Precocious genius: the letters of Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud boldly reversed Flaubert’s famous statement: “Be orderly and regular in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Freud believed “the artist must be true to those impulses and emotions, however disastrous their effect might be. . . . All my patience goes into my work, leaving me none for my life.” At seventeen he burned down his art school by carelessly discarding a hot cigarette. He wanted to be a jockey, loved riding horses bareback and betting on them; went in for high-stakes gambling and midnights in louche nightclubs. He was aggressive, anarchic and dictatorial, extravagant, angry and rebellious, a risky swimmer in mountainous Cornish waves. The grandson of Sigmund Freud was a handsome, charming and precocious genius who liked the thrills of jazz and cinema, dancing and sex.
Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939-1954 (from age 17 to 32), edited by David Dawson and Martin Gayford (Thames and Hudson, £65), is exceptionally handsome and well designed. The editors provide photos of the leading characters, a clear biographical narrative and a perceptive account of his art (though they don’t list the locations of the paintings). The book includes facsimiles of Freud’s redesigned postcards and his letters with different coloured inks, witty drawings and pasted images. Hastily written in block rather than cursive script, the letters (transcribed in the book in tiny italics) contain jokes, fantasies and feelings, as well as descriptions of his restless travels around England and Wales, the excitement of postwar Paris and the island of Poros in Greece. Freud thought wealthy patrons should support him and many of his missives ask for funds. One “smile of gratitude” letter includes a photo (not identified by the editors) of a goofy figure with a round head, protruding ears, narrow eyes, widely stretched mouth and gap teeth. This is Alfred E. Neuman, the “What, me worry?” icon of Mad magazine.
As Freud, born in Berlin in 1922, changed his language from German to English (while retaining the guttural “r’s” in his speech), his ungrammatical letters became lively and amusing. Alberto Giacometti’s exuberant hairdo reminded Freud of Harpo Marx. The snails in a French restaurant were “sizzling hot butter out of their ears” and “delishious cigarofumes were beginning to weave that comalike spell!” The Parisian costume ball he attended featured, as he breathlessly wrote, naked bodies in vivid colours: “There was a yearly feast Bal for Art students the other night who paraded the streets painted scarlet some shiny black some matt black a lot were completely naked painted pale blue white or orange with wonderfull trojan Headdresses some were pale green one on a motorbike designed as a white horse they Lift tiny cars of the road with the motor still running and the surprised occupants peeping through the windows.”
Freud joined the British merchant marine in March 1941 and sailed in a convoy of 41 ships from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He got into fights on the ship, didn’t back down and was thought to be pretty tough. A nearby ship was hit and sunk by the Luftwaffe, and he barely escaped a watery death. But he loved danger and excitement, and wrote: “We were attacked by German planes. I, being naïve, thought, ‘Hooray, fireworks!’ But one of the ships, which was carrying ammunition, was hit and went up in such an enormous explosion that when I saw the photographs of atomic bombs, I wasn’t surprised. Bits of the boat and the people on it rained down on us. Some of the other sailors had already seen dreadful things; after that, I realised that war was dreadful.” On the return voyage his ship was attacked by German submarines, which sank a straggler. His two-month naval experience gave him a taste for the lower depths as well as for fashionable society, and he continued his lifelong connection with both crude and cultured people.
Though Freud was a great womaniser and catnip to the ladies, he lived in the homosexual milieu of his artistic friends: his teacher Cedric Morris, his patron Peter Watson, the painters Francis Bacon, John Craxton and John Minton; Cecil Beaton, Benjamin Britten, Michael Redgrave, and their cadre of lovers. Freud wrote that the jealous Natasha Spender, wife of the bisexual poet who shared a house with Freud, “broke into my room and stole the letters that Stephen had sent me and poems. . . . He would never, never stand up to her. So I had to get out. I had nowhere to live.” His father warned, “If you carry on the way you are, you won’t have any children.” But he needn’t have worried about that: Lucian later had as many as fourteen.
The teenaged Freud, shy at first with girls, confessed, “When I was young, I couldn’t chat to them easily and I used to frighten them because I always tried to show off, and that used to terrify them.” In one bizarre encounter he reported, “when she took off her clothes there was this pink artificial leg. We were on the bed and I was running my hand down her leg when I touched something solid like metal. I was quite startled. I said, ‘What’s that?’ ’’ The woman hadn’t warned him that her leg, entangled in factory machinery, had been amputated below the knee. He added a comically macabre detail, “there was a bit of a squeak when she moved because it needed oiling.”
His first deep and stormy passion was for the married Lorna Wishart, whom the editors call “a beautiful, fascinating, faithless and wealthy woman . . . savage, wild, romantic and without guilt.” She drove a Bentley, loved horseback riding and swam naked in high waves. But their increasingly intense affair was doomed. The older, glamorous, promiscuous Lorna would not remain faithful to the penniless painter. He sent his most agonising, masochistic letter as she was about to abandon him: “I cant go on like this Waiting out this full of false hopes while you decide if youll see me or not telling me you want me / but something is stopping you beckoning me onto your pitchfork once again but always making new holes. . . You say Im so tough but Im just not tough enough for you.”
Lorna was succeeded by Kitty Garman, the illegitimate daughter of Kathleen Garman and the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and niece of Lorna, who’d introduced her to Freud. He married Kitty in 1948 and they had two daughters, but he neglected her and took many lovers. Freud painted three important pictures of Kitty, his first long-term model, with minute details and disquieting realism. In Girl with Roses (1948) she’s seated in a wicker-back chair, and wears a black and green-striped sweater and a purple velvety skirt. One hand holds a thorny red-yellow rose on her chest, another rests next to a rose lying on her lap. Kitty has long brown hair flowing onto her shoulders, a wide pale face, slightly open lips, outsized eyes and a startled, even frightened expression.
