Talk, perhaps of sculpture, probably of more gossip-worthy pursuits, hangs in the air in the long afternoon of The Colony Room, Michael Andrews’ conversation piece, exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery in January 1963 and immediately recognised by those involved as a true record of their daily encounters. In the secluded upstairs bar in Dean Street the regulars bitch and gossip and fall silent. Freud stands centre right, glass in hand, the only person wise to what the painter is up to, watching him compose his cast of characters. The others act unaware. John Deakin, photographer, faces an obstreperous Henrietta Moraes. (‘The only person who painted Henrietta well was Mike, in The Colony Room,’ Freud commented. ‘See her shouting …’) She could be laying into Deakin for selling nude snaps of her around the pubs. Above Deakin’s head swells the mural, painted by Andrews, after Bonnard: the Colony Room’s substitute for a window.
The mirror on the far wall augments the gaggle, fanning the conviviality and furthering Andrews’ take on Manet’s Music in the Tuileries, in the National Gallery, where Baudelaire can be spotted in the throng. Perched on one of Muriel’s bar stools, Bacon replaces one of Manet’s crinolined ladies. Could he be once again telling them all about the sculptures he swears he’ll produce, any time now? Bruce Bernard, in profile, pays close attention. Not so Muriel Belcher, loudly presiding, skirt rucked up, legs crossed in a flash of nylons. Well set in her character part, she looks at Carmel her girlfriend, and at Ian Board serving behind the bar and calls for someone – ‘Cuntie’, ‘Lottie’, ‘Miss’ – to stand another round. While most of the figures in The Colony Room were at one time or another painted by Freud as key individuals, assembled by Andrews they interact, their show of confidence – their being the in-crowd – slyly observed; the scene is cinematic: Manet revisited, La Dolce Vita re-enacted upstairs in Soho. To David Sylvester, writing in the Sunday Times colour magazine, The Colony Room was yet another example of an Andrews composition ‘flawed by a fumblingness and uncertainty’.1 Sylvester was more at ease with the thrusts and wipes of a Bacon than with the cheek-by-jowl panache of Andrews’ masterpiece. What could be more expressive than his pale, stroppy face of Muriel Belcher and the way he poses Bacon’s shoulders and plumps his blouson and thigh?
When the Colony Room Club opened in 1948 Muriel had offered Bacon free drink and the odd tenner a week to bring in the customers; Bacon was the main reason for Freud going there so much. The one-arm bandit was also an attraction and he served his time on it. ‘Not like Harry Diamond, who played on knowing that it was fixed so that after a certain weight it would pay out.’ One day, just when he reckoned it had got to that point, he ran out of change. ‘An old lady, a villain’s mother, moved on to it and he said, “Stop it, I’m going to get some more money,” but she took no notice, there was a crash of money coming out and Harry hit her. “He only hit X’s mother,” said Muriel. “I had to bar him.”’
At one stage, in the early sixties, the Krays were said to be charging Muriel anything up to £250 per week protection money; they would turn up in the Colony Room in business suits and people would think them quite respectable. One time, when they said they wanted a word with her, Frank Auerbach remembered, ‘she told them she was busy, could they come back Tuesday afternoon? Which they did. There were two men with her. She greeted the Krays: “May I introduce Detective Chief Inspector Gosling and Sergeant Burton?” This worked. She probably paid the police to mind her.’ As famous in her setting as Rosa Lewis had been in the Cavendish Hotel, painted by Andrews and photographed by Deakin for Bacon to transfigure, Muriel Belcher was a prime subject for Freud, perhaps too obviously so. He began a portrait. ‘I liked Muriel and it was nice to work from her, but she was easily frightened and then something went wrong, a legal issue, and she got nervous: she really wasn’t at all tough. It went very well and then I destroyed it.
