the ways you think up to bring an event to life again.’ Matthew Smith, he stressed, in the introduction he contributed to the catalogue of Smith’s Tate retrospective in 1953, had this essentially painterly imagination. ‘He seems to me to be one of the very few English painters since Constable and Turner to be concerned with painting – that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable.’32 What was true of Smith was even more true of himself: ‘I think that painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.’33
Suspicious of such notions as happy accident, Freud baulked at this. ‘I don’t know with Matthew Smith. It’s impossible not to like it, but you don’t feel that truth plays much part in it.’ Listening though to Bacon, seeing him most days, he found himself echoing his words. ‘I used a phrase, “memory-trace”, to Colin Anderson. He said, “You’re talking like Francis: is that right?” Sort of bitchy.’
Bacon, Freud found, was better to talk to than anyone else he knew, deft and provocative, always stimulating. And he even agreed to be painted. ‘It took two or three months. He grumbled but sat well and consistently.’ Bernard Walsh, who ran Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street, their favourite eating-place, used to go on at them to do portraits of one another. ‘What I want is a Bacon of Freud and a Freud of Bacon,’ he said, so it was a virtual commission. Freud saw it as a favour rendered. ‘That little picture I really did for him; but when I left Kitty and married Caroline he was so unpleasant. “I didn’t know Lucian was a ponce,” he said, and I was so depressed I fell off the bar stool on to the floor. I couldn’t do anything else as he owned the place and was thirty years older.’ Otherwise, he said, he would have thumped him.
As with most of the other small portraits he did around that time Freud used a copper plate, small enough to be hand-held if the detailing demanded it. ‘Life-size looks mean,’ Bacon said, whereas shaving-mirror-scale looks intimate. Freud’s Bacon is side-lit, half dour, half sunny, his voluptuous features, nostrils and chin, temples and jowls, uneasily patted together. Sitting knee to knee, within three feet of him, Freud caught the air of unconcern, or diffidence even, the heavy-lidded eyes downcast, blond hair mussed over traces of pencilling, a flicker of disdain crossing his mind possibly.
Francis Bacon, 1952
Freud was prompted – shamed even – by Bacon. ‘I got very impatient with the way I was working. It was limiting and a limited vehicle for me and I also felt that my drawing and my making artefacts – graphic artefacts – stopped me from freeing myself and I think my admiration for Francis came into this. I realised that by working in the way I did I couldn’t really evolve. The change wasn’t perhaps more than one of focus but it did make it possible for me to approach the whole thing in another way.’ He appreciated that expression – as distinct from Expressionism, which was pseudo-primitive Mannerism – involved a degree of emphasis bordering on abandon. Bonnard said, ‘Draw your pleasure – paint your pleasure – express your pleasure strongly.’ As Delacroix wrote in his diary, ‘One never paints violently enough.’
Shortly before Freud’s second Hanover Gallery exhibition in May 1952, John Rothenstein of the Tate came to Clifton Hill to see his latest work and, compensating for having failed to secure Girl with Roses for the Tate, went one better by buying both Girl with a Dog and the portrait of Bacon, which was thereafter referred to by Bernard Walsh at Wheeler’s as ‘my picture of Bacon you sold’. Conveniently, when Eric Hall presented Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to the Tate the following year, Freud’s Francis Bacon could be associated with it as the very head within which the dream of reason had produced monsters.
Walsh, who had been an actor and at one stage owned the Ivy Restaurant, was a racehorse owner with a family background in oysters. He continued to complain about being cheated of the picture. ‘I thought you were a friend of mine,’ he said. Freud told him that he saw no reason to keep to any arrangement they might have had. ‘No doubt you were drunk,’ he added, to which Walsh retorted: ‘In vino veritas.’ However some years later Freud did a similar sort of portrait of Walsh himself. ‘Done for oysters. It didn’t hold together. He was a big Irishman; his daughter, married to a Maltese man with a restaurant in Charlotte Street, had it on show there.’
