The Louche Life of Lucian Freud

I am reading William Feaver’s monumental biography of Lucian Freud. Volume One, Youth, covers the years 1922 to 1968.

I am reading William Feaver’s monumental biography of Lucian Freud. Two volumes reduced by Waterstones to £8 each. Unfortunately, when I went back to get volume two it had gone so I have bought it for my Kindle.

Volume One, Youth, covers the years 1922 to 1968.

I have long been fascinated by memoirs relating to the artistic Bohemia of London and Dublin in the 1950s. Particularly entertaining are two books by Anthony Cronin: a novel, The Life of Riley and his memoir Dead as Doornails. I have been to McDaid’s in Dublin and the French House in Soho but have not met any of the major protagonists. Having watched a number of documentaries featuring them I don’t think I would want to know them up close.

Beginnings

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. He moved with his Jewish family to England in 1933, when he was ten years old to escape the Nazis. He attended Dartington Hall School in Devon, and later Bryanston School for a year before being expelled for disruptive behaviour. He became a British citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War. Freud’s career as an artist began in 1943 when the poet and editor Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu commissioned Freud to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore called The Glass Tower.

See my article on Tambimuttu published in Himal Southasian in Kathmandu.

https://www.himalmag.com/archives/the-prince-of-fitzrovia

Triangle

In the 1940s, Freud and fellow artists Adrian Ryan and John Minton were in a homosexual triangle. Freud never considered himself to be gay, although he told a girlfriend in 1977 that the one man he really wanted to go to bed with was the jockey, Lester Pigott. There seems something more than a little dubious about his relationship with Stephen Spender.

Mark Gatiss made a BBC documentary about Minton.

Cider with Laurie

Freud had an intense relationship with Lorna Wishart, a married woman eleven years older than him. Her husband ran the left wing publishing house Lawrence and Wishart which formed in 1936 through the merger of Martin Lawrence, the Communist Party's press, and Wishart Ltd, a family-owned left-wing and anti-fascist publisher.

Lorna was also having an affair with Laurie Lee. In his diary, Lee described Lucian as “dark and decayed-looking”, adding: “This mad unpleasant youth appeals to a sort of craving she has for corruption. She would like to be free of it but can’t. Meanwhile, she says she loves me…Oh, I can’t express the absolute depths to which this has brought me . . . She goes to him when I long for her and finds him in bed with a boyfriend. She is disgusted but she still goes to see him.”

Marriage

After the affair with Lorna, Freud went on to marry, in 1948, her niece Kitty Garman, the illegitimate daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein's. Kitty was the model for some of his best-known paintings of the Forties.

He was married to Kitty for four years and, for about the same length of time, to Lady Caroline Blackwood.

When he was around fifteen years old, Freud worked in a painting studio with the Vorticist, William Roberts. The model in the sculpture room was Joan Rhodes, who later made a career as a strongwoman on the variety stage. Freud recalled flicking small balls of clay at “her shapely form”. Freud had pursued Caroline frantically and his search took him to Madrid where he encountered Joan Rhodes again in 1953. He knew Caroline’s door number but not the street and knocked on all the 85s. He stayed at a noisy hotel on the Gran Via. Joan Rhodes happened to be lodging there as well with a crowd of circus people.

Being half-Spanish, Joan Rhodes knew Madrid well and they wandered about together. “In the end, about the fourth weekend, I found Caroline. I got some clue through her cousin Daphne. Quite romantic. She was quite weak.” Lucian and Caroline got married. It did not turn out well. She married another mad genius, Robert Lowell, and had an affair with Bob Silvers, founding editor of the New York Review of Books (with whom I once had an email conversation, during which he lied to me very charmingly).

Man with Bicycle Has a Lot of Love to Give

The Greek sculptor, Vassilakis Takis, who knew him well, estimated that Lucian had at least 500 lovers but never committed himself to any single woman for long. He danced with Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret. There were at least 14 children and probably more. Geordie Gregg reckons 30. More than Boris Johnson. There were many abortions – more than one to the same woman.

Haveth Childers Everywhere

At the end of Feaver’s very long book I was somewhat unclear which children were which and who the mothers were. In 1961, he fathered three children (Bella, Isobel and Lucy) by three different women. “Don't you realise I had a bicycle?”

