DRAGON
Lucian Freud
(1922 - 2011)
Lucian Freud was born in Germany in 1922. He moved with his Jewish parents to England in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. His grandfather is Sigmund Freud. Lucian Freud is regarded as one of the leading figurative artists of this century.
Lucian Freud's etchings parallel the power of his paintings, but in them he reduces the images to its essential elements. Craig Hartley writes "Lucian Freud's scrupulous analysis - without prurience, sentiment or prejudice - supposes a moral force. His etchings turn candour into an uncomfortable truth".
Like most artist, Lucian Freud came to etching as a draughtsman. Lucian Freud's first etching; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'The Bird' was made during a stay in Paris in 1946. Followed by; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Chelsea Bun'. Both these plates have the innocent awkwardness of experiment with a new medium, but it is typical of Lucian Freud that this is turned to curious effect.
The following year after a trip to Aix-en-Provence Lucian Freud produced a much more assured piece of etching; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Girl with Fig-Leaf'. Lucian Freud's wife Kitty is shown simply holding up a fig leaf; but the effect of the print is more powerful than can be conveyed by a plain description of its subject matter. The intensity of the gaze of her single visible eye makes the absence of the other eye disturbing. The longer we look at the image the more suggestive is the suspicion that the fig leaf is not just obscuring her face, it is replacing it.
The masterpiece among these early prints is; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Ill in Paris'. 'Ill in Paris' retains many of the strengths of 'Girl with a fig-leaf'. But deploys them to different, more subtle, effect. As with 'Girl with a fig-leaf, the confinement of the plate-edge produces a tension, but this time it also reproduces the sense of the confined view experienced by the figure in the bed. One eye is almost pressed shut against the pillow; the other eye takes in the rose and sees it vividly. Is the rose important to her? Presumably; but we cannot look beyond the plate edge for more information. We are confined, just as she is.
Lucian Freud's early work is often associated with surrealism. It wasn't until 1950s that he began to paint portraits, often nudes, to the complete exclusion of anything else. Looking at them we are often startled not only by the candour with which they scrutinise the human form, but by the physical impact of flesh realised as paint.
Lucian Freud did not etch again for thirty four years. Focusing instead on his paintings. It was not until the 1970's that he again made drawings for their own sake.
Lucian Freud's portraits often depict only the sitter. The enclosed composition and cropping of the subject is depicted in; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head on a Pillow' and Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head and Shoulders'. In this second etching it is also worth noting, in the treatment of the shoulder, the survival of the manner of shading around the edge of a contour which was used earlier for the bars in Lucian Freud, print, signed 'The Bird' and for the thorns on the rose in Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Ill in Paris'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Rose'. Also from the 1982 collection are; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'A Couple'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Lawrence Gowing' (first version). Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Lawrence Gowing (second version). Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of a Women'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of a Girl I'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of a girl II'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Small Head'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Bella' (first version). Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Bella' (first version, second state). Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Bella' (second version). Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Fragment Head'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'The Painter's Mother' (first version). Lucian Freud, print, signed 'The Painter's Mother' (second version). Lucian Freud, print, signed 'The Painter's Mother' (final version). Throughout this impressive series of large-scale etchings, Lucian Freud's growing confidence in handling the etching needle is apparent.
In Lucian Freud's large- scale etchings of naked people Lucian Freud has chosen to exclude considerably more than in their related paintings. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Blond Girl' and Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Girl holding her foot', mirrors the pose of the original painting, but the sofa on which the girl is seating as been removed. In; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Man Posing', the etching was finish before the related painting, 'Painter and Model'. The etching shows much of the same detail as the corresponding area of the painting, but from a slightly closer, higher, view-point.
There is a warmth in Lucian Freud's portraits which initially seems absent from the nudes. For instance in; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Esther', the broken line, which are less stiffly hatched than in; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Bella', convey with considerable warmth the interchange between artist and sitter (both Bella and Esther are Lucian Freud's daughters). In contrast; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Naked man on a Bed' 1990 is drawn with such force that we are rather startled by the nakedness and provocative pose. But this too is a remarkably responsive portrait. The care and sympathy evident in the related painting, remind us that Lucian Freud's subjects are restricted to the people he knows and can observe at close quarters, in the round, and on the move.
Lucian Freud Quote "I get my ideas for pictures from watching people I want to work from moving about naked. I want to allow the nature of my model to affect the atmosphere and to some degree the composition. I have watched behaviour change human forms".
Lucian Freud's subjects are often the people in his life. To quote Lucian Freud; "The subject matter is autobiographical; it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really". Lucian Freud, print, signed 'IB'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of Bruce Bernard'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of a Man'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Lord Goodman in his yellow Pyjamas'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of IB'. Lucian Freud, print 'Esther'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Self Portrait Reflection '. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Susanna'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Girl with fuzzy hair'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Donegal Man'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'The New Yorker'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of a Woman'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of a Naked Girl'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of an Irishman'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Painters Doctor'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Solicitors Head'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Portrait Head'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'David Dawson'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Bella in Her Pluto T-Shirt'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of Bruce Bernard'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of Ali'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Conversation'.
