A hazy shot of the sun setting between the shoulder and legs of a Henry Moore reclining figure was used for the dust jacket of a lavish seven-guinea coffee-table book. ‘A new kind of book about a new situation,’ the blurb claimed, the situation being that, arguably, London had become as much an artworld capital as Paris and New York. Published in October 1965, Private View was designed by Germano Facetti in collaboration with Lord Snowdon – husband of Princess Margaret and ‘artistic adviser’ to the Sunday Times. Though it proved too expensive for the English market, it sold well in the United States, where Time Life were the publishers and where Time magazine was soon to carry a cover story on ‘Swinging London’.
Many of Snowdon’s photographs of dealers in their galleries and painters in their studios had already appeared in the Sunday Times colour supplement. He tried, he said, ‘to echo the mood of their work’, meaning that most of his photographs had the pace, the swinging pace, of bright Sunday journalism. Beyond Sir Kenneth Clark, suave in Albany, and Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld and Harry Fischer yelling at Frank Lloyd over a business letter, the sixties scene unfolded, a world of veteran Surrealists and pullovered Constructivists, Eduardo Paolozzi testing his strength against one of his colourful Moloch sculptures, Hockney dazzling and nearly every art school busy discussing life-class replacement and the desirability of fibreglass sculpture. Kokoschka, Epstein and Moore, Hepworth and Nicholson, Sutherland, the St Ives School, the ex-Royal College Pop Art squad, as they came to be labelled (Blake, Caulfield, Hodgkin, Kitaj), dealers (Erica Brausen, Helen Lessore), administrators (Lilian Somerville, John Rothenstein), critics (David Sylvester, John Berger) passed in review, commented upon by the Sunday Times art critic, John Russell, and Bryan Robertson, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Bacon’s face filled a page, full face. As Freud had painted him and Deakin had photographed him. He was among the pre-eminent. Freud, now in the middle generation, came later in the book, inserted between Roger Hilton and Frank Auerbach. ‘Few painters can be more hypnotic in close-up,’ the caption read.
Freud’s face over-exposed by Snowdon and enlarged to amazing graininess (‘looking’, as he said, ‘like a Mervyn Peake’) was the biggest head on any page. ‘I had a letter and so on and he came over and we talked. I didn’t want my room to be photographed so I said, “I’ve got a really good place,” and when he came to photograph me I took him round to the rag-and-bone man’s place under the canal-side arches.’ Over the page was a double spread, also grainy, of a deserted Clarendon Crescent: empty, that is, except for Freud in shirtsleeves with cigarette, standing in the middle of the street (‘didn’t know it was being taken, which makes it sort of good, surely?’), a van parked at a distance and, close enough to read the number plate, his own car parked outside a house with broken windows and crumbling windowsill. He could be a landlord collecting rents. ‘He has a habit of living by extremes,’ the caption says. ‘It happens that the car is a Rolls-Royce.’ The shots of him seated among heaps of old clothes as though he owned them were omitted.
John Russell summed up Freud in four paragraphs, three of them brief. He noted a capacity to talk his way out of anything.
As a serious painter in the mid-1960s Lucian Freud has almost every possible handicap. He bears, to begin with, one of the great names of this century. He has had the burden, hardly less heavy, of adulation in first youth. He is preoccupied, finally, with a kind of painting which is now widely regarded as disreputable.
By way of defence against all this, Freud virtually went underground: living in houses already overdue for demolition, seeing a very small number of people from the top and bottom ends of society, exhibiting his work rarely or never. In an art scene infiltrated by puffery and public relations, Freud retains an entirely radical attitude to the public.1
Freud edgy in the Crescent, waiting for Snowdon to stop fiddling around with his camera and then come with him to take a look at the rag-and-bone shop, is the classic outsider, stylishly aloof. For Private View this was the telling image and Woman with Fair Hair – Portrait II and Resting Nude – Portrait IV, the two paintings reproduced, in black and white, postcard size, were of little more than pathological interest. ‘They might have been painted in the condemned cell at midnight,’ John Russell suggested.2
The four McAdam children, Jane, Paul, Lucy and David, born between 1958 and 1964, were barely aware of having a father. Jane McAdam remembered Freud turning up one day when she was about seven. ‘Lucian – we always called him Lucian – suddenly appeared outside the house. “Jane, come here,” he said. “Go and get your mother.” He didn’t like to come in when we were around. We always thought he was famous, though he wasn’t really then. We had a booklet – the 1963 Marlborough catalogue – in the front room with pictures of naked people.’ That gave them something to relate to. ‘People would see it and change the subject.’ He never touched them, she said, but would look at them intently.3
Freud avoided involvement and stood aside from responsibility, even maintaining that Katherine McAdam had said to him that on no account should he tell anybody that the children were his. Which suited him. ‘I never saw them when they were children, mine or not is not the point. I got a covenant made when I hadn’t any money so that they always had some money. They don’t know that.’ After a while Jane Willoughby acted as his banker; although the McAdams never met her, it was she, he said, who saw to it that quarterly payments reached them.
Eventually Lucie Freud found out about the brood (Jane understood that her mother met Lucie Freud through Lucian) and for some time sent monthly cheques. ‘£15 usually,’ Paul McAdam said. ‘She was a real constant.’ Presents came for birthdays and Christmas. ‘Generous presents,’ Jane said. ‘She gave me a recorder. We saw her as a sort of fairy godmother, even with her persistent manner, which I got the brunt of.’ How she had learnt of their existence she did not know. ‘She turned up on the doorstep in Fernhead Road where we lived.’4 Freud regarded this development as yet another opportunity for his mother to do the right thing, excruciatingly so. ‘She was very altruistic and had a very noble motive. I kept out of the line of fire.’