‘Bernardine [Coverley] worked for an antique dealer in Islington, a crazy man, bisexual and promiscuous. (People often say they are bisexual and never are; but he actually was.) He’d been a pilot in the war, I think, drank a lot, married to a press lord’s daughter and kept a tarty boy. He had the picture of Bernardine almost giving birth to Bella and commissioned the painting of Muriel. He was a hot financier, got into trouble and unloaded on to me. He then sued me for the money. There was a solicitor’s letter, which meant they could come and take some pictures, plus one of their choice, and I had to sign something.
‘Scrapping the picture put an end to it. Obviously I didn’t have to destroy it, but it was a way of getting it settled, done out of panic. As he was a sort of ally, it was something I resented.’
Far from the Colony Room and the Bacon retrospective, other, seemlier reputations were sanctified in May 1962 with the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, Basil Spence’s compendium of Festival of Britain modernism, featuring Epstein’s St Michael (modelled on Kitty’s second husband Wynne Godley), John Piper stained glass, and a hefty eagle lectern by Liz Frink. This was the older generation – plus Liz Frink – delivering contemporary church fittings. Behind the high altar arose Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Majesty, purportedly the world’s largest tapestry ever, every fault blown up out of all proportion. A wrinkled green immensity, it exaggerated Sutherland’s habitual blend: plush naturalism barbed with thorny emblems. ‘As a work of art,’ John Russell wrote, ‘it falls some way short of the more extravagant expectations of Mr Sutherland’s admirers.’2 Douglas Cooper still championed Sutherland, by now a member of the Order of Merit, as ‘the most distinguished and the most original English artist of the mid-twentieth century’.3
If Sutherland disappointed, so too did the cathedral. A design package conceived as the high temple of post-war reconciliations and recovery, it became a show home of compromise, the only surprise being the absence of a Henry Moore. Neither Bacon nor Freud nor anyone they consorted with had any inclination to be involved in a project radiating consensus spirituality.
The consecration came at a time when blanket urban redevelopment, along with colour in advertising and Sunday newspaper magazines, bright new acrylic paints and bright new pop and abstract modes, betokened a jaunty spirit of the age, pressure for change and stirrings in the social mix. In Freud’s part of Paddington one of the few buildings not listed for demolition was St Mary Magdalene, a blackened landmark of Victorian Gothic by the architect G. E. Street, just beyond the end of Delamere Terrace in Clarendon Crescent where it occupied almost half of the inner curve. ‘Hard to find in dismal streets’, John Betjeman warned in his 1958 Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Magnificently incongruous, built to dazzle the poor and glorify the parish, it was a Coventry Cathedral of its period a century before with an elaborate interior complete with a chapel in the crypt adorned by Sir Ninian Comper with saints and angels decked out in blue and gold.
By the mid-sixties the new medium-rise Warwick and Brindley LCC estates reshaped the district, bringing patches of green space and leaving only the church and a few pubs untouched. Sitting tenants had no security of tenure but council tenants had the right to be rehoused so, knowing that there would be no reprieve for Delamere, Freud had managed to become a council tenant. ‘I moved from 20 to 4 as the terrace was progressively demolished. With demolition teams advancing along the road I was throwing cigars and bottles down at the workmen to give me one more day, I so liked it there.’ Number 4 had been a council flat, which meant that the council had to rehouse him in the neighbourhood. ‘As I was pushed out, I went to different places.’ Not for him the new housing. ‘The ones they wanted to pull down were the dumps that suited me.’
He was offered a room just down the road: 12/6 a week for a first-floor flat at 124 Clarendon Crescent. Built in the 1850s for navvies and costers, the street was said to have come to serve exclusively as lodgings for thieves, prostitutes and laundrywomen. ‘It was the longest street in London without a road off it – because of the canal behind it – and people were so aware of the strain that the shop in the middle was called the Half Way Stores. I was dead opposite the church: in fact opposite the house where I had drawn the doorstep and railings all decked up for the Coronation.’ The houses were narrow, one room per floor; his room gave on to a landing leading to a shared lavatory outside on a balcony to the rear.