Lucian Freud's subject matter is often the human form and it is the candour with which he revels it that it gives his work such a powerful and disturbing quality; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Girl Sitting'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Man Resting'. And Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Man Posing'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Man Posing', 1988-99. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Two in the Studio'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head and Shoulder of a Girl'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Woman Sleeping'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Before the Fourth'.
The blurred distinction between portraits and nudes is seen nowhere better than in the remarkable series of works, both paintings and etchings Lucian Freud produced in the 1990's, using the performance artist Leigh Bowery. He first appears in Lucian Freud's work in 1991; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Four Figures'. Followed by; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Head of a Man'. And in the much larger scale head-and-shoulder portrait etching; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Large Head' and Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Reclining Figure'.
The glamour of Bowery as a subject places most of these works somewhat apart from studies of sitters, but in formal and technical terms the scale of; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Large Head of Bowery'', follows closely the achievement of the similarly large-scale etched portrait; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Kai'. Comparative to Bowery, Kai appears introspective and nervously self-aware. These two portraits are unprecedented among Lucian Freud's etchings for their grandeur, not only of the scale but in the confidence and sweep of the treatment. The very breadth of the etched shading amplifies the form. Lucian Freud achieves in these portraits the same impact that he achieved first in his large-scale nudes in the late 1980's.
During the same period that he produced the iconic power of these large-scale portraits, Lucian Freud also made some of his smallest and most intimate etchings; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Woman on a Bed'. It is not only one of the smallest of his nudes, but it is also the most compact in its form and expression. The small Landscape; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Landscape', further extends the range of Lucian Freud's etched work. As well as; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Garden in Winter'. This was followed by; Lucian Freud' print, signed 'The Egyptian Book', also small in scale.
As well as people the use of animals in his compositions is widespread; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Eli'. Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Pluto aged Twelve'. And often feature pet and owner; Lucian Freud, print, signed 'Pluto'.
Lucian Freud quotes "I remember everything I've done because it was done with difficulty".
Lucian Freud continues to work from his home in London.
(Freud died in 2011.)
The genius with 500 lovers
Awesomely gifted, magnetically attractive. But artist Lucian Freud, as this new biography reveals, was also a frighteningly ruthless seducer of women
By Geordie Greig
PUBLISHED: 20:15 GMT, 13 September 2013
UPDATED: 17:23 GMT, 15 September 2013
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Throughout the last decade of his life, Lucian Freud and I met regularly for breakfast. And it was during our many conversations over the table at Clarke’s restaurant just a few doors down from the painter’s West London home in Kensington Church Street that this obsessively private man gradually opened up.
Lucian often wore a paint-flecked, grey cashmere overcoat, and black lace-up workman’s boots, which gave him a sartorial edginess. The coat was from Issey Miyake, and his unironed white shirt was crumpled but expensive.
The Grand Old Man of British art would slip through the delicatessen next door to the restaurant, via a side passage into the empty dining room.
Artist's muse: Lucian Freud poses with Alexi Williams-Wynn, a lover,
for a photo entitled The Painter Surprised
The shop does a brisk trade, but breakfast next door was a privilege that Sally Clarke — the eponymous owner of the restaurant and one of Lucian’s last sitters — only ever granted to him. In effect, it became Lucian’s private salon for himself and his guests.
Lucian loved the starched white tablecloths, the pretty girls in their chef’s uniforms, the light airy atmosphere and bright arrangements of flowers on the bar counter, the delicious food and, of course, his friendship with Sally.
His shabby-chic style and hint of dishevelment masked a man of discernment and taste. Nothing was unplanned. Breakfast at Clarke’s was precious downtime for him.
Here, he would juggle a small cast of invited guests — past lovers and new ones, art dealers, his children, framers and friends. The range was wide: from a beautiful girl dying of cancer who worked for the Queen to a former heroin addict who had been to jail, his wine merchant, favourite auctioneer, bookmaker or the painter Frank Auerbach, his oldest friend.
Freud was a great divider. We were carefully kept separate and he allowed few of us to see any of the others.
In that quiet space, Lucian’s conversation ranged from dating Greta Garbo to the best way to land a punch without breaking your thumb, to how he had popped in to 10 Downing Street to see Gordon Brown, or had been to a nightclub with Kate Moss, or had sold a picture for an eye-watering sum.
Recitations of Goethe, Noël Coward, Eliot and Yeats tumbled out. It was somehow always a performance and never a declamation, whether it was Nat King Cole’s ‘There’s Gotta Be Some Changes Made’ or 19th-century French verse.
+5He could recall spats in the 1940s with Ian Fleming, who believed Lucian was cuckolding him (‘completely untrue, actually’), how the writer Stephen Spender had stolen some drawings, or how Jacob Rothschild had taken him to the ballet at Covent Garden the previous night.
His conversation was, in fact, like the man: witty, caustic, curious — and, as I was to discover, with a dark side as unexpected as it could be surprising.