Lucie Freud would collect Jane from Barrow Hill Juniors, round the corner from St John’s Wood Terrace, and wait with her until Paul arrived from the infant school, Robin’s Field; or else they would both go and meet him. ‘She insisted on seeing our reports. She went through them, as she had done with Lucian’s, and was keen to rectify my failings. “Your writing shows such willpower.” I loved the attention. She sent me dictionaries as a response to a comment on my spelling and an art book on Henri Rousseau by André Salmon: it came after a good report on art. She took me to tea every day after school. A Danish pastry every day. And she wanted a copy of my school photo, but it was when my teeth were dropping out and I wanted her to have one with teeth. “Please,” she said, insistent. We felt very secure with Lucie.’5
Paul McAdam was shy, introverted, bullied at school. On the way to meet Jane after school one day, when he was six or seven, he was knocked down by a lorry and taken to the St John and St Elizabeth Hospital in Grove End Road, St John’s Wood. ‘I was in a coma for a few weeks. Lucian was in the hospital too, apparently, having his appendix out. A parcel of toys came from someone, from the lorry driver, I thought, but how could he have known where I was? I soon did for the toys; I used to take everything apart. It was two years before I recovered.’6 His primary school headmistress got him a place at Woolverstone Hall near Ipswich, a boarding school with free places for pupils from the Inner London Education Authority deemed to need the benefit. ‘I went to this Georgian country house with horses in the fields then home to the council estate. I was homesick always.
‘All our security on our father’s side was through our grandmother, not Ernst. He was reassuring and friendly but it was mostly Lucie. It was her thing.’7
Freud reckoned that he did what he could, short of exposing himself to commitments of any sort. ‘I used to give Kay money and sometimes hadn’t any. And she said – and I hate being threatened, even if it’s something I want to do – “If you don’t, I’ll go and see your parents,” and so I didn’t, she did, and I didn’t see her again. I dreaded my mother talking to me about it.’ The last thing that he ever wanted any girlfriend of his to do. In 1966 she moved with the children to a council estate in Roehampton, South London, where, as far as he was concerned, that was that.
‘There was a massive rift when I was six or seven,’ Jane said. ‘We did a flit: my mother gave Lucie a forwarding address so that Lucian could find us if he wanted to.’8 He did not. She had gone to his mother.
Lucie Freud went on asking for school reports and sending money. ‘There seemed to be a sort of conversation going on through the type of presents she gave,’ Jane remembered. ‘We all looked forward to her monthly letters which always included her cash gifts. They arrived like clockwork in the same post on the same day each month. There was never any variation in about ten years and she never missed a month.
‘When I was eleven or twelve me and Paul went to see her. Trooped off to St John’s Wood Terrace. She had the table laid for visitors, cakes on the table, and poured the tea from a teapot with a minute long spout, her hand shaking. “How lovely to zee you,” she said. We talked about the past. Paul and I, we’d write letters talking about “Pops”. (He didn’t know.) When my mother was resentful sometimes it came out. “Write to your father,” suddenly she said.’9 The aquamarine ring that he had given her was lost and the black lacquer box, given her by Lucie Freud, got broken.
Rationalising his undomesticity, Freud used to say: ‘If you’re not there when they’re in the nest you can be more there later.’ He often talked about being unable to treat all children fairly. ‘Fairness is a disaster. You have to go by what’s needed at the time.’
‘I am still mystified by how L. managed to fit in the McAdam ménage with all the others,’ Anne Dunn said. ‘Poor girls perhaps, but why did the mother comply over such a long and fertile period? L’s sometimes “monstrous philosophy” of his life does mimic certain of Grandpa’s more worrying “betrayals” in his work and relationships.’10
Certainly Freud could be monstrously possessive over certain things dear to him. ‘I had a passion for those covers made out of Crimean War uniforms: red and white and black and insignia. I used to have them on my bed. It was folk art and I had a really good one and Kay said she’d mend it. Years and years and years went by and I said, “Could I have it?” But I didn’t get it back. Terribly odd, as I saw her very little.’
‘I’ve always thought of friendship as where two people really tear one another apart and perhaps in that way learn something from one another,’ Bacon said to David Sylvester in a broadcast interview for the BBC in 1966.11 At that time his friendship with Freud was still harmonious and close enough for him to send a telegram telling him how lonely he was and in need of his friendship. It was his responsibility for George Dyer that had become exasperating, an involvement that began in the autumn of 1963, as Freud remembered. ‘They met in a club and went home and Francis was terribly pleased as George gave him an enormous gold watch which he’d stolen the night before.’
Bacon painted Dyer swerving on a bicycle, intently shaving, shying away as though just slapped, paintings that had the stamp of ardour and affection then degenerating into impatience and, finally, drear remorse over the sad, sozzled cipher that Dyer eventually became. He came to treat him as a dramatic projection, his own worst enemy, victimised and puking, baring the exposed neck; unlike Freud, who painted him in friendly fashion. ‘All sorts of people liked George. He had been with a gang – the Richardsons, I think – he had to carry something for them and Francis said, “I can’t believe George could do it.” Useless.’ When he came round to Gloucester Terrace and sat for Freud, the idea was that this would occupy him regularly while Bacon was working. ‘Francis said to George: “Just let him do a head, not more: he’s only good at heads.”’ Head and upper body only, shoulders slumped, Man in a Blue Shirt is the engaging and inept petty criminal, a man appreciative of this prolonged and unaccustomed attention. ‘Really sympathetic. He wasn’t tough. He had a cleft palate, a strange voice, a hand-washing mania and a tidiness and cleaning-up mania: never so shocked as when he went into Isabel [Rawsthorne]’s flat. He was having lunch once with Francis and I and Hermione Baddeley, and her slave Joan Ashton Smith, who couldn’t understand George, because of his common accent, and his stutter. She wore a huge toque, as women then did; George took his fist and rather gently hit her on the hat, which went over her face.