‘Much of the Clarendon Street area is insanitary,’ the Architects’ Journal commented in 1938, the year it was renamed ‘Crescent’. Since the war there had been no improvement. Yet, the Journal remarked, ‘It is a sociable home-like place with a character of its own, and it is liked by the people who live there.’ Previously owned by the Church Commissioners and compulsorily purchased from them by the London County Council in order to be pulled down, the Crescent curved in a long concertina squeeze of close-packed terracing from St Mary’s to the Harrow Road. Behind the peeling stucco and bent railings was authentic squalor. ‘It was known as Bug Alley, had to be debugged before I moved in.’ He was there for eighteen months.
Clarendon Crescent was not as notorious as the recently demolished Rillington Place, site of the Christie murders, had become ten years before, but it was celebrated for having been a location for several car chases in the 1949 Ealing film The Blue Lamp, authentically so in that the police encountered hostility there and it was a dead end. ‘Villains would run along the roof and throw chimney pots on their heads. It backed on to the canal with just the towpath running below.’ This too was used for the discovery of a vital clue, Dirk Bogarde’s discarded raincoat, and the 1951 comedy The Lavender Hill Mob included footage originally shot for The Blue Lamp, now showing the inhabitants gathered on the rear balconies as police trawled for missing bullion. It was a prime location for seekers after outstanding mean streets, as did Walker Evans when he photographed in the area (principally the corner of Woodchester Street and Cirencester Road); his caption in an article for Architectural Forum in April 1958 identified it as ‘A perfect scene for a rousing manhunt or at the very least a pleasantly sordid heart breaking tryst.’ Rachman the slum landlord operated near by, out of an office on the corner of Monmouth Street and Westbourne Grove. Colin MacInnes, in his novel Absolute Beginners published in 1959 and focused on Rachman, singled out ‘this weird and fantastic region, in the triangle between Wood Lane and the Harrow Road and the Grand Union Canal … This is a place the Welfare State and the Property-owning Democracy equally passed by.’ Half a page of the Observer that January was given over to a set of Roger Mayne’s photographs taken in the area: ‘our London Napoli’, a district of ‘huge houses too tall for their width cut up into twenty flatlets’ swarming with the children of those children Marie Paneth had studied under wartime conditions and – hardly surprisingly – found to be uncontrollable. ‘Their background, their bagful of experiences had taught them not to trust and not to hope, but to attack, to grab, to lie, to steal and cheat, all of which are the reactions of people against a world they fear.’4
Verlaine, Freud was pleased to learn, had hymned the street in Romances sans paroles (1874):
Ô la rivière dans la rue!
Fantastiquement apparue
Derrière un mur haut de cinque pieds,
Elle roule sans un murmure …
‘Streets’, subtitled ‘Paddington’, was written in 1872, when Verlaine eloped with Rimbaud to London and stayed in Howland Street, Fitzrovia; though Freud could not be certain that Clarendon Crescent was the one, no other fitted the description better.
La chaussée est très large, en sorte
Que l’eau jaune comme une morte
Dévale ample et sans nuls espoirs
De rien refléter que la brume
Même alors que l’aurore allume
Les cottages jaunes et noirs.
Even as dawn illuminates
The cottages yellow and black.
The move to Clarendon Crescent led to a saison d’enfer for Freud. Clarendon was notorious for being a dead end or last resort. Once there he lived by extremes more than ever before. More often than not for daytime paintings he used neighbours but also sitters recruited from his other world. The Bentley transported him at noon and night to the West End and back again.
‘I had a real desperation for money when I moved from Delamere. I associate leaving Delamere in my head with a club called Don Juan in Grosvenor Street and the Casanova where I went a lot; at Clarendon I was working 4 a.m. to lunch, then off gambling. Lots of playing, day and night, horses and dogs. I was completely broke.
‘There was a loo on a balcony (the inhabitants referred to it as the “flat”) in a shed overlooking the canal and in the winter, when pipes froze, I melted snow for water to boil.’ The woman in the flat below, whose husband was in prison, said to him, ‘It’s unfair of the council to put a factory in front of the place with you there.’ It was improper, she thought, for an artist to have a room with so uninspiring a view. ‘I just knew her to say hello to and we shared the loo on the roof overlooking the canal where there was a poem in pokerwork, green and yellow:
64,000 dollars may come your way
But don’t sit here and dream all day.’