The atmosphere in the studio was charged as Raymond Jones lay nude on the sofa with a live rat — albeit one that had been drugged with champagne and half a sleeping pill for it to remain still enough to paint.
‘There was nothing said about it being an odd picture to paint,’ Jones recalls. ‘Nothing about the fact that the rat is near my testicles. This was never discussed.’
In truth, it wasn’t the rat that unsettled him so much as the great Lucian Freud himself.
Peering at his sitter intently, Freud informed him: ‘If you’d been a woman, I would have gone with you.’
As Raymond, an interior decorator, was to learn, the painter had a solution to that particular situation. In the middle of a sitting, there’d be a knock on the studio door and a woman would enter and go straight to the bathroom.
‘I’m just taking a break — I won’t be that long,’ Lucian would say, quickly following her inside.
Then, Raymond remembered, ‘they’d go at it: bang, bang, bang — the noise of her being sh***ed, not on his bed but always behind the bathroom door.
‘Lucian would have a bath after his exertions, wandering back into the studio naked. He’d say, “I’ve just had a bath to settle myself down and now we’ll carry on.”’
Doubtless the woman in the bathroom was just one of several lovers that Lucian was juggling in the late Seventies. As if in a farce, they passed for decades through an ever-revolving set of doors, sometimes unaware that they had rivals.
Indeed, the notoriously private painter was the only person who ever knew the full cast of characters who sped in and out of his studio or bedroom. And he was always finding more.
In the Seventies, one former lover told me, ‘He did a lot of mad chasing of women, climbing up drainpipes and climbing in high windows of houses of women he wanted to see, hanging from balconies by his fingertips.’
The day would come, however, when most of his lovers discovered they had rivals — and that often led to jealousy and violent rows.
Sophie de Stempel, a 19-year-old art student when she started seeing Lucian in 1980, was his lover for a decade.
She was astonished by the sheer intensity of his focus while painting her: ‘I saw him stab himself with a paintbrush, wounding his thigh so that it bled,’ she said. ‘It was, he explained to me, like being the jockey and the racehorse, urging on with a manic compulsion.’
In the end, though, she walked out on him because she could no longer tolerate his sexual opportunism and the jealousies it provoked.
‘There was someone who found out that I was sitting for him,’ she said, ‘and she was so upset. She had been hospitalised and was almost suicidal.
‘There were some ugly scenes where I really thought you could be killed. They were dangerous moments. Some of the people were quite violent.’
So was Lucian himself at times. Anne Dunn — the daughter of a Canadian industrialist — had an on-off affair with him for years, yet admitted she sometimes found him relentless in bed.
‘One had to be very careful not to show that one wished he would stop,’ she said.
He could also be cruel. ‘I heard from someone else with whom he had an affair that he became quite vicious.’
Anne experienced this for herself the last time she slept with Lucian. ‘The very last time. I didn’t want to see him again in that way. It was horrible; he was hurting my breasts, hitting and squeezing — really painful.’
'One had to be very careful not to show that one wished he would stop': Anne Dunn, right, with her husband John Wishart. She had an affair with Freud for years, yet said she sometimes found him relentless in bed
So how did Lucian Freud manage to lure so many girls — most of them upper-crust and some many decades younger? Part of his allure, as his picture framer, Louise Liddell, put it simply, was that ‘he was dishy — always was.’
Even in his 80s, Lucian could walk into a room and turn heads. In his studio, he’d sit in a chair with his legs slung over its arms, almost louche in his pose and flexible as a teenager. And he had a magical ability to charm.
Intellect and emotion collided in his life, as he used people to whom he was attracted to produce pictures which captured an intensely observed truth.
He believed the human body was the most profound subject and he pursued a ruthless process of observation, using the forensic exactitude of a scientist dissecting an animal in a laboratory. His paintings were always more analytical than psychoanalytical; he never intended them to have a narrative. They merely showed what he saw and if the oddity of a zebra, rat or protruding leg gave rise to psychological interpretation, he would insist that he had merely painted what was before him.
'He went with his feelings, took what he wanted.
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| Lucian Freud and David Hockney |
'He went with his feelings, took what he wanted.
That was his strength'
Victor Chandler, Freud's favourite bookmaker
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| Lucian Freud and Leigh Bowery. |
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.
Several times, I saw Lucian mock-grab the thigh of one of his female guests at Clarke’s, or of a waitress, or of the owner Sally Clarke (who’d laugh). The gesture was playful, and clearly originated from an era before political correctness. It was also evidence of a man who grabbed life. Unrestrained by moral scruples, he broke every rule that didn’t suit him — and quite possibly had no rules at all.
There were usually plenty of casualties in his wake: not only the discarded lovers, but hurt and offended children, letters left unanswered or replies of stunning rudeness, debts left unpaid, insults traded.
He simply did what he wanted, pursuing his art and his own pleasures at whatever the cost. And he somehow managed to get away with everything.