‘George had never looked at any painting ever in his life. He’d been a sort of lookout man for a gang, a very bad one, and he saw a book of Hals, he looked at it, and his face absolutely lit up. He said, “What a marvellous idea, making people look like that.” He thought they were modern. That’s right really. George was always looking at books. He was very amused by things I took for granted: girls and whatever. His point of view was interesting. He was intrigued by some people and couldn’t understand why, or what, or how; or being patronised by Deakin, who called him Georgy Porgy.’
Once, in the Colony Room, Michael Andrews offered to buy Dyer a drink but he refused, insisting that he had more money than Andrews, as he understood him to be a painter. ‘What do you do?’ Andrews asked. ‘I’m a thief,’ he said. Living with Bacon, he had found, was demoralising; there was kindness and indulgence, but the work habits and lordly ways plus the masochistic requirements took it out of him. The relationship drained Bacon’s generosity. Freud regarded this as characteristic behaviour. ‘Francis used to say, “I take up with these people because they are strong and tough and then it turns out that I’m so much tougher than them.” He said to me it was hard being with George, with someone he couldn’t talk to, to do with ideas. He got terribly lonely. Queers do. Also Francis liked being knocked about a bit.’
Bacon and Dyer went to stay at Saint Estève in the South of France with Rodrigo Moynihan. Anne Dunn, by then married to Moynihan, was not there but, she remembered, their child Danny was, and his nanny. ‘Francis was cruel to George. The s/m started upstairs and the nanny fled to Rodrigo’s bed.’
Freud took Dyer up to Scotland with him to stay at Glenartney, Jane Willoughby’s Perthshire shooting lodge, passed on to her in a semi-derelict state (‘a ruin, shepherds sleeping on the floor’) after Tim Willoughby died. He painted him in an upstairs room at the end of a long corridor hung with antlers. ‘I took him there to get him off the drink. Francis was very odd about it. I said, “We had a nice time, played billiards,” and Francis said “No he didn’t: he was very cold there.” I think that he wanted to go on tormenting him in London. Going to Glenartney wasn’t remotely done in any secretive way, I talked to Francis about it and said that when things are bad I go up there quite a bit and work. I know it annoyed him. It was a bit like interfering in marriage rows. Francis said George was freezing there, but he could have asked for another blanket.
‘George was the sort of person who would be protective if someone was in a bad way. He was incredibly brave and had been knocked about by the police. He was completely unvenal and had proper feelings. He had one ambition: he wanted to have a newsagent’s; when he got more far gone Francis suggested it but it was no good by then; it was awfully tragic really: Francis stopped fancying him and George was in love with him. Francis got him these marvellous – horrible – grand flats, but he wanted to be with him. Francis hoped he’d get off with someone but, Francis said, under drink he was impotent and so people took him home and in the morning didn’t want him any more. He had DTs.
‘I took him down to Ian Fleming’s awful place, Sevenhampton – Ann must have liked him – and drove him back in the middle of the night because of his DTs. He saw things and was terrified. Francis would always hide his strong pills for blood pressure and stuff. “If I don’t hide them I know George would eat them all and I just can’t let him,” he said. And then he said “I’ve often thought of forgetting to hide them.” Francis was really concerned. George was so demoralised and jealous of Francis. It’s impossible to judge, but Francis was horrible to him; it’s very hard to behave well …’
Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud (1967) presented them as an odd pair on a bench in some eternal anteroom, stuck with one another behind a glass-topped table, heads irritatedly blurred, nothing to look at but an ashtray and a stuffed cat.12
There had been better times. In 1964 Freud, Bacon and Dyer went to stay in the Balmoral Hotel, Monte Carlo. ‘Francis invited me, so the three of us went, for a fortnight or ten days. We went swimming in the pool. Then there was a fuck-up as we lost all the money in the Casino.’ That left them idling at the hotel until relief came from London. ‘Miss Beston [Bacon’s assiduous minder at the Marlborough] was away and when Francis sent for more money only dud Gilbert [Lloyd] was there and he said, “How shall we send the money?” Miss B. would have just sent it. It was really hard and we had a couple of days without gambling money.’
Both Freud and Bacon regarded Monte Carlo as a little Emerald City, for Bacon a familiar resort representing glamour and risk, for Freud the place where his grandmother Brasch had enjoyed a historic stroke of luck. ‘My grandmother married this wealthy grain merchant, very much older than herself, a man of the world who travelled and decided to go to Monte Carlo for their honeymoon. In my grandmother’s journal she says her mother was really worried about this and sent her a letter: “Can’t sleep: a relation of yours ruined herself at Monte Carlo, lost a fortune. Promise me you won’t go to the Casino.” Grandfather after a delightful dinner said, “For a treat tonight we are going to the Salon Privé: I’ve often played roulette, very interesting game.” My grandmother thought OK, she wouldn’t tell her mother, dressed up to the nines and went to the Casino. Even so they said, “Have you got any identification?” Grandfather had his passport; Grandmother had nothing except, in her handbag, she had the worried letter from her mother and she got in on the strength of it, had three bets at the roulette on zero, which came up three times. Treble Zero. To her it was the most memorable occasion of her life.
‘Francis was rather obsessed with a mysterious house, high up, at the end of the bay; he said it was where Pavlov had done those experiments with monkeys, and he talked about this Russian who had information on Pavlov. Miss Beston told me that she and Francis were walking somewhere there once and he suddenly said, “This is where we lived,” meaning him and “the Russian”, a real influence pre-war. He said to Francis, in French, “You don’t know how to behave yourself,” meaning how to hustle like the boy in Warhol’s Flesh. He lived off his wits, anything negotiable – and women perhaps – and certainly had an affair with Francis. He made Francis feel that his strange eccentric behaviour needed style.’