One day Freud thought he heard someone say to him in the Devonshire Castle pub on the street corner, ‘Grapefruit. Are you related to the grapefruit?’ What sort of question was that? Then it dawned on him: ‘The Great Freud’.
The director John Huston, who spent much of his time in Ireland and the London clubs, told Freud around this time that he was thinking of making a film about Sigmund Freud. Would he be interested in playing his grandfather? Freud said the only film role he had ever fancied was to be a cowboy. Montgomery Clift got the part.
‘My private money, from the Freud copyrights, I had made over entirely to Annie and Annabel; the money had gone up very much by the sixties with more translations. I thought I’d like to have a bit of money so I asked Godley for it.’
In 1955 Kitty had married Wynne Godley, younger son of Lord Kilbracken, an oboist (in the BBC Welsh Orchestra) turned economist who became, in the late sixties, Deputy Director of the Economic Section of the Treasury and subsequently, in 1970, Professor of Applied Economics at Cambridge. ‘When Godley married Kitty, his mother said to a nurse: “Marrying the daughter of a New York yid”.
‘There was a lot of hostility. Godley wasn’t in the Treasury for nothing. I wasn’t allowed to see the children except under certain circumstances and under supervision. Under the terms of the divorce I was the guilty party but had “reasonable access”. Godley was monstrous. I used to call for them and he’d slam the door. It was such a bad idea not to see them, particularly then, so I kept on going to court to see them and one rather human judge said, “I notice that over the last x years Mr Freud has had recourse to litigation in order to see the children and I notice that, with all the things that you have said against him, the one thing that has never been questioned is his affection for the children. And I notice under the terms of the divorce one of the stipulations was that in any litigation regarding access the costs should be borne by the guilty party. In future, I’d suggest, if there is any litigation, the costs should be divided.” I was never taken to court again after that. Things got easier then.’ As a manifestation of ‘reasonable access’ he started taking Annie to restaurants, which she loved. ‘Robert Carrier’s, I enjoyed that, also Soho: La Terrazza, Italian tiles and glass tables: non-pasta Italian. When we were going to Greece we went to a “Greek” restaurant, the White Tower, every week.’5
Going to Greece, in the summer of 1961, was a greater test of access. ‘It was a way of seeing the children. I hadn’t been allowed to take them because of the car smash. We had to go with the Lambtons. Suited me very well. They couldn’t object to them because Tony Lambton was an MP.’ A further claim that being with the Lambtons would corrupt the girls got nowhere. Annie found Bindy maternal: ‘mad but grown up’. Part of the journey was by cruise ship, pausing at Naples to see Pompeii and the Museo di Capodimonte, which Freud particularly remembered for an operatic incident he provoked. Bindy, being heavily pregnant, put her feet up on a park bench and was told off by a park keeper in operatic style. ‘Naples is wonderful. One afternoon, with Bindy and the children, in a small park high up, a man in uniform came shouting in Italian and he was so like Mussolini I said “Mussolini” and he went round hitting trees – because he couldn’t very well hit me – and the children were so excited.’
The holiday on Spetses, an island fast becoming another Monaco with shipping tycoons much in evidence, proved irksome in that Freud found himself on his own with Annie and Anna, whom he took sightseeing in Athens (the Parthenon and Piraeus). Michael and Anne Tree were near by in another rented house where the Somersets joined them. Being with the children practically all the time was onerous. ‘The Lambtons had a villa; we had a hotel. Didn’t go to Poros: the extraordinary distinction wasn’t there any more. It was rather leisurely. We’d go out in the evenings, but not in the day. John Wilton, David Somerset, Caroline Somerset, Bindy. Met Paddy Leigh Fermor. Ghastly spiv, I thought.
