Freud could be selfish, amoral and cruel. But he lived and painted with feverish intensity.
There is a much darker side to his life, too. The relentless womanising, including with vulnerable people far, far younger than him; the children so numerous they were hard to keep track of; the brutal break-ups, vicious feuds and spasms of verbal cruelty that made Freud, for many people, an impossibly sulphurous figure, a coldly brilliant predator smoking with menace. Observing him at the Jewish wedding in London of the painter RB Kitaj, the poet Stephen Spender whispered to Feaver: “I can’t stand being in the same place with Lucian. He is an evil man.”
How is a biographer and a friend supposed to bridge this impossible gap of perception? Freud’s doctor, Michael Gormley, perhaps comes nearest to a balanced picture when he described him as “one of those wonderful people who owned his self. His selfishness. He had an addictive personality. Addictive people love intensity; it’s the nature of the personality, ruling everything…”
This intensity makes him a glorious subject for biography. In this second volume, taking the story from 1968 to 2011, Feaver lacks the jaw-dropping Hogarthian quality of the early life, with its cast of gangsters, stoned aristocrats and Soho bacchanals. These, by contrast, are the decades dominated by grand exhibitions in London, Paris and New York, feuds with collectors and galleries, friendships with the (very) rich and famous, from Kate Moss to Arnold Goodman, and the steady succession of masterworks emerging from his various studios.
You wouldn’t have thought that any of this could possibly be as interesting as the hungry years. Yet Feaver has written a second great page-turner, one of the finest art biographies I know. Part of that comes about because of the artist’s authentic voice, meticulously recorded in all those conversations. By the time the book closes, you hear Freud ringing inside your head, with his sibilant Germanic accent, his subtlety, anxiety and humour. Asked about how it feels when an old picture sells for £1m, he responds: “I can only say that it feels like hearing that an overbearing great-aunt I had no contact with has been eaten by cannibals.”
Yet, behind the jokes there is often tragedy. The background tone is black, even with aunts. Discussing his lack of enthusiasm for showing in Vienna, Freud explains: “My great-aunts, when the Nazis put them into the concentration camp, were in their sixties. One went to the head of the camp and said, ‘We aren’t ordinary persons that have been roped in, because we are half-sisters of a very great man [Sigmund Freud]. Could you put us to death right away?’ So they did. It’s not secret. My father told me that…” If Freud was a strange one, who lived always at full throttle and had a horror of wasting the gift of life, you can see why.
Part of that intensity is displayed through his unusual attitude to money. During the first part of this volume, even as he is creating his greatest paintings, Freud is still being sneered at by the London critics and earning far less than his one-time friend and rival Francis Bacon. He loses huge amounts betting. For many years he was banned from racecourses after a feud about Northern Irish banknotes. When money does come in, he often hands it straight to somebody who is in need, or who has simply asked. Similarly, he expects to borrow whenever he needs to and likes to keep a fat stash of banknotes always close to hand. Once he does become very rich, gambling loses its appeal (because he can afford to lose), and the sitters/girlfriends receive more and more extravagant presents. It is, in short, a thoroughly un-bourgeois attitude to wealth.
The same cannot, sadly, be said for the cast list. As characters, his dealers and collectors are inevitably duller than the street urchins and wide boys of the earlier volume. The most remarkable characters here are the famous sitters, Leigh Bowery and “Big Sue” Tilley, the benefits supervisor. But what gives this book its rocket fuel is Feaver’s close attention to the work itself. The paintings are the real characters. We feel and understand that the making of a major one is itself a dramatic, even theatrical, episode – the centre of the life.
The most thrilling example is probably the making of his 1981-83 masterwork, Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau), with his friends and children squeezed on to an iron bed in a scabrous, peeling studio, a tap running to one side. The psychological tensions and the physical difficulties of making this entirely successful painting are brilliantly described – the changes of direction, the rubbings-out, the sheer intellectual effort.
In other cases, the studio dramas can be high comedy. In 1998, Freud was working on another large interior. One sitter, Francis Wyndham, is reading a book in the foreground, while the other, Jerry Hall, then married to Mick Jagger, is seen breastfeeding her new baby in the sunlit background. The assumption was that Jagger would buy the final painting. Unfortunately, to Freud’s fury, Hall proved unreliable: she kept failing to turn up for the sittings. A battle of wills began. Who was the more important, the supermodel or the artist? Gleefully, Freud resolved this by simply painting her out and substituting David Dawson, his studio assistant and amanuensis, suckling Hall’s child with his male breast. Freud dropped Hall a note, casually explaining, “You’ve turned into a man”, and told Feaver: “With the baby, David looked more like a mother.” According to Freud’s dealer at the time, “Jagger went crazy”, though the painting was immediately sold. Jerry Hall morosely summed up: “He scratched me out.”
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