Hanging around, waiting for money to arrive and the Casino to be open to him again, Bacon had fretted. ‘Francis couldn’t swim or walk, or only for short distances, and I wanted to draw George and Francis told him I wasn’t any good at bodies, only heads, therefore not to do it.’ Accomplishment being in his view decorum, he was quick to decry aptitude. Not that he ever badmouthed Freud as witheringly as he dealt with those he really despised. As when he met Michael Ayrton who had asserted in a broadcast on ‘The Nature of Drawing’ that he, Bacon, couldn’t draw. ‘Is drawing what you do?’ he asked him. Pause. ‘I wouldn’t want to do that.’
To Bacon, drawing, Ayrtonic at worst, was something he liked to think he needn’t be bothered with, it being – one way and another – the pursuit of stylishness if not exactitude. For him there was plenty to be done by other means, by shadow play and calculated swipe. He insisted that the reflections of onlookers and splashes of light added extra layers of accident and obscurity to his pictures. Freud too liked having his paintings glazed, not so much to gain reflections but (particularly when the quality of non-reflective glass was improved to near-invisibility) because of the protection it affords. ‘Mine is a substitute for varnish, plus keeping the London dirt from seeping into the paint when it’s drying. I like people to be aware of the form and not the PAINT, which glass, by its nature, obliges them to do, to some degree and that suits me.’
In 1967, the year Bacon was awarded the International Rubens Prize, he and Freud went to Paris to see an Ingres exhibition at the Petit Palais. Why Ingres? ‘My choice not his,’ Freud said. ‘The way he liberated pictures seemed so marvellously 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.’ He quoted Baudelaire on Ingres and the nude. ‘He depicts them as he sees them, for it appears that he loves them too much to wish to change them; he fastens upon their slightest beauties with the keenness of a surgeon, he follows the gentlest sinuosities of their line with the humble devotion of a lover.’13 Freud saw in Ingres what Baudelaire had observed of him: ‘His method is not one and simple, but rather consists in the use of a succession of methods.’ To be economical and incisive was to be more exacting, ultimately, than to be compulsively spontaneous-looking like any Bacon.
At a birthday dinner for the novelist Angus Wilson in the early seventies, Freud was seated next to the novelist Margaret Drabble. She turned to him. ‘“So you are an admirer of Angus’ fiction.” “I like him, not the books.”’ She looked puzzled. Freud had first come across Angus Wilson at the Horizon office thirty years before. ‘“How can you dislike his work?” “Because it reminds me of Zola.” “Yes, Zola probably is his hero.” “I don’t like Zola. Full of false feeling.”’
For all the ‘tremendous drama, excitement, sex and passion’ of La Bête humaine, Freud was unconvinced. ‘The characters aren’t real. I felt very uneasy about that type of realism.’ Not Zola, not Dickens, not caricature and stereotypes for the true realist. Henry Mayhew was more to his taste, and of course Balzac.
‘Balzac is completely real, even when he is just saying what his characters spent on things.’
Angus Wilson, on the other hand, tended to splurge adjectives (‘“This is really wonderful,” cried John, with extra hearty laughter, pushing back his curly hair with a carefree boyish gesture’). The equivalent in portrait painting is the showy detail – presentation overriding particulars – and, being more susceptible than any other genre to whim and ingratiation, it interested Richard Hamilton for a while in the period leading up to his 1970 Tate retrospective. Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland, a mix of mask and newsprint image begun shortly after Gaitskell died in 1963, was a vengeful death notice indicating disapproval of Gaitskell’s attachment to nuclear weaponry as political instrument. A year later Hamilton turned his attention to celebrity constructs. A layout pad for Time magazine covers came into his possession, enabling him to pose himself in sketchy mock-up as a Time chosen one of world renown.
Deconstructive gambits such as these were of no interest to Freud. ‘I did find, less than I do now, Richard Hamilton oddly boring in the way that he kept out of his work the thing that I was trying to get in, while keeping himself in. Which I thought self-serving. Every now and then things came alive. At the Robert Fraser Gallery I saw a lot of his photographs of Whitley Bay.’ These were enlargements from a postcard of the beach at Whitley Bay in which half-tone dots vied with blobby bathing caps. Magnified beyond legibility, identities become indecipherable. As was also demonstrated the following year in Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s elaborate take on fashionable photography, grainy photography and Swinging London. Another Hamilton project involved persuading colleagues ranging from Bacon to Joseph Beuys, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Gilbert & George to take Polaroid snaps of him, the idea being that these would be delegated self-portraits with Hamilton provoking his fellow artists to self-parody. ‘Lunching in Islington, he gave Francis a camera and said, “Take a photo.” And as he did he jogged it to make it more a Bacon.’
Inexhaustibly circumspect, Hamilton dissected the aims, the means and the foibles of portraiture. Bacon on the other hand endeavoured to out-Bacon himself or, as he put it, ‘Slightly complicate the game’. Whereas Freud, possessed by the need to have the sitter present throughout, could not detach himself from his belief in character, real character, face to face, as the working conditions. ‘The act of sitting, which takes a long time in my case: that constitutes a connection, obviously.’
Bacon’s paintings of Freud from the 1960s, notably his 1964 Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach and his 1965 Portrait of Lucian Freud and groups of Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud, all closely informed by Deakin’s photographs of him, were systematically dramatised in the making. Bacon amplified the feel of shapes, exaggerating how it feels to sit, to slump or to fidget to avoid a crick in the neck and cramp behind the knee. He loved a good whiplash assertion of fellow feeling. This often involved interchanged body parts. ‘He gave me his garters sometimes, and huge voluptuous ankles, which I never had.’
For Freud portraiture was truth-telling and all-embracing. Where Bacon could only feel that he had to animate and quash, as though haranguing his every proponent into submission, Freud used people and things even-handedly once it occurred to him that they interested him; after that it was up to him to make something of them. And then in the mid-sixties the time came when he began seeing the face in the mirror not only as himself heroic, or himself moodily distanced in a hand mirror propped on a chair, but as himself related to others: himself parental, albeit detachedly so.