‘We were entertained by Niarchos out of doors: dinner, dancing on a tiny dance floor. Tina Onassis’ daughter, Christina, said, “I don’t want to do that, Aunt Tina,” in an American accent, like they all had, and she said, “I’m your mother.” Niarchos’ son said, “It’s a bore. I have to go to the dentist tomorrow: he’s in New York.” [Heini] Thyssen was there – on a yacht – the first time I met him was then. He had Fiona, a model, with him and a horrible child aged three saying, “Could I have more jam?” and Heini saying, same voice, “Could I have more jam too?” I remember thinking what the hell am I doing here?’ The yacht was hung with Renoirs, Annie remembered.
Unlike the sharp little paintings of thistles and tangerines that had preoccupied him on Poros fifteen years earlier, Freud’s output on Spetses consisted of siesta-time studies of the girls resting and himself seated, his image reflected with sea and distant isle behind. These were opportunistic watercolours for which he borrowed Annie’s Reeves paint box (‘with the greyhound on the lid, proud that Dad used it’).6 ‘I had those books of Ingres paper, from the war. I did a lot. Kept seven or eight.’ Two of them were of a bat that they had found, dead, on the table in their room.
Obliged as they were to laze around in holiday mode, all three fretted, he especially. ‘Dreadful hotel’, Annie said. ‘He was on his own with us as he had pissed Bindy off, may have insulted her with something done with someone else. Anyway, he was miserable, lonely and out of sorts.’ She read Tintin books to him. ‘Slight worries about swearing. I said “bugger” and he was bothered that I would disgrace him. “Don’t disgrace me,” he’d say at a grand dinner.7 Bindy fell out with him: in the villa that they had they had a garden, it was full of children and we were in a sparse hotel far away from this and the three of us were alone and Annabel fell ill. Anorexia at eight: she gave up eating.’ ‘Alarming’, Annabel remembered, ‘because I hadn’t had breakfast and Dad stuffed a roll down my throat and my throat was dry. He was terrified.8
‘We flew home. It was the last of these hols. It was nothing to do with Dad that I got ill in Greece. He was worried.’9
As soon as he was back in London Freud picked up a girl in the Caves de France. ‘After being with the children I was desperate to work again. I met her one night, took her back, she took her clothes off and I just did her head, and I really felt I had done a nude without all the difficulties. What was unusual about her was that she was a waitress in a coffee bar but so was her mother: hadn’t gone up or down in the world but just level. She married a rather impoverished gent with double-breasted waistcoat and library and a little house in Chelsea. I did the painting in nine days, in six or seven goes, which is about like one go for anybody else.’ Some years later he gave it another go. This involved persuading Jane Willoughby, who had the painting Sleeping Head (1962), nicknamed ‘The Pig’, that it needed altering slightly. ‘The shoulder had got one loop too many. I painted it out.’
Annie and Annabel had spent a lot of time with their grandparents at Walberswick. Between 1960, when she was the nine-year-old Child in Bed in a pink frilly nightie (a painting Freud considered ‘a bit sloppy’; it belonged to his mother) and Portrait of Annabel (1967), in a striped dress, Annabel had become distressingly unstable. ‘When Anna[bel] got ill first, when she was thirteen, Tony [Lambton] said to Bindy that they – Anna and Annie – must be separated, partly as he had a brother who killed himself; his brother being Anna, as it were, he saw some parallel. It was astute of Tony. Anna turned against Annie whom she had adored.
‘One of the principles in analysis is you must not treat anyone who’s a relation, so my Aunt Anna suggested Dr Winnicott to my father and mother and he established a sort of secret friendship with Anna: very impressive. I talked to him quite a lot. And then he said, “I’m going to write to you periodically about Annabel,” and he wrote me these long letters. I didn’t reply and he stopped. I think, because of my aunt’s dislike and fear of me, he wanted me to know. Thought I was serious. He had rather an extraordinary lively mind. I felt it was an element of friendship.’
The renowned paediatric psychologist Donald Winnicott, who worked at the children’s hospital in Paddington, told Freud that Annabel’s illness was anorexia, stemming from fear of puberty. ‘A death wish, to do with keeping puberty at bay. I saw so much of Winnicott that I asked him why men can’t have it. He said that starving is a symptom, and a classical cause is if the father leaves the mother at the time of birth. Winnicott, or my grandfather, was responsible for the fact that the initial cause is the father leaving the mother. In my case, absolutely right, I left Kitty. Whether the father physically leaves is hardly it: it’s the unhappiness of the mother transferring misery to the child. It’s a cramp, being born in the mother’s misery.