Erica Brausen was furious too when she learnt that Rothenstein had bought the two paintings ahead of the Hanover exhibition for it deprived her of the best potential sales, as the other exhibits, such as Girl in a Blanket, Girl with Beret (Helena), and Portrait of a Girl (Anne Dunn), were all small, except for Interior in Paddington which had been presented by the Arts Council to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. David Sylvester did not specifically mention either painting in his review for the Listener, published a couple of days after the opening. Francis Bacon however was reproduced with a caption dating it 1950–1 and saying that the Tate had bought it. The early paintings, Sylvester wrote, had been ‘hysterically still and airless’, but the new ones had more to them. ‘The impression they make of a presence as complex as that of real people. And as unique. For while Freud’s work might be called affected – as a dandy is affected: that is to say there is deliberation in its unconventionality – it is entirely free of mannerism, of any inclination to impose a preconceived character on the subjects.’34
Other reviewers aired what had become the usual preconceptions. ‘The tension here is at snapping point,’ wrote Michael Middleton in the Spectator. ‘Or fairly frequently so.’35 John Berger in the New Statesman recommended the mildly Coldstream-style paintings by Martin Froy, a recent Slade graduate, in the upstairs room at the Hanover as ‘well worth investigating’ but did not mention the Freuds. But Robert Melville praised the Bacon portrait unreservedly. ‘For once he has suppressed all his sinister proclivities for the game of out-staring but we are on safer ground if we think of it simply as one of the great portraits of the century.’36
Bacon appreciated that Freud had caught him all but unawares. There he was: close, guarded, troubled, solitary really, and manifestly private. Unusually for him, Freud was relieved to be told that he approved. ‘He liked it as it went on.’
More so, it may be assumed, than Robert Buhler’s half-length portrait of him in open-necked shirt and jacket, painted in 1950 and exhibited in the 1952 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Buhler’s Bacon sat further away, distant enough to appear to be a fairly average sort of chap acting nonchalant for a fellow painter despite inner uncertainty and a lack of proper training.
When Nanny Lightfoot died in 1951 Bacon was so distressed he couldn’t bear to go on living in his Cromwell Place studio. Buhler took it over and came upon some discarded canvases there, which, Freud heard, he later sold. ‘Francis was really upset and confronted Buhler about restretching stuff of his and putting it on the market. Buhler said, “You don’t really care so much about your reputation, do you?”’ Bacon didn’t pursue the matter. ‘He said, “These are my drinking companions, Rodrigo, Robert and Ruskin [Spear].” Francis was far too intelligently realistic to make anything more of it.’ Better to shrug it off than make a belittling fuss. ‘Francis had a brilliant gift of finding qualities in people.’ Better to seem to find qualities in people than to be seen to lose face over them. Presentation, after all, was so important.
‘Francis would not be photographed in the ordinary way, so when [John] Deakin was photographing several people a day in the Vogue studios in Shaftesbury Avenue and asked him, he said he would only be photographed naked to the waist with sides of beef: i.e. fuck off. But Deakin got sides of beef and Francis’ bluff was called. He had to do it.’ Bacon submitted to being posed between two sides of beef like a peculiarly ineffectual meat porter. ‘If you look, no hand could hold them; the sides of beef were hooked.’ Rather than waste an outlandish pose, Bacon did a painting of Deakin’s photo session, the sides of beef closing in on a pope like two wings of a triptych. Freud told him that he liked it. ‘I don’t,’ Bacon said and not long afterwards offered it to him as a wedding present.
Freud found Bacon good to draw impromptu. He drew him tetchy, scratching the top of his head like Stan Laurel bemused. Then one evening at Clifton Hill Bacon stood up, tugged at the waistband of his trousers and, wiggling a little, offered himself up as a poseur. ‘He said, “I think you ought to do this, because I think that’s rather important.” He undid his top fly buttons. “Oh, you ought to use these,” he said. His hips: such a good tip. He rolled up his sleeves (his forearms were very well developed) talking about how to edit himself. He recognised the hips were a great feature, part of his allure.’ Three impeccable line drawings resulted, drawings defining the twitch of the pelvis, the roll of the hips.
Freud was to paint Bacon once again some years later, ‘a half-picture’, he said, extending to facemask proportions: eyes, nose, mouth and the bulge of a cheek completed, the rest unrealised. ‘Francis got bored, sort of, with sitting.’ There being no likelihood of ever getting it finished, he decided after a while to let go of it to Nicholas Luard (co-founder of the magazine Private Eye and the Establishment Club in the early sixties) to settle a debt of £80. But Luard wrote back saying that he actually owed £280. Offended, Freud withdrew the offer (‘I thought not giving it to him was some sort of fine’) and eventually the dealer William Darby bought it off him one afternoon for an urgently needed £600; he nipped into a nearby betting shop with the money and there lost it.