Suzy Boyt had four of his children – Isobel (Ib), Susie, Rose, Alexander. Freud also considered Kai, the son of Boyt and another man, to be his own. Katherine McAdam was a teenage student of fashion at the St Martin’s School of Art in the Fifties. He was an already successful artist, married to Kitty Garman with two daughters Annie and Annabel. Katherine was the mother of Lucy Jane, David and Paul. Bella and Emma were the daughters of Bernadine Coverley. Frank was the son of Celia Paul.

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

Freud took many risks: driving dangerously and running people over, making love to women while their husbands were in the next room, consorting with gangsters. Gambling put him in a constant state of tension. In 1983, Lucian was banned from most racetracks as a bad debtor but he was undeterred and used disguises to enter race meetings. Whenever he made money from selling his pictures in the earlier part of his career, he gambled wildly, often losing the lot. When he had run up mountainous debts, death threats were made by unsavoury lenders. He would pay what was owed, when he could. When he began to make vast sums for his paintings, he gave up gambling.

Freud often gambled at Esmeralda’s Barn, the Kray twins’ Knightsbridge club, and dined with them on a regular basis. Freud was rumoured to have owed the Krays half a million. He told them he would pay them, but he couldn’t pay them if they killed him. Freud’s friend Francis Bacon was also friendly with the Krays. In his conversations with Feaver, Freud downplayed the badness of the Krays. He said they were small-time compared to the Richardsons. Eddie Power was amused that the Krays claimed credit for killings that he had done. Power invited Freud to a party “and all the guests were murderers and had done at least 15 years inside. They all knew each other.” I recall being in a similar situation at Charlie’s Club in Spring Gardens, Manchester in 1971. Freud also played cards with slum landlord Peter Rachman.

Sleazy Old Soho

Several unsavoury types mingled at the Colony Room Club in Soho, (“a concentration of camp”) presided over by the foul-mouthed and aggressive Muriel Belcher. Francis Bacon was the first customer and Muriel supplied him with free drinks and a cash retainer if he brought in new customers. The Soho set that Freud mixed with included John Minton, Daniel Farson, Norman Bowler and Henrietta Moraes. I remember Norman Bowler as Detective Chief Inspector Harry Hawkins in Softly, Softly from 1966 to 1976. Bowler was part of that Soho set in the early 50s and had a homosexual relationship with John Minton.

Francis Bacon painted Henrietta Moraes 18 times. Henrietta sat for Lucian Freud in the early 1950s. He painted slowly: there may not be more than three of her portraits from his brush. Henrietta Moraes divorced her first husband, actor Michael Law, and married Bowler. At the time she married Bowler, she was pregnant by Colin Tennant who was mentioned as a possible husband for Princess Margaret. This marriage ended in 1956. Later in 1956, she met the 18-year-old Indian poet Dom Moraes. They married in 1961, and they amicably divorced by the mid-1960s. She was born Audrey Wendy Abbott in Simla in 1931. She shared a flat with Marianne Faithfull in 1976.

I saw her in a documentary about Colony Room habitue photographer John Deakin. She looked terrible and sounded like Princess Margaret. Tracy Emin worked behind the bar after she became famous, as did Daniel Craig.

Only contiguity, never interaction.

Julian Barnes wrote of Lucian Freud: “He ‘never wanted beautiful colours’ in his work and cultivated an ‘aggressive anti-sentimentality’. When there is more than one figure in a picture, each is separate, isolated: whether one is reading Flaubert and the other is breastfeeding, or whether both are naked on a bed together. There is only contiguity, never interaction. An interesting painter, but not a pleasant man, unfortunately.”

I had in my mind an image of a satanic and dangerous creature. Byronic might be the word – mad, bad and dangerous to know. He certainly looks a handsome devil in the early photographs. Strangely though, Feaver makes him seem more normal. This is because Freud felt reasonably comfortable with Feaver who let him explain himself and recorded their conversations on a Dictaphone. I remember hearing Feaver on the radio while my subscriber Bromley Man and Mrs Bromley Man drove me to Derek Jarman’s home in Dungeness. Feaver has a beautiful soothing voice. I bought my only oil painting, Rineen Trees by Graham Crowley, on the strength of Feaver’s review. A series of interviews in the 1990s was followed up by lengthy telephone calls to Freud from Feaver.

Then in the cold light of dawn one enumerates the things he did and the people he associated with, and he becomes a monster again.