‘A very odd thing: Kitty was terribly jealous of Anna being ill. There is such a lot of madness in that family. Inability to eat is nothing to do with eating disorders, it’s to do with a cramp. Anna became an absolutely brilliant cook when she had it, absolutely brilliant at it and obedient. She went to hospital for ages, to the Fulham & Hammersmith Hospital by Wormwood Scrubs, where I used to see her a lot, and the Maudsley. On a drip for nearly a year. She’s sort of Catholic.
‘I remember Bella when she was about sixteen saying to Annabel that she tried to do something and it wasn’t any good, and Anna said, “You can’t expect to be brilliant at your age.” She’s got her funny old lady-girl manner, very aware of her own shortcomings, but in her crazy way she’s sort of considerate. A genius in her way.’
Photo by John Deakin of staged lunchtime session in Wheeler’s, Soho (L to R: Tim Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews)
Lunchtime at Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street, Soho. The scene is a set-up: two tables pushed together, an unopened champagne bottle lolling in the ice bucket. In the time available before the first customers appeared John Deakin, the Soho Brassaï, clicked off a whole roll of photos of four painters in a row. Right to left: Michael Andrews scratching his head and laughing, Frank Auerbach smiling in response, Francis Bacon, glass raised to his lips, about to say something to Lucian Freud who turns to give him incisive attention and who, in other shots, recoils a little then turns and fixes him with one of his sudden, amazing, locked-on, hawk-eye stares.
The photograph went unpublished at the time. Francis Wyndham had commissioned it for Queen magazine but he rejected it as being out of focus; a blurry detail, from another shot of the scene showing Freud alone, served as the frontispiece to his 1963 Marlborough catalogue. However, twenty years or so later it was to become iconic: a definitive group photograph of the leading figures of what was to be labelled the School of London. Back then, in 1962, it was just the four of them, plus Tim Behrens, a grinning hanger-on, indulging Deakin, hence the spoof conviviality and a seating arrangement suggesting a Last Supper or, to be precise, the tramps’ parody Last Supper in Buñuel’s Viridiana, released the previous year. Here were Bacon the Saviour and Freud the bosom companion with Auerbach and Andrews savouring the pretence.
Not just in Soho but way beyond, Bacon was now pre-eminent. His Tate exhibition had brought him to prominence and the first of David Sylvester’s interviews with him was to be broadcast a few months later, in March 1963, and subsequently published in the Sunday Times under the heading ‘The Art of the Impossible’: conversation ranging over film stills, photography, Velázquez and accident. On the wireless, in print, at the Marlborough (that July) and in Deakin’s photograph, he unquestionably held court.
Seated to one side, an acolyte only, Tim Behrens grins deferentially at the pepper mill, the one person keen to be there, and to be photographed in such exclusive company. Once the photographing was over he loudly demanded drink and food; but no: Bacon didn’t even oblige with the champagne.
Behrens’ involvement was principally with Freud, who had been using him as a sitter, as did Michael Andrews. From the age of sixteen (he was born in 1937) Old Etonian Behrens had been at the Slade, where his fellow student Suzy Boyt had painted him looking not unlike Freud’s John Minton. He had lodged in the house that Minton had bought for Norman Bowler and that Freud had subsequently taken for Suzy Boyt and the children. Helen Lessore showed him at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1960, ’62 and ’64 (paintings such as Fashion Models, I and IV, candidly indebted to Michael Andrews); he was considered promising, picking up on Freud, Andrews and Bratby, working against the whole tone of the Slade.
