There's a rare home movie depicting Sigmund Freud, identifier of the Oedipus complex, strolling around a garden in Primrose Hill in 1938, while his 16-year-old grandson Lucian Freud lurks evasively by a goldfish pond. Today, 82-year-old Lucian has become the equal in fame of his grandfather. Yet he continues to avoid the camera lens. He has never lacked cronies and lovers, but he is fanatically private. His mother once told him that his first words were: "Leave me alone!"
In the early days of his success half a century ago, Lucian Freud was a charismatic playboy, a lady-killer with an Alvis. He mixed as easily with Soho lowlife as with Mayfair toffs. Frail now, stick-thin, stooped, his face bloodless, his nose like a hawk's bill, I see him shuffling up Holland Park Avenue to Lidgate, the bespoke butchers, to buy steaks for the whippet; woodcock, quail and snipe for his human sitters. In crumpled chinos and laceless trainers, a thin grey scarf around his collarless neck, there's more than a hint of old Steptoe. Yet with an income estimated in 2003 as £12m a year, he is twice as rich as Robbie Williams, they say, and despite the geriatric grunginess, he can still mesmerise women