“Painter Working, Reflection,” 1993 (The Lucian Freud Archive/Royal Academy of Arts)
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In late 1940, the 18-year-old Lucian Freud sent a series of highly decorated letters to the renowned poet and critic Stephen Spender. The pair had become fast friends and, despite their 12-year age gap, would later become lovers. In their exchange — one of many collected in the brilliant new volume Love Lucian — Freud embellishes his messages with pencil illustrations and not-so-subtle hints of their growing romantic attraction; Freud gave himself a pen-name meaning “juicy fruit“.
Their correspondence is remarkable not just for the intimacy it reveals, but for the fact that the volume exists at all: while Freud was alive, none of these letters would have seen the light of day. He was obsessively, obstreperously concerned with his privacy. One biography was halted after Freud felt too disconcerted by its revelations, and another was stopped at Freud’s behest by the very persuasive presence of a group of East-End gangsters. The first volume of William Feaver’s weighty account was only published in 2019 — eight years after the artist’s death.
Martin Gayford — who edited the new volume with Freud’s long-term assistant David Dawson — was uncompromising about how Freud would see this latest book: “I’m sure he wouldn’t have welcomed it… [but] posterity is owed the correspondence.”
It’s not hard to see why an intrepid writer would run the risk of Freud’s wrath or even hired violence. Freud’s life is made for a biography. The grandson of Sigmund Freud, he was born in Berlin and moved to London to escape the rise of Nazism in 1933. He dated Greta Garbo, danced with Marlene Dietrich, was friends with Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon, married the sculptor Jacob Epstein’s daughter, Kitty (after an affair with her aunt), eloped with the Guinness heiress and socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood, and, in his later years, was friends with the supermodel (and future subject) Kate Moss. He dated the artist Celia Paul — after having met her when she was his student — and had scores of other mistresses. He is the acknowledged father to 14 children, and the suspected father to dozens more.
It is this celebrity — his “fame and infamy” — that the new retrospective at the National Gallery, Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, hopes to “look beyond”. The exhibition’s curator, Daniel F. Herrmann, writes that Freud’s artistic practice has been “overshadowed by biography”, and he hopes to bring the paintings back to the fore.
It’s a worthy aim — who doesn’t want an art exhibition to be focused on the art? — but, when it comes to Freud, the line between biography and creation has always been rather fraught. After his early portrait of his art teacher and friend Cedric Morris (Love Lucian also features letters to Morris), Freud rarely painted portraits of named sitters. His pictures of his first wife, Kitty Garman, often refer to her only as “girl”: Girl with a Kitten (1947); Girl with a White Dog (1951 – 1952); Girl with Roses (1948). Garman may have been Freud’s muse, but he was meticulous about keeping her name, and any hint of their joint biography, out of his work.
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SubscribeHmmm… this brief dive into the life and work of Freud seems like something from a bygone age. Although the author is careful to stress the ambivalence that might be felt, it still seems as if his “chauvinism” is being celebrated. If he was at pains during his lifetime to protect his privacy, it can’t have been because he thought his behaviour would enhance his artistic reputation… or was that simply a conceit which he used, given the amount of very public exposure he himself engendered – shouting across restaurants, for instance?
I’d guess there would be much greater opprobrium if he were still alive and working; lawsuits, even. And yet, none of his partners (of either sex) appeared to feel coerced; one can’t be coerced to keep returning day after day to pose for extremely intimate portraits, unless of course, you’re a rat.
Whilst Freud’s ability to manipulate paint isn’t in question, what interests me more is why people become manipulable. Do we all secretly yearn to have our pudenda on display, for instance? And the way to do this is called “art”?
I’ll come clean here. As an artist, i’m well versed in the revelatory nature of the visual arts, and that includes sculpture and photography. I’m bored to tears, however, with the so-called “revelation” of naked display. It’s only a sample of who we are, within certain limited circumstances, and i find much of Western art involving the “nude” pretty yawn-inducing. Oh look, there’s another one… wall after wall in gallery after gallery. Freud was a great painter, but in my opinion was far from being a great artist, missing out on a huge amount of vital human experience in his pose of “protecting his privacy” whilst going out of his way to do the opposite. That’s the true revelation; greater than any amount of exposed flesh.
Nicely said. Let’s face it, if L. Freud’s last name wasn’t Freud, would he have been nothing more than a bum?
Apart from a very strong personality, a very strong will directed at painting, a very keen observer of the human body and a developed mastery of paint.
It’s interesting to read accounts about flagrant, demented and chauvinistic perverts. But, somehow, if they create art it is all ok. But if they exist in any other form, they are demonized.
The art world likes its pets. They like them to be a bit dangerous. It gives them a thrill to know it might bite.
He appeals to those on the left as portraying the gritty realism of life. I always find it funny that liberals, the left are so attracted personally to people who are vile in their treatment of others.
Freud would have been destroyed in the current climate – but then we’d have missed out on his great art. So separate they (behaviour and art) must be.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t have welcomed it… [but] posterity is owed the correspondence.”
My response to this is, why?
It’d keep hagiographers in employment.
I just love the scattering of “gaze” here and there.
His sitters are subjected to his excoriating gaze, …
… the cold, unsparing nature of Freud’s gaze makes her seem dead.
You can feel Freud’s cruel, uncompromising, brilliant gaze in every canvas…
Gaze is the empty receptacle, devoid of intention, until it can be squeezed from accounts of Freud’s behaviour and trickled into it as meaning and so becomes a lens to view his paintings. But it is an awfully big assumption that behaviour implies the nature of an artist’s perception, and then to conclude on the back of that, that Freuds “gaze” was “excoriating”, “cold”, “unsparing”, “cruel”, “uncompromising” and “brilliant”.
If he did one good thing, it was that Freud kept figurative painting in the public eye during an era when the art form was neglected in favour of American abstracts and so-called Pop Art. Lucian had the upper-class connections, which helped him being taken seriously by galleries. My late husband the artist Cyril Mann (1911-1980) was not so lucky. Impoverished, bi-polar, and without the right friends and contacts, he did many of his finest paintings in a small council flat, determined to invigorate figurative painting. Today his flat has a commemorative plaque celebrating Cyril’s achievements. One critic opined he could have been ‘the most important figurative artist of his generation’, but what’s the use? He has been dead over forty years.
Illuminating and captivating article. An artist behaviour and personality can add to understanding their work, but its when people try to cancel the presentation of the work that we can loose out.