Placing on the floor the mirror salvaged from 20 Delamere Terrace, he studied his reflection from below. At that angle the ceiling swung into view and the light fittings floated overhead as though flown in from some recent Bacon. After leaving, barely begun, an initial painting of himself in the looming space he persevered with a second version into which he inserted Ali and Rose Boyt as diminutive onlookers keeping company with his towering image. Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait) is the closest he ever came to overtly emulating a Bacon tableau. The children served as markers, stuck into the bottom left-hand corner like family snaps in a living-room mirror. Their incongruity may be variously interpreted (the artist’s hand is clenched as though holding puppet strings) but essentially they were posed as duplicates of the son and daughter of Seneb the dwarf in a 6th Dynasty family group reproduced in Freud’s constant resource, his much thumbed Geschichte Ägyptens. ‘They sat there. That Egyptian tomb idea rather.’
Freud, foreshortened, holding himself stiffly in a blue-grey jacket worn without a shirt, substitutes himself for little Seneb, the electric light harsh on his forehead and glowing in dimmed reflection over his shoulder. The ceiling above is no mere background. Filling the mirror, it contains distance. ‘I used a palette knife to make the air round me.’
‘When we try to examine the mirror in itself,’ Nietzsche said, ‘we eventually detect nothing but the things reflected by it. When we wish to grasp the things reflected, we touch nothing but the mirror. This is the general history of knowledge.’ A mirror image, ready flattened and detached, contained on a surface, presents distortions as fact. Similarly, in his Geschichte Ägyptens the dense photogravure plates take the viewer back a few millennia to the anonymous yet idiosyncratic heads of sculptors from an unearthed workshop and to the heads of pharoahs, one of whom, Akhenaten, was arguably the first human being to have his individual image – his true portrait – propagated, potentially, for all time.
Rose remembered grumbling at having to stay still, their astonishment at the array of cakes laid out in the teashop afterwards and their amazement at their father taking a single bite out of several cakes. Liberating, they felt.
In August 1965 Andrew Wordsworth, a classics master at Bryanston, wrote on behalf of the school’s Da Vinci Society asking if Freud would care to come and give a talk. ‘Because you are the Bryanston painter whose work I admire most and this situation hasn’t changed in the past sixteen years.’ He enclosed a stamped addressed postcard but no answer came.
By this time Freud was establishing something of a routine, proceeding with painting by daylight and painting by artificial light, day shifts and night shifts. The need to find and secure sitters devoted enough and reliable enough to enable him to work meant that he was constantly on the lookout, readily on the prowl. A neighbour in Gloucester Terrace was out one day with her son, a golden-haired child, and Freud, whom she did not know, stopped and touched the boy’s hair, assessing it. She stood by, Freud walked on. Nothing doing on that occasion but potential sitters, he told himself, could be sighted anywhere. Obviously Colony Room characters – Deakin, Harry Diamond – were available; amenable, that is, to putting in the hours for no more than the price of a drink or two. But keeping them coming regularly and on time was another matter. That he was not necessarily friendly with such sitters was not a drawback. ‘People who irritate me: that has sometimes helped. The dislike can be very strong, but I’m very strong. You can dislike two people in two different ways. And what they are there for is so interesting.’ The desire to be painted, he recognised, may indicate anxiety to please and lack of self-esteem while vanity, the obvious motive, is a shortcoming in that it demands indulgence or endorsement. Bernard Breslauer, another Colony Room regular at that time, seemed desperate for attention, Freud thought: ‘An animal of a peculiar kind.’ Breslauer was an eminent antiquarian book dealer; he bought a painting from Frank Auerbach’s first Marlborough show in 1965 and at the same time commissioned a portrait from Freud who, while protesting that he never worked to order, was prepared to oblige when financially pressed.
‘I did it as he looked rather like my brother Stephen. Father had been a book dealer in Berlin, an antique book dealer in New York. He was so horrible I changed the picture: I put a jersey on him to make his blubby chins more blubby and chinnish. He took the picture to Muriel’s and passed it round and they said how cuntish it was. He told people he destroyed it, but I don’t think that he did. [He did.] I saw him in the street in New York once, dressed in tartan, and bald.’
News having reached the Bayswater end of Gloucester Terrace that a well-known portrait painter was living at the council-owned end, Freud was approached to paint a neighbour, a brigadier-general with a scar down his face, which tempted him. A fee of £500 was agreed but proved more than the regiment was prepared to pay. David Somerset at the Marlborough steered several clients his way, Charles Clore’s son Alan, for example. ‘He backed Polanski and others in films. David said, “Have you thought of painting Alan?” I said no. He was always preening his hair. He said, “Meet him: he longs to be drawn. Dinner at L’Étoile.” Alan, preening his hair, said, “I’d really like you to paint me.” “OK,” I said, “but could you pay me in advance?” “Yes,” but he wrote a cheque in pencil. Came to sit and I did lots but rubbed it out. Never came again. He said to David, “You know it was awfully good, but he destroyed it.” So I got £350 for one sitting, and that was quite a bit then.’
Commissions from persons prepared to sit for as long as it took and, ideally, pay in advance were not to be spurned, particularly when he was in urgent need of ready money. There arose, for instance, the possibility of painting an Oxford college head.
‘I had a letter from a chemist at Jesus College Oxford and it said, “We had a discussion about having our Principal painted, and we had a Fellows’ dinner to decide, and I hope you’ll be pleased to hear the choice fell on you.” I wrote back and said I’ve hardly ever done any commissions – successful ones – as I need to work in my room with people I know, not work from a stranger in another place.
So it seems not realistic. I wondered could I see Dr Christie before making up my mind.
