William Feaver - The Lives of Lucian Freud: FAME 1968 - 2011

Notebook entry for Wednesday, 28 November 1973, the day I began to get to know Lucian Freud:

A bed in each room, empty canvases ready. A painting: nude sprawled, leg cocked across, painting stool edging into the bottom of the picture. The front room has a brass bedstead, tables covered with letters, telegrams, The Listener, paint tubes bent and worried. A small surprisingly bright palette.

Lucian talked, I remember, about how, early on, he had taken to showing up at the Ritz Bar and other wartime haunts in a fez and postmans trousers. That was then. And now with his fiftieth birthday in prospect and a retrospective to follow, such stunts were blips in a distant past. Things were getting ever more serious in terms of ambition: paintings accomplished and those he hoped might yet be done.

His mid-career show was an occasion for taking stock, an Arts Council man had told him without going as far as to explain that it was in fact a stopgap: somebody elses proposed exhibition had fallen through, hence this sudden late addition to the Hayward Gallery winter schedule. Freud wasnt bothered about being second choice since he had never been associated with any innovative tendency and thus had no date-stamped reputation to lose. He wasnt even as celebrated an anomaly as his friend Francis Bacon. To be exceptional was good enough.

The Sunday Times Magazine hadnt specified what sort of article I should produce to coincide with the opening of the exhibition, but it had been put to me that an arresting character study was needed, as revelatory as I could make it. Freuds life and works had become wreathed in rumour. Waiting in that cluttered upstairs room in Maida Vale while he changed for lunch, discarding the paint-smeared trousers, I began jotting down potential quotes and observations.

Where to start? Briefly: Lucian Michael Freud, born in Berlin on 8 December 1922, the second (middle) son of Ernst Freud (architect and youngest son of Sigmund Freud), was named after his mother, Lucie Brasch. In September 1933, not long after the Nazis had seized power, the family moved to England where in successive schools Lucian became fluent in English but evasive when faced with academic demands and institutional procedures. A term or two at the Central School of Art was followed by spells at the more congenial East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing interrupted by three traumatic months, March to May 1941, during which he served incompetently as an ordinary seaman in two North Atlantic convoys: Nova Scotia and back. Invalided out and exempted from conscription he swung into an opportunistic way of life in London. The emblematic centrepiece of his first one-man show, in 1944, was The Painters Room, featuring a red-striped zebra head (a gift from his femme fatale Lorna Wishart) intruding upon a space furnished with attributes: sofa, scarf, top hat and scruffy palm.

Post-war, Freud made his way as soon as he could to Paris, thenin the autumn of 1946to Greece where he spent several months with fellow painter John Craxton on the isle of Poros. Soon afterwards, having returned to London, he became involved with Kitty Garman (daughter of Jacob Epstein and niece of Lorna Wishart) whom he married in 1948. She sat for Girl with Roses (19478), and more resignedly as Girl with a White Dog (19501). Freud did not take to domesticity. His Interior in Paddington (1951), featuring a resentful young man squaring up to the even more unkempt palm in its alien setting (the painters room in Delamere Terrace, London W2), secured an Arts Council Festival of Britain purchase prize. Divorce was followed by marriage to Caroline Blackwood in December 1953. The subsequent Hotel Bedroom (1954) was a disaffected view of the relationship, which formally ended in 1957.

Emboldened paintings (making the paint do what you want it to do) were more than a match for the distractionsgambling, betting and amorous pursuitsof the sixties, a period in which the artist achieved a degree of accomplishment bordering on virtuosity. Living still (squatting virtually) in various council properties scheduled for demolition, he fitted phenomenal stretches of activity into each day: a compartmented life in which sittings had unquestionable priority. He aimed throughout, he said, for greater ruthlessness. As his celebrity swelled he became increasingly conscious of time running out.

This second volume begins when Freud had just over forty years of studio life ahead of him: years that in terms of ambition and relentless application were to prove extraordinarily productive. It combines his words and my recollections together with the reminiscences of many others whose relationships with him differed widely.

Sometimes, when he stepped back to take a fresh look at a painting as it neared what could be declared completion, he would murmur, as though taunting himself: How far can you go?

Initially this book was to have been a brief account of Freud the artist, but in the late 1990s, as the tapes accumulated and reminiscences flowed, we agreed that what Lucian had taken to referring to as The First Funny Art Book was outgrowing its prospectus, so it was shelved for the time being, Lucian half-heartedly assuring me that he would have no objection to a novel appearing once he was dead. Working with him on a number of exhibitions made the oeuvre ever more familiar to me and we went on talking, primarily on the phone, almost daily. The notes I took from the countless conversations (How old am I now? he would ask me or, less specifically, How goes it?) are the chief source of these two volumes of biography.