Victor Chandler, who was Lucian’s favourite bookmaker, remembered the painter telling him that he actually needed sex to stay alive.
‘It was his attitude to living, to need the release,’ he said. ‘I think he needed to dominate women in certain ways.’ Victor’s impression was that Lucian was ‘almost animal. He went with his feelings, took what he wanted. That was his strength. You could also physically see it in his actions — eating with his fingers, tearing birds to pieces on his plate. The usual social rules that we apply to ourselves, I don’t think he ever thought applied to him.’
What caused Lucian to behave in this way? He had no interest in finding out, despite being the grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
Difficult relationship: Freud pictured in 1980 with his mother Lucie,
who doted on him excessively, driving him mad and leading him to cut her ruthlessly
out of his life until after his father's death
He did, however, talk to me about his at times strained relationship with his mother. Lucie Freud, the daughter of a German grain merchant, had doted on him excessively, and had constantly wanted to know what he was thinking and doing.
With brutal candour, Lucian told me he couldn’t even stand being near her. Her curiosity, he felt, had invaded his privacy — and that drove him mad.
‘She’d ask me to draw for her friends, which almost made me never want to draw; and even worse she wanted me, aged four, to teach her to draw,’ he said. ‘It really made me feel sick.
‘I felt oppressed by her because she was very instinctive and I’ve always been very secretive. It was hard to keep things from her. The idea of her knowing what I was doing or thinking bothered me a great deal.’ His solution was to cut her ruthlessly out of his life. As for his father Ernst, an architect, Lucian remembered him being ‘absolutely horrible about my work very early on . . . I thought: what a bastard.’
After Ernst died in 1970, Lucie was bereft and took an overdose of pills. On recovering, she was incapacitated by depression.
Lucian still found her oppressive, but observed: ‘She had given up. I actually felt I could finally be with her because she’d lost interest in me.’
An enduring legacy from his mother’s obsession with him is that Lucian hated feeling watched: even after he became world-famous, he guarded his privacy obsessively — never filling in a form, for instance, which meant he could never vote.
Plainly, Lucie’s smothering affection also affected his attitude to his two wives and many lovers. It left him determined never to be controlled by a woman, and always to be in control himself.
Lucian’s daughter Jane believed that he saw womankind as very separate: ‘They were another species for him. This is connected with his mother and her suffocation of him,’ she told me.
But his mother can’t be blamed entirely; his youthful affair with Lorna Wishart — a dark-haired, brown-eyed siren, 11 years his senior — also deeply affected his attitude to women. His affair with her was to be the most blistering of his life.
Not only was she married to an extremely tolerant husband, but she’d also been having an affair for the past five years with Laurie Lee, the author of Cider With Rosie, whom she had met after a chance encounter on a Cornish beach. According to Lucian, then a 19-year-old impecunious artist, Lorna was ‘very, very wild, without any inhibitions or social conventions.’
CLEMENT FREUD, THE BROTHER HE DETESTED FOR FOUR DECADES
On the day of Clement Freud’s funeral in April 2009, I pointed out a picture of him in a newspaper to Lucian.
As children, the three Freud brothers had been referred to collectively as the Archangels — because Lucian’s middle name was Michael, Clement’s was Raphael, and the surviving eldest brother Stephen’s is Gabriel. But they were never close.
They’d spent their childhood in pre-war Berlin, surrounded by governesses, maids and a cook. From early on, Lucian and Stephen would gang up and mercilessly tease Clement — who went on to become a broadcaster and Liberal MP.
‘I felt sorry for Clement,’ said Stephen’s wife, ‘as they made him go up to some Nazi soldiers in Berlin and ask if they had seen a monkey. Then he would hand them a mirror, which got him into trouble. The other two brothers found it terribly funny.’
The Freud family, who were Jewish, escaped to Britain in 1932 — after being vouched for by the Duke of Kent. (This was partly why, 70 years later, Lucian gave the Queen the portrait he had painted of her: it was repayment for his freedom.)
The brothers’ arrival in a new country, where they didn’t speak the language, might have been expected to draw them together. Far from it: within seven years, by the time Lucian was 17, there had been a bitter rift.
Stephen and Clement had suggested that Lucian was not the son of their father, Ernst — and therefore not the grandson of the famous Sigmund Freud, a connection of which Lucian was always proud.
‘It was a really disgusting thing to say — vile and very difficult to forgive,’ Lucian told me.
Whether his brothers truly believed he was illegitimate or were having a joke at his expense, he never did fully forgive them. At the age of 87, he was still complaining about this slur on his bloodline to Mark Fisch, a New York property developer who sat for two portraits in 2009.
‘His biological link to Sigmund mattered to him,’ said Fisch. ‘It was key to his identity, where he’d come from and also why and how he’d survived in England. He had spent seven decades worrying that he was an illegitimate son.’
Having closely studied photos of Lucian and his grandfather at the Freud Museum, Fisch is convinced that the accusation was unfounded and untrue.
Lucian fell out further with Stephen — owner of a hardware shop off Baker Street — after lending his brother some money. When it came to repaying it, there was disagreement over what the exact amount had been.