The editors call Girl with Kitty (1947), a play on her name, a “Holbein-esque close focus on textures of hair, skin and eyes.” Looking slightly to the left and wearing a V-necked lavender blouse, Kitty has the same long hair, enlarged eyes and full lips. She grasps the kitten firmly by the neck and holds it against her chest. Its paws dangle down, it stares straight at the viewer, its pointed ears frame Kitty’s face, its brown stripes match her hair and its eyes echo her own.
Girl with White Dog (1951) is the most striking portrait of his first wife. Seated on a striped sofa, wearing a yellow velvet robe and revealing one bare foot and ankle, the pregnant Kitty cups one breast and exposes another: naked, bulging.. Her hair is now shorter and parted, her face lined and shadowy. The tight body of a sharp-eared, pinkish-white bull terrier lies alongside her leg, its head rests on her robed thigh, its muzzle echoes her bare breast, its nose matches her nipple. Kitty seems sad and depressed —as if she knew that Freud was going to leave her.
Kitty was replaced by the dazzling Botticelli-beauty Lady Caroline Blackwood, daughter of a marquess and a Guinness-brewery heiress. In a delightful 1953 letter to Ann, wife of Ian Fleming, Freud wrote, “the main advantage of being married here is that it can be done at dusk so that one can emerge, spliced, into the paris night” and back to their room in the Hôtel La Louisiane.
In Girl in Bed (1953) Caroline is enveloped by a billowing white pillow and duvet. Facing the viewer, she rests her head on her bent arm as her blond hair falls behind it and touches the pillow. She has delicate, rose-colored skin, perfectly formed nose and lips, and large blue eyes, and seems eager for Freud to join her in bed. Hotel Bedroom, a year later, has a troubled and more mysterious mood. Lying in bed with curly blond hair, and facing across the picture, Caroline touches her sad, sickly face with her long delicate fingers. An open window reveals the shuttered windows of the building across the street. The dark silhouette of Lucian, with bushy hair and hands in his pockets, gazes down on her as she looks away from him, and the shadows under her eyes express her misery. Angry and estranged, they seem to have quarreled bitterly and withdrawn into quiet desperation.
When not painting his wives, Freud worked slowly with live models and expected them to remain absolutely still for long hours. To avoid distractions, Freud didn’t have a phone and relied on telegrams. His architect-father had doubts about his unusual methods and “was worried that Lucian proceeded by adding detailed observations one to another, rather than arranging the picture in a geometrically ordered “rational’ space.” Still, as he created his closely focused and meticulously scrutinized subjects, his methods worked.
Freud’s wild, reckless behavior, his tiny clustered houses in Man and Town (1941), his detailed clarity and Expressionist intensity, resemble the character and art of the Viennese Egon Schiele (1890-1918). Three early works reflect these qualities. Self-Portrait with a Thistle (1946) shows, on a brown foreground table, a curved, spikey and erect thistle that expresses his own personality. His bust-length figure stands behind it and peers through an open-shuttered window. Facing the spectator in a half-shadowed three-quarter view, he wears an open-collar bluish-grey shirt, his elongated face resting on a pillar-like neck. His curly hair is reddish-brown, his forehead flat, his almond eyes widely spaced, his nose long and narrow, his lips sensual, his chin sharp, his expression severe: a tough guy, not to be messed with.
The editors note that in the ambitious The Painter’s Room (1944) Freud brings his stuffed zebra-head “back to life. Grown to gigantic proportions, it pokes its head through the window. This, he said, was to make it appear real and not a trophy on the wall. Simultaneously, his Chesterfield sofa bought from a junk shop seems to be coming to life too, each rolled armrest turning into a miniature zebra-head, while the wall behind the potted palm is replaced by a blue, softly clouded sky.” In this Surrealist picture the once black-striped zebra is now striped red. With erect ears, open eye and tight mouth, it barely makes it through the narrow aperture, its tiny neck hairs almost touching the top as it extends its head and neck more than halfway across the room. The sofa’s plump legs rest on wheels, its beige cushion is wrinkled, and a red cape and upside-down top hat are placed on the brown floor to balance the composition. All these finely drawn elements enigmatically cohere as the curious zebra, like a new tenant, seems to be inspecting the premises.
The editors don’t mention that Freud’s Father and Daughter (1949) was influenced by the subjects and composition of Balthus’ Joan Miró and Daughter (1938). In Freud’s picture the figures are framed by a long blue-and-white beaded curtain that descends from the ceiling to the floor. The father (Freud’s neighbour) is seated with his left hand protectively around his daughter, who stands stiffly between his open legs and rests her hand on his knee. Both wear jackets and trousers. His black hat touches the beads, and he has large sky-blue eyes, strong nose and firm lips. His daughter has reddish bangs, hair touching her white collar, round pale face, wide-apart brown eyes, snub nose and curvy lips. The father’s rather severe expression contrasts with his daughter’s gentle look. Both vivid subjects relate more to the viewer than to each other.
In 1954 Freud—along with Ben Nicholson, Francis Bacon and Gwen John—represented Britain at the important Venice Biennale. His acquisition of a dealer and a gallery, his first London exhibition, growing artistic reputation and stature as king of bohemia concluded the first phase of Freud’s spectacular career.
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, Impressionist Quartet, biographies of Wyndham Lewis and Modigliani, and a book on the Canadian realist painter Alex Colville.
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