‘I liked him. There are early things that are good,’ Freud said, acknowledging that Behrens had been around with him for some years, in effect replacing Charlie Lumley in the sidekick role. ‘Francis said it was my fault I had a terrible effect on him.’ Auerbach thought the same. ‘He should have taken notice of Patrick George-type teaching at the Slade where its structured ways would have given him something to work on; as it was he tried a Bacon–Andrews method and produced feeble paintings.’10 And he remembered being with him at Paddington station, employed by the GPO as student labour helping out with the Christmas post. Behrens had no idea, he said, about what it was to work, ‘he just posed on mailbags and didn’t do a stroke.’
‘He had that thing of people whose fathers loathe them,’ Freud argued, tellingly. ‘He became terribly influenced by his father. There were three brothers and all tried to kill themselves: two or one succeeded. Tim always had a lot of money while “not having any”. He was very vain.’ His father, an oil man and owner of the Ionian Bank, bought the Hanover Gallery on impulse when Erica Brausen complained of being bankrupt. ‘Which made it impossible for Tim therefore as a painter. If you have a powerful father it’s difficult.’ The father had humiliated and bullied him. ‘You’re a rich boy,’ June Keeley once jeered. ‘And never forget it, June, I am,’ he replied. He thought of himself as Dostoyevsky’s Idiot and affected laceless boots.
Behrens was charmed by Freud, who painted him as a raw-boned gilded youth: the hearty Red Haired Man and, in three-quarter view, Red Haired Man – Portrait II, a head leading with the chin. Then, as Red Haired Man – Interior, he squatted in docile posture on a mock-bamboo chair with paint rags heaped behind; ‘a surf of rags from the rag-and-bone shop under the bridge’, besmirched and accumulating daily now that bigger brushes were used. The joist dividing the picture and stressing the suppliant crouch was all that was left of the wall between the front and back rooms at Clarendon after Freud knocked through.
Tim Behrens as Red Haired Man on a Chair, 1962–3
In Red Haired Man – Interior Behrens is a hapless figure. Freud recognised in him a propensity to disappoint. ‘Tim’s first wife had twins. Driving with her boyfriend and twins in Algiers or Morocco she was stung by wasps and swelled up and died and was tied to the boot of the car. Tim got obsessed with the boyfriend and was inspired to do pictures of him, and a whole series of pictures related to his wife dying. Janet had a Jewish conventional family (merchants, jewellery, or some trade) and Tim somehow hated her family home and Golders Green, and did these extraordinary pictures of this house and to do with the death.’ In 1970 Behrens left London for Italy. In 1988 he published a novel, The Monument, a thinly disguised account of another chapter in his family history. Freud found it not thoroughgoing enough. ‘Sort of well written, but what he doesn’t say (which completely invalidates the book) is that the heroine, his “sister-in-law”, was his father’s girlfriend, and it explains the suicide attempts. She eloped with the brother. The father not being mentioned makes it romantic, this semi-incestuous story. I thought it ridiculous that he admired his brother for killing himself.’
Well before this Freud stopped seeing Behrens. ‘I couldn’t face him any more. I felt awfully uneasy about it, like I never have with girls. I was embarrassed by it. Generally, if you don’t see someone, it’s accepted; I think if you can’t help your behaviour, it makes it less manipulative. Self-pity and suicidal gestures horrified me, and Tim tried a lot.’ One of the twins, a talented writer, killed herself, he added. ‘I used to see the other one a bit. She had a child.’
As late as 1987 Behrens was airing his connection with Freud by putting on his cv: ‘1953–1963: protégé of Lucien [sic] Freud’. Perched on the mock-bamboo chair he came close to being the victim on the ducking stool, poised to topple backwards into the rags. Looking back he was to talk of Bacon and Freud as latterday flâneurs. ‘A Dandyish feeling: Bacon had something to do with Oscar Wilde and Lucian perhaps with Baudelaire.’ There was to be a rift. ‘My familiarity with Lucian dissolved and I left the country.’11 He went to live first in Italy then in Spain. While Frank Auerbach thought he was let down by Freud, who set him against his Slade tutors by encouraging in him a sense of superiority, Freud on the other hand thought that there was a basic lack in him.