‘I got a letter back. “We appreciate your difficulties because Dr Christie would get upset if you decided no. But I have an ingenious way round the problem. Once every few years we have distinguished visitors to dine at Jesus, so we could invite you and place you strategically where you could see Dr C.” So I went to Oxford, had a wonderful time. There are Elizabethan portraits in the dining hall, and a Henry Lamb of a blind Principal with four pairs of binoculars. Dr Christie was sort of Scottish, youngish-looking, and a bit of an old woman. That’s an insult to nearly every old woman.’
John Traill Christie, Principal of Jesus from 1950 to 1967, was, the budding poet Dom Moraes had found, ‘a very kind man’. Christie had admitted Moraes as an undergraduate, against advice, and supported him against most of the senior common room when his turbulent relationship with Henrietta Law, to whom he was later married, interfered with his studies; he had even attended a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg, arranged by Moraes, and though shocked had remained well disposed.
Freud agreed to do the painting. ‘I wrote that I’d have a try but must do it in London. “Right,” was the reply. “He comes to stay with his daughter.”’ The daughter, Catherine Porteous, happened to be working as Kenneth Clark’s secretary on the BBC series Civilisation and she told him about the proposed portrait. ‘K. Clark was both impressed and surprised; he knew my father slightly as they had been at Winchester together.’ Father and daughter arranged to meet Freud for lunch at the Great Western Hotel and took a corner table, Freud worrying about whether he would be turned out for not wearing a tie. ‘They seemed to get on well: seemed to spark each other off. I remember it being jolly and fun.’ Shortly after that, sittings began. ‘Dr Christie arrived with his daughter, sat down and never stopped talking. “And now, Freud, those paintings made of dots and dashes: what’s so special about them?” He’d been headmaster of Westminster and Repton. He came three times, talked about Dom Moraes, it was talk, talk, or down he went, fast asleep. And then I wrote and said, “Terribly sorry, I’m afraid I can’t do it. Magnificent as Dr Christie looks, I can’t work with him in the room.”’ Catherine Porteous agreed in retrospect that yes, her father did talk a lot. ‘But Freud could easily shut him up. He genuinely wanted to know. My father said he kept taking down drawings and chucked them in the basket and being a scrupulous nineteenth-century figure he didn’t take one when Freud was out of the room. The excuse, my father understood, was “the paint won’t run”.’ And that, Freud thought, was the last he would see of Christie.
‘Two or three days later, bang on the door and there he was in top hat and spats. “Your letter”, he said, “played into the hands of my enemies.” I couldn’t reply. Then he said, “No hard feelings, Freud … What’s the matter with me? Nothing, you say? Come off it …”’
Word went round the college that Freud disliked Christie and wasn’t prepared to continue, so the commission was transferred to Peter Greenham ARA who painted him in subdued tones, to the satisfaction of the fellows of Jesus.
‘I can’t be pressed really. It put me off doing anything like it again.’
A double portrait involving characters he knew well preoccupied him instead: two heads set together in much the same pose as A Man and his Daughter but with the charged air of a Hals marriage portrait. Michael Andrews and June was a non-conversation piece: two heads, two characters, mutually protective. Andrews, his stare averted, plays his part with resigned concentration. ‘The success of the marriage’, Freud remarked, ‘was to do with her outraging his sensibility non-stop. His gritting of his teeth was the same as being fondled.’ Andrews admired Freud as a painter, considering him second only to Bacon, and sometimes went out drinking with him. Freud found it hard to get drunk, try though he might, and so drank little; Andrews got drunk easily, which was why he was arrested the night Tim Behrens married Harriet Hill.
Freud and Bacon called one evening at Duncan Terrace, where Mike Andrews and June lived. She remembered it clearly. ‘We were having a screaming row. The bell went. It was Francis and Lucian. “We called round to see you.” “June and I are having a screaming row,” said Mike. “Oh are you?” said Francis. “Maybe we can be of help.” Mike kept him out. He’d have had Mike and I killing each other. It took the sting out of it, being interrupted.’
Freud tried working from the two of them together initially then scraped June out and did her separately; she ran the Perfume Centre in Burlington Arcade at the time, and sat for him after work. ‘Lucian would pick me up and drive me home to paint me. Once, outside his place, a man in leathers got off his bike and said, “Mr Frood?”
‘“Who wants to know?”
‘“I do,” and he tried to stick a paper in his hands, but Lucian kept his hands behind his back, so he stuffed the paper in Lucian’s jacket and left and Lucian said, “We are going to see Ted,” and drove somewhere, and I sat in the car while he spoke to Ted. Then I went off home with him, changed into the dress for the picture and sat. Mike told me to tell him that after a day’s work I could only sit for two hours and I noticed, as the two hours were up, that he would start to paint more dramatically, all moves and pressure, to stop me saying anything. I said I was hungry once and he went off and came back with a tooth mug with toothpaste on the rim, sloshed it full of neat whisky and said, “Drink that and shut up.”’
Experienced though she was at coping with men in the clubs, June was nervous of Freud. Every time her arm slipped off the back of the sofa he would shout and during breaks he would edge up to her, she said, and she would calculate the distance to the window and tell herself that if he made a pass at her she could take a running jump. The room was on the first floor so at worst she would only break a leg. Ted appeared. He and Freud were going gambling and he suggested dropping June home. ‘We haven’t got time,’ Freud said. ‘We’ll drop her at Paddington station and she can get a taxi. I can’t bear her company for another minute. She’s been moaning.’ One night he did drive her back to Duncan Terrace where she saw that the light was still on so she asked him if he would like to come in and say hello to Mike. He said no. ‘I’d like to but I couldn’t stand another second of your company.’