This resulted in a letter from Stephen that read: ‘Herewith my cheque for £1,000. I am almost sure the loan was for less than that, so please let me have your cheque for the change.
‘I find it disappointing that after spending 20-plus hours in my company in the last year or so, you are now able to believe that I am both a crook and an imbecile. I could say plenty more, but as I cannot remember a single occasion in all the years we’ve known each other when you admitted that you’d been wrong, it would seem a little pointless.’
Lucian was apoplectic. Always ready to embark on a feud, he sent his brother a postcard chastising him for not sending the right amount, and informing Stephen that he was ‘a king-size w*****’ and would never have a loan again.
Many years later, in 1985, Lucian partly made up with his brother by painting a portrait of him. Then, in 2001, he sent a girlfriend round to Stephen’s house on his 80th birthday to deliver a bottle of champagne and a handwritten card.
Towards Clement, however, Lucian’s rancour endured till the end. Over the years, the painter had variously accused his younger brother of cheating in a race at sports day and of failing to honour a debt. As a result, they didn’t exchange a word in 40 years.
Towards Clement, however, Lucian’s rancour endured till the end. Over the years, the painter had variously accused his younger brother of cheating in a race at sports day and of failing to honour a debt. As a result, they didn’t exchange a word in 40 years.
Lucian himself once explained his fraternal feuds to me in the bluntest manner. ‘I was never friendly with either of my brothers,’ he said. ‘I had illusions about Stephen.
‘I thought he was incredibly dreary, pompous, timid. But more than all that, I thought he was honest and then I had to give up that illusion.
‘Clement, I always despised because he was a liar, and I minded it. If you liked someone, you wouldn’t have cared if they were a liar or not. He’s dead now. Always was, actually.’
She dived naked into lakes, painted landscapes by moonlight and used glow-worms to light up her lanterns, he said.
Lucian was bewitched. But Laurie had no intention of sharing his mistress with him.
Writing in his diary, he 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.’
(This was not the only same-sex affair Lucian had in his youth, but he never considered himself to be gay. It was more a case of taking advantage of any sexual opportunity — though he did tell a girlfriend in 1977 that the one man he really wanted to go to bed with was the jockey Lester Pigott.)
Eventually, the passionate affair between Lucian and Lorna drove Laurie to consider killing her — and himself. He got as far as picking up a razor to slash his throat.
‘I put the razor down, put my head on my hands and sobbed as I have never done since I was a child,’ he wrote in September 1943.
His bitter rivalry with Lucian culminated in a physical fight in front of Lorna at a bus stop in Piccadilly. Lucian won — but it was Laurie who took Lorna home.
It was Lucian, however, who got the girl: that night, she told Laurie their six-year affair was over.
Afterwards, Lorna lived with Lucian during the week, returning to her husband at weekends. But the affair eventually ended as it had started: with infidelity.
Lorna had discovered love letters from the glamorous actress Laura Tennant in Lucian’s studio, and become hysterical. But when she decided to dump her lover, it was his turn to be beside himself.
Determined to win her back, Lucian grabbed a gun and headed down to her marital home in Sussex.
There was a showdown in her cabbage patch, during which he threatened to shoot either her or himself if she didn’t agree to return to him. In the end, he merely fired the gun into the air.
Later, he reappeared riding bareback on a large white horse, making it rear up in front of her house. It was a wildly dramatic gesture, but Lorna remained adamant.
‘Lucian was genuinely in love with her, but she never went back to him,’ remembered his painter friend John Craxton. ‘He said to me, “I’m never, ever going to love a woman more than she loves me” — and I don’t think he ever did again.’
The split from Lorna triggered a lifelong pattern of overlapping affairs. Often, they were with women who knew each other, or who were from different generations of the same family.
Shortly after his heartbreak over Lorna, he started having an affair with her niece, Kitty Garman, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein. A short-lived marriage to her followed, in 1948. That same year, he started bedding Anne Dunn, at that point a naive 18-year-old, after picking her up in a Soho nightclub.
Anne said: ‘I had no idea Kitty was his wife when I met him, nor did I know Lucian was a father, until one night we were having dinner and someone came up and asked him how the baby was. I was absolutely astonished.’
Lucian didn’t care. Guilt was not an emotion that either affected or restrained him.
And because he considered any form of birth control to be ‘terribly squalid’, Anne ended up getting pregnant twice and aborting two of his babies. Not that he remained faithful.
‘He was completely unstoppable. He’d go for anyone and anything,’ she said.
Even so, she claimed to have no regrets: ‘He was so alive. He was like life itself, pulsating with energy. It was what I’d always sought, and never found again.’
Although the absolute focus of his life was painting, the complexity of Lucian’s private life was extraordinary. Around this time, for instance, he had a brief dalliance with the beautiful painter Janetta Woolley, the wife of a friend of Anne’s.