‘When Mike [Andrews] had his show at the Hayward [in 1980] someone (Jane perhaps) went there early one day and heard a sobbing noise. It was Tim weeping and looking at the pictures. Then she had a cup of tea and went back. He was still weeping. At the Slade I believed in him.
‘I have a sort of prejudice about upper-class people doing art. They just don’t …’
Clarendon Crescent was a step down from Delamere Terrace. Not only was the house overshadowed by the blackened redbrick church opposite, much of the street was already emptied and boarded-up. Besides knocking down the partition wall to create elbow room, he tried compensating for lack of space by painting bigger. ‘The room was terribly narrow: I think that’s why I did those big heads. The change wasn’t radical, just a change of idiom.’ The loaded brush smoothed and pushed with a sweeping touch. Initially Freud thought the paintings of Tim Behrens overblown; it took forty years for him to acknowledge that they had certain strengths, not least a gulping panache. ‘I’ve always had a strong thing against doing things people might like, things where my ambitions weren’t tested.’ The broader handling gave Portrait II, in particular, a trenchant not to say pushy quality.
‘I was very conscious of things that were unsatisfactory to me in my work, rather than working for somewhere to aim my response. I was very aware of the terrible things I was doing in the process.’ Such paintings bulged in effect. ‘I became conscious of that and I think that it slackened the tension in some of the pictures. By that time I’d come to terms, to some degree, with working in this way and I didn’t feel debarred from any other ways in which I had worked.’
Such ‘other ways’ included the fine restraint shown in his first completed portrait of Jane Willoughby, the bare-shouldered Woman with Fair Hair – Portrait I (1961–2), a touching study of pensive character. In the next one, done immediately after, she turned her head to her right as though asserting her privacy a little. These paintings were as refined as anything he had previously done, but to test himself further he then determined to take on the entire person, full length and, for the first time, fully naked. ‘I think like a biologist,’ he said.
Two or three years previously he had started a painting of Anne Dunn: a nude against the light in his effortful sweeping manner. ‘It was done just before she married Rodrigo [in 1960]. I didn’t show it because it was unfinished: a document, but it didn’t look like a throw-out.’ An acceptable unfinished painting of a naked figure would be one with parts of the body unrealised maybe but with sufficient substantiality achieved from the top downwards to make its presence felt. ‘Until I started with nudes I started with the head and then I realised I very deliberately wanted the figure not to be strengthened by the head.’
He was beginning to find it easier to get people to sit for him. And the more of them he enticed or persuaded the more his days and nights became subject to routine. Henceforward there were to be fewer periods of distraction. He began working from two sisters, Lucia and Jane Golding. ‘Lucia was really wild, very witty, amazingly abandoned and beautiful in a curious way: very much at large. The other had this passion for me at one time then lived in Spain; I started this and then one of Susanna [Debenham], for a bit. Didn’t keep it.’ Susanna Debenham had been a girlfriend of Tim Willoughby and was then briefly with Tim Behrens before marrying the journalist Alexander Chancellor in 1964 and becoming involved with Freud, an involvement that was to last on and off the rest of his life.
When no one else could be prevailed upon to sit Freud used himself. Standing, shirt off, he looked down at himself in the mirror he had taken from the entrance hall at 20 Delamere Terrace. In two out of three portrait studies he inserted his left arm as a prop to the face and worked the paint as though modelling a bust, goading spontaneity.
Degas said, ‘I am more interested in talent at forty than in talent at twenty.’ Freud at forty was on the verge of full maturity. The three self-portraits from around then give us the protagonist emerged from the second round, his former accomplishment sloughed off, the odds increased, the strain showing. Unlike the heads of Jane Willoughby or Red Haired Man, these self-portraits, ‘very much at gambling time’, he acknowledged, were startlingly brusque. Looking at a mirror propped on an easel, he examined himself. How to represent reflection? How to reconcile the two unaligned sides of one’s face? How did Hals manage it? He tried a pummelled look.
‘Goya did everything – all the portraits and I think some of those still lives – in one go. Maybe not: maybe the sheep’s eye couldn’t be so glazed in one go.’