‘Another time a police siren was going when Lucian was driving me home. He jumped the lights. I said, “Pull over,” and he did, and I suddenly saw a load of purple hearts on the dashboard. Police got out and came towards the car and I grabbed the bottle and put it in my bag. I thought if he got lippy they’d have him.’ Amphetamines, or uppers, were a boost, Freud found, when working long hours, or being otherwise hectic. ‘I used to have purple hearts, as Mike did. Dr Moynihan would dish them out: he was always very nice in that way. Mike and Frank had them. Liked staying up all night. I must have stopped very soon because I had some left for a very long time. Didn’t need them, got them just for Mike. I never slept much.’
The nights Freud drove June home, Michael Andrews would have been working on Good and Bad at Games, a set of three paintings done between 1964 and 1968 in which he showed three filmic takes, as it were, of a nocturnal gathering by a hotel pool with each foreground occupied by a dozen or so figures representing friends and aunts, some bloated, some spindly, some palpably Giacometti-ish, their size varying from picture to picture depending on how they were perceived, or how they felt about themselves on social occasions. Among them were his Slade friends Vic Willing and Craigie Aitchison (both of whom Freud strongly disliked). Sitting for Freud, Andrews nursed the thought of body bulk correlating to social skills, conscious throughout that he was being worked from as never before. The painting, completed in 1966, is primarily a portrait of him. Freud caught Mike’s long-nosed angularity, his near cross-eyed concentration on keeping still under the overhead light whereas June is toned down, her arm and hand perfunctorily laid on the sofa’s shoulder. ‘She is in a sense almost a pendant,’ Freud said. Mike’s intent expression cuts across her thwarted expression, he being the guarded figure while she watches out for him. She smoulders; he brings his willpower to the sitting and a characteristic perturbed resolve.
Ten years earlier, in ‘Some Thoughts on Painting’, Freud had remarked on the impact people make, filling the air. ‘The effect in space of two different human individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and an electric light bulb.’ Andrews talked of wanting to feel, when he painted, as if he was ‘placing the brush on the place on the real thing’. Freud put his finger on the congenial disparity between the two.
Michael Andrews and June went to a bookie, Benou Miller. ‘I gave him it in return for a debt. His place was in Dering Street, off Bond Street: first on the right “B Miller Turf Accountants”. All the villains knew him. I owed £600 or £700 and said, “I can give you this instead.” “Fuckin’ horrible thing,” he said. “If you believe in me, keep it,” I said. But he put it into an auction and Jane bought it for £654, only a bit less than I’d said. He could have got more and when told he said, “You’ve made my fucking day.”’
Before finishing the double portrait Freud began working from a new sitter. ‘I met her at a party at Sheridan’s, my ex-brother-in-law. [Sheridan Dufferin, a backer of the Kasmin gallery.] I was a frustrated painter of nudes and wanted to do something about it. She sat mostly during the day, once she’d stopped being a nanny.’ Penelope Cuthbertson was twenty-three when Freud first knew her and game for being painted first clothed then naked on a sofa, her hair dishevelled, her lips parted as if to spout a trendy mid-sixties mock-cockney accent, the soles of her feet grubby from the bare boards of Gloucester Terrace. Evelyn Waugh (who had been besotted with her half-Dutch mother, Teresa Jungman, one of the original Bright Young Things) had remarked, on seeing her a few years earlier, that she needed a haircut and elocution lessons.
‘A sweet girl,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘She worked with the kindergarten in Brunswick Square where Jake [Auerbach’s son (b. 1958)] attended and spoke very highly of Jake as the only infant with whom one could have an intelligent conversation. Lucian thought there were lots of girls like her, very very nice. With the exception of somebody who cleaned for him while her boyfriend was in jail, they tended to be upper-class girls, available in the sense that they thought he was exactly the sort of person they read about in their literature classes: Byron and Heathcliff and D. H. Lawrence and Eugene Marchbanks, the young poet/lover in Shaw’s Candida. Also the name Freud must have seemed a bit like a title. And also they had time on their hands, so if he called them at eleven o’clock in the morning they’d be ready.’
Having had Girl on a Sofa photographed Freud decided to dispense with the dress; he then had the painting reproduced as ‘earlier version’ and ‘final version’ in the catalogue for his 1968 Marlborough exhibition, the removal of the mini-dress relating her to a Hogarth ‘Before’ and ‘After’ deflowering sequence. And, for that matter, to Goya, whose Naked Maja was, Freud maintained, a private boast. ‘It’s not “Oh, there’s Gertie without her dress on”; you don’t feel the clothed one is better: you do get a slight feeling of “I’ve done it.”’
Around this period he was enjoying the gossip and memorising favourite diatribes in the journal of the Goncourt brothers. ‘Woman’s body is not immutable. It changes with each civilization, age and way of life …’ And ‘The person who does not paint the woman of his time will not endure.’14 He completed seven paintings of Penny Cuthbertson (‘I did think “I’m going to do a whole lot of them”’) between 1966 and 1970; they were transformative; there was a dawning assurance in the way she presented herself and the way he painted her, there on the floor, first awake then sleeping, confidently relaxed, her skin lustrous, her status as a ‘nude’ no big deal. Sitting up, as Girl Holding a Towel (1967), fist clenched and looking askance, she was the practised accomplice, inured to posing casually.
Reviewing the 1968 Marlborough show in the New Statesman, Robert Melville had wondered about the identity of Naked Girl (1966). ‘Who is the model? She is very lean and has straggling, straw-coloured hair and to make matters worse, the artist’s ruthless concern with optical realism gives the rib-cage in the foreshortened nudes the look of a nasty swelling …’ Not being able to put a name to Penny Cuthbertson’s rib cage may well have frustrated Melville, yet arguably talk of ‘optical realism’ as an injurious mode was a greater bar to appreciation than Freud’s practice of rarely naming sitters. ‘Partly to do with privacy, but it also seems to me to be pretty irrelevant. Portraits are all personal.’