Janetta later had an affair with the Duke of Devonshire, who bought many of Lucian’s works. Meanwhile, according to Lucian, he had an affair with the duke’s wife, Deborah ‘Debo’ Mitford.
Then 40 years after his fling with Janetta, Lucian bedded her daughter Rose.
As always for Lucian, the present was all-consuming: the latest woman — or whatever he was painting — was all that mattered. He allowed no one to question how he behaved. And he never seemed to regret his selfish behaviour.
When his affairs ended, his lovers were sometimes distraught. With few exceptions, Lucian seldom minded: there was always someone else to console him. ‘He was on to the next thing,’ said one jilted lover. ‘He never stayed to see the fallout — or he dodged it if he could.’
Personal life
Freud is rumoured to have fathered as many as forty children although this number is generally accepted as an exaggeration. Fourteen children have been identified, two from Freud's first marriage and 12 by various mistresses.
After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry, in 1948, her niece Kathleen "Kitty" Epstein, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman. They had two daughters, Annie and Annabel Freud, and the marriage ended in 1952. Kitty Freud, later known as Kitty Godley (after her marriage in 1955 to economist Wynne Godley), died in 2011.
Freud then began an affair with Guinness beer heiress and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood. They married in 1953 and divorced in 1959. She is said to have been the only woman who truly broke his heart. After their divorce, his friends noticed a change in him; he began drinking heavily and getting into fights. Francis Bacon became concerned that he was suicidal.
Freud had additional children by the following women:
Suzy Boyt, a pupil of Freud's at the Slade art school:
1.Alexander Boyt
2.Rose Boyt
3.Isabel Boyt
4.Susie Boyt
1.Alexander Boyt
2.Rose Boyt
3.Isabel Boyt
4.Susie Boyt
Katherine Margaret McAdam (died 1998):
1. Jane McAdam Freud, artist/sculptor
2. Paul Freud
3.Lucy Freud
4. David McAdam Freud
Bernardine Coverley, a teacher (died 2011):
1. Bella Freud, a fashion designer
2. Esther Freud, a writer
Jacquetta Eliot, Countess of St Germans (née the Hon. Jacquetta Lampson):
1. The Hon. Francis Michael Eliot (born 1971)
1. The Hon. Francis Michael Eliot (born 1971)
Celia Paul (born 1959), an artist:
1. Frank Paul (born 1984), an artist
1. Frank Paul (born 1984), an artist
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| Lucian Freud standing on his head in his studio with his daughter, the fashion designer Bella Freud |
"I want paint to work as flesh...
my portraits to be of the people, not like them.
Not having a look of the sitter, being them ...
As far as I am concerned the paint is the person.
I want it to work for me just as flesh does."
Lucian Freud
Obituary
Lucian Freud, OM
Lucian Freud, OM, who died on July 20 aged 88,
was the most celebrated British figurative painter of the late 20th century.
Girl in a Dark Jacket_1947
by Lucian Freud
THE TELEGRAPH, 11:06PM BST 21 Jul 2011
Freud was thought of primarily as a painter of portraits, but though his subjects were often well-known people, he was no society portraitist in the manner of Sargent or Boldini. His purpose was not to flatter, and the starkness of his images, many of them highly detailed nudes, have few precedents in the art of the human form.
So early was Freud's reputation established – while he was still a teenager – that for almost all of his career he was able to paint on his own terms, and only what he was interested in. "My work," he said, in a remark at once typically truthful and egotistic, "is purely autobiographical. It's about myself and my surroundings."
The results of this subjective outlook divided both the critics and the public. For many, Freud was a master of capturing the quintessence of a sitter, his paintings being, as he said, not like people but of people. Though his stature was perhaps increased by his having few great contemporaries, he was hailed as the heir of Rembrandt and Hals, both of whom he greatly admired.
Others found the stern intensity of Freud's scrutiny unsettling and too uniform, thinking his paintings revealed not their subjects but his view of humanity. His pictures were said not to celebrate the differences between individuals, but their melancholy similarities – an opinion reinforced by the anonymous titles Freud gave many of his works, as if they were exercises rather than pictures of real people.
The counterpart to Freud's determination to make use of his life in his work was that his life itself became something of an exhibition. There was a quasi-theatrical streak in his personality and, though it was exaggerated by speculation, he gained a reputation as a rake, a snob and a Lothario.
Freud consorted with both high and low society. He had many beautiful and well-born lovers, some of whom sat for him, while perhaps his most celebrated model was a grossly fat homosexual nightclub dancer, Leigh Bowery; indeed, Freud painted few men who were not homosexual, saying that he admired their courage.
Entertaining though gossip about his life and his inspirations was, it shed little light on Freud's work, and detracted from the one constant in it, his ambition. Certainly, Freud told the critic David Sylvester, he needed models whose "aura was the starting point of his (Freud's) excitement". But by the end, the picture was all he felt about, and each revealed to him "a great insufficiency that drives him on".
Thus, after numerous sittings, the 11th Duke of Devonshire was summoned back to Freud's studio because the artist had not got the silk of his subject's shirt quite right. "Rembrandt would have done it, and I'm damn well going to do it too," said Freud. The remark revealed not only the standards Freud hoped to emulate, but also the hunger of a great painter to inspire the sort of reaction to art had by Jose Ortega y Gasset on first seeing Las Meninas: "This isn't art, it's life perpetuated."
Lucian Freud was born in Berlin on December 8 1922, the middle brother of three. His father, an architect, was the youngest son of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.
Lucian's mother was the daughter of a rich grain merchant, and he had a comfortable childhood, growing up in a house near the Tiergarten, being schooled at the Französisches Gymnasium and holidaying on his maternal grandfather's estate.
It was an environment that from an early age he found overprotective, and even as a young boy he made regular forays into rougher neighbourhoods to escape the smothering attentions of his parents and nannies. Such expeditions were evidence of a nature that was to prove both curious and wilful.
The rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany and the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor prompted the Freuds to move to England in 1933. They settled in Mayfair, not far from Green Park, the setting of the earliest of the many stories that spattered Freud's reputation with mud.
It was said that the origins of Lucian's near lifelong estrangement from his younger brother Clemens, later the MP Sir Clement Freud, lay in an adolescent race around the park. When his brother threatened to win, Lucian called out "Stop thief!" and Clemens was promptly seized by passers-by.
The story seemed improbable, but that it could sustain repetition at all was proof that many were willing to believe the worst of the adult Freud. Though capable of great charm, as his amorous conquests testified, in later years he became notorious for his temper, once punching Harold Macmillan's son-in-law, Andrew Heath, after he had taken Freud to task over his treatment of his wife.
Freud was well-known for his bitter feuds. He eventually fell out with, among others, arguably his closest friend, Francis Bacon, one of his earliest patrons, Lord Glenconner, and his dealer, James Kirkman.
Lucian was sent to Dartington Hall, the progressive boarding school, from 1933 to 1937, and then for a year to Bryanston, from which he was expelled for disruptive behaviour, said to have culminated in his driving a pack of foxhounds into the school's chapel during Matins.
He devoted most of his time at Bryanston to riding and to drawing, in which he was encouraged by Sigmund Freud's gift of some prints of Brueghel's paintings.
At 15, Lucian enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, but in 1939, dissatisfied with the school's classically-oriented curriculum, he moved to the East Anglian School of painting. That same year he took British nationality.
The East Anglian School was run by the artist Cedric Morris, who was the first to persuade Freud to begin working with paint. He forgave his pupil when Freud left a cigarette alight and burned the school down.
By now Freud had been recognised as a prodigy and had a sketched self-portrait accepted by Horizon, for which he also drew portraits of its editors, Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. Freud took a studio in Maida Vale and cultivated a bohemian image, stalking through wartime London in a fez and fur coat, a bird of prey perched on his wrist.
Among his other eccentricities was the refusal for many years to have a telephone in his studio; until the late 1980s, friends could contact him with any certainty only by telegram. Freud guarded his privacy jealously, and one potential biographer claimed he had abandoned the project after receiving mysterious and threatening telephone calls.
In 1942 Freud enlisted in the Merchant Navy and served for three months on the convoy vessel Baltrover before being invalided out. But his brief service confirmed his instinct that he would find such raw milieux attractive and stimulating, and when he returned to London he rented a studio beside the Grand Union canal, the border between working-class Paddington and better-heeled Little Venice.
The divide mirrored that which Freud maintained in his social life. He moved easily and steadily between the two worlds, perhaps breakfasting at a workmen's café before driving his Bentley rapidly (if erratically) to Soho for a day's drinking and betting with Jeffrey Bernard or the photographer John Deakin. Freud was a notorious and reckless gambler, and in 1983 was warned off the Turf after reneging on debts to bookmakers of some £20,000.
At night he would return to the West End, a spare figure immaculately dressed, this time perhaps for a drink with the Duke of Devonshire before moving on to a nightclub in Berkeley Square.
It was a Pimpernel-like existence that amused some of his friends and infuriated others, notably Francis Bacon, with whom he finally fell out over what Bacon (who was of gentle birth himself) perceived as Freud's snobbish cultivation of position. Certainly, Freud eventually forsook Paddington for the grander environs of Holland Park; but the view from his flat was of the tower blocks of Shepherd's Bush.
Freud was given his first exhibition in 1944 by the Lefevre Gallery. By now he was concentrating on painting rather than on drawing, working in a style some thought influenced by Surrealism. Thus the subject ofQuince On A Blue Table (1943-44) is somewhat overshadowed by the baleful zebra's head that thrusts from the wall above the table. Freud, characteristically, denied having been influenced by another style.
From 1946 until 1948 Freud lived and painted in Greece and France, where he met Picasso, who responded to the tartan trousers Freud was wearing by singing It's A Long Way To Tipperary. When Freud returned to England it was to begin teaching at the Slade, and to marry Kitty Garman, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein.
Freud's wife became the subject of his first important series of portraits, notable for their flat contours, stylised line and stark lighting. The wide-eyed subject of Girl With Roses (1946-48) and Girl With Leaves (1945) is treated with an unsettling, detached sensuality reminiscent of 15th-century Flemish portraiture or, more recently, of Ingres – so much so that Herbert Read called Freud "the Ingres of existentialism".
This period of Freud's work culminated in portraits of two of his closest friends – Francis Bacon, whom he painted on copper, and the photographer Harry Diamond. The latter portrait is suffused with tension born of the unnatural lack of animation in Diamond's face and posture, a calmness belied by his clenched fist and aggressive open stance.
In the painting, Freud hints at a barely suppressed violence beneath Diamond's static exterior and externalises it in the shape of a man-sized and threateningly spiky potted plant, one of several to appear in his work. The portrait brought Freud the Arts Council prize at the Festival of Britain, for which he was the youngest artist given a commission.
Freud divorced his wife in 1952, prompting his father-in-law to remark: "That spiv Freud turned out a nasty piece of work." The next year he married Lady Caroline Blackwood, daughter of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. They were divorced in 1957, and she later married the poet Robert Lowell, who in 1977 was found dead in a New York taxi with his arms clasped around Freud's portrait of the blonde-haired young Caroline. She died in 1996.
By the late 1950s Freud had begun to pull away from the neo-romanticist contemporaries such as Graham Sutherland and John Minton with whom he had been grouped, and he gradually evolved a style of work that was to sharply divide the critics.
His portraits began to become more tactile, demonstrating eventually an almost sculptural fascination with flesh and its contours. Freud abandoned the fine lines of his early work for broader strokes – swapping sable brushes for hogshair – and began to work with a more limited palette in which greasy whites and meaty reds predominated. His subjects were also often foreshortened or seen from a peculiar angle, a change in technique brought on by Freud's beginning to paint while standing up rather than sitting.
Most of the best-known works that Freud executed in the next 40 years were of nudes, rather vulnerable figures usually placed against a white sheet on an iron bed or on an old Chesterfield sofa in Freud's studio. The subjects often seemed to be tired or even asleep, yet Freud's gaze remains tireless, even pitiless under the glare thrown by an interrogator's 500 watt bulb. Moreover, there is little independent communication between sitter and onlooker, for the eyes of Freud's subjects rarely meet any outside the studio.
Freud sometimes ascribed the change in his style to a conversation with Bacon in which he was urged to put more of his own life into his work. Some critics who sought evidence of this concluded that what was going into the work was Freud's dissatisfaction with his own life.
In particular, Freud's soured romances were said to have left him with a contempt for women that made him paint them as a voyeur. He was accused of being cerebral, cruel or macabre, and, in the words of David Sylvester, having the eye not of a painter but of a pathologist.
There was certainly little respect for frail mankind in Freud's work, and many of his pictures seemed to convey only the tedium of existence, the waiting for death. Thus, in perhaps his best-known composition of the 1980s, Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) (1981-83), Freud replaced the lively flirtation among members of a comic troupe in Watteau's original painting with a group of his own children and friends, seemingly bored and lost in their separate thoughts.
The painting was sold in 1997 for £3.75 million, a record for a living British artist, although the money went not to Freud but to his former dealer, James Kirkman, with whom he had fallen out.
Yet if there was no outright affection for humanity in Freud's work, there was no hostility either. Rather, there was evidence only of an unwearying fascination with the human form, and of a striving to be faithful to it in all its moments, by turns sullen, proud and tender.
Freud displayed a distinct feeling for the last of these qualities, notably in portraits painted in the 1980s of his elderly mother, of his daughter Bella, and in compositions featuring dogs, such as Double Portrait (1985-86), in which the hand of a sleeping subject cups the muzzle of a similarly drowsy hound.
Freud continued to paint into old age, among the most remarkable of his later works being the full-length naked self-portrait Painter Working(1993), which seemed to depict him as an elderly satyr, shod, almost comically, in a pair of ancient fell-walking shoes. It was a rare explicit glimpse of Freud himself in a body of work that otherwise was introspective only by proxy.
He exhibited regularly and had a number of retrospective showings of his paintings, including one at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1998 and a large show at Tate Britain in 2002. Since the millennium there have been solo exhibitions in New York, Edinburgh, Los Angeles, Venice, Dublin, The Hague and Paris. Comparatively few of his paintings, however, are in public collections.
Between May 2000 and December 2001, Freud painted the Queen, with controversial results. In May 2008, his 1995 picture Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold at Christie's in New York for $33.6 million, a record for a work by a living artist.
Freud was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1983, and a member of the Order of Merit in 1993.
It is difficult to be precise about Lucian Freud's progeny, but there appear to be at least 13. He had two daughters by his first marriage. He had four children by Suze Boyt, one of whom is the novelist Rose Boyt; by Katherine McAdam, he had two sons and two daughters; by Celia Paul, he had a son; and he had two daughters by Bernadine Coverley, the writer Esther Freud and the fashion designer Bella Freud.