‘I get my ideas for pictures from watching the people I want to work from moving about naked,’ Freud told John Russell. ‘I want to allow the nature of my model to affect the atmosphere, and to some degree the composition.’15 Each painting being an expression of some degree of intimacy, each was dependent, to some degree, on the complicity of each person involved; that meant there had to be confidence. ‘Of course a naked model is going to feel vulnerable,’ he told me once. ‘The naked person is more permanent.’
Anonymity is intriguing. And titles such as The Woman in White and Portrait of a Lady stimulate curiosity. Similarly, the unnamed sitter lives by appearance alone. Asked if it is not worth knowing that Hogarth’s portrait of a burly sea captain represents in fact Captain Thomas Coram, founder-benefactor of the Foundling Hospital and founder of Nova Scotia, Freud’s answer was that one doesn’t need to know. To name is to advertise: ‘rather like carrying material – canvas or frame or picture – down the street’. And even plain titles carry implications. Woman in a Fur Coat (1967–8) was Jane Willoughby in the same chair as Penny Cuthbertson in Girl Holding a Towel, who was also Girl in a Fur Coat. (‘When I did this I thought I was doing a nude.’) All wording is loaded: ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ demarcate, while ‘fur coat’ may seem to art historians to incite comparisons with Rubens and ‘towel’ with Degas. A good title, Freud concluded, speaks volumes. ‘I still haven’t read Conrad. My father’s yellow-bound edition, which I knew from Dartington: I tried to read them as Francis was keen on Heart of Darkness, but I still haven’t, except his marvellous titles: Nigger of the Narcissus, Lord Jim. Had he read further he might have come upon Conrad’s wordy but bracing raison d’être: ‘The unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth.’
‘I always had this idea of being able to have an escape. Naturally I’ve always had a feeling about covering my tracks.’
Like Sickert and Matthew Smith, Freud took rooms, not so much to work in but for use as boltholes. ‘Hideaways, really. I had several rooms I could use in people’s houses, and a place up Leman Street, Whitechapel, over a café.’ One was near Holloway Prison: ‘a place in Camden Road, a council flat, which I got for Bernardine. Two rooms in a rather rough street, a real dump, up by the Brecknock pub, with evil-smelling stairs like old bacon, a scarlet-carpeted room and a kitchen – bathroom with red and blue glass. Bernardine didn’t like Camden Road as Bella got burnt badly there; there were perfectly nice marble fireplaces, but hippies had horrible stoves with doors and put one in and Bella got burnt on it. It was a controlled rent, £140 a year, so I took it after she left, in 1965. Bernardine wanted to follow I Ching (3rd edition), and why she went was all to do with that: certain conventions. Like “never say no to a child”. She took the children to Ladbroke Grove, another flat.’
Freud liked the Camden Road flat and decided to do it up. ‘Rather well. I had “The Buggers” there, and my red curtains, and the bed with straw ends, and a check table, which had been in Clifton Hill. (Kitty took everything of mine except the table, which was actually hers.) He also had some drawings there by Frank Auerbach. ‘Modest exterior, lush interiors’, a girlfriend remembered. An interior decorator was employed to do it. ‘He put brown paper on the walls, an Aubusson carpet, great chandelier, beautiful gilt chairs.’ He was pleased with it after nearly five years of more or less slum conditions. ‘I liked having that flat clean, like a hotel room, so Wilfred, my crazy Jamaican cleaner, a kind of part-time janitor to blocks of flats, went there once or twice a week. Wilf liked polishing and ironing and stitching; he was a lady’s maid who happened to be a man, loved bangles and uniforms, loved packing a suitcase and making breakfast. He had started working for James Mason as a kind of butler. He’d go to Golders Green and mingle with funeral people, when he wasn’t working; and he had an absolute passion for Lena Horne: signed photos everywhere in his flat in Sutherland Avenue. “Black Bess”, Muriel called him.
‘Wilf only liked white men. I sent him round to clean at Penelope’s, near by. “You know I don’t like working for women,” he said, “I think it’s degradin’. ” But he liked working for Jane – her title – and he’d never nick things. He was childish. “Can I have this?” he’d say.’ Freud let him have Gerald Wilde drawings, leftovers from Wilde’s stay at Abercorn Place. ‘I had good ones I gave away to Wilf: one of Brighton Pier.’ He found him sad. ‘Older than he seemed: he dyed his hair, as Negroes can. There was a lot of tart’s morality: shocked by someone not being properly dressed. Slightly Noël Coward. The place he loved was New York, but he wasn’t allowed there as he’d been caught for hustling. But he got on well, had good manners. A tiny bit like my grandmother, he was a grand retired actress but did all right. When these old boys died in the South of France they left him something.’
He didn’t paint Wilf. ‘I couldn’t. I liked him but he was a bit irritating; there wasn’t that instinctive understanding of difference.’
A Slade student, Brian Sayers, who was taken to see the flat one afternoon together with a friend of his, another student, was impressed by the set-up. ‘We went up the stairs to the top like something out of The Lady Killers, an elderly woman opened her door on the way up and called, “Is that you, Mr Freud?” Clearly keeping an eye on his flat for him.’16
Fully furnished and regularly tidied – John Russell described it as ‘a hallucinatory likeness of a room in a French provincial hotel’ – the Camden Road flat amounted to domestic quarters, the first that Freud had had since childhood and marriages.
‘It was quite nice to get away from Delamere for a night or two, and when I was in Gloucester Terrace.’ But after a few years he had to give it up. People on the ground floor had complained to the council that he was hardly using the place except for assignations. ‘The Camden weekly paper said “Millionaire’s artist brother keeps luxury flat in Camden Road. Appears in a Bentley late at night, with beautiful girls, whereas a family with eight children need somewhere to live.” I was in a dangerous position: the house was bought by the council to demolish but I still had Gloucester, so – God – I suddenly had two council flats. I told Camden, magnanimously, I didn’t need rehousing. So I moved out, and took out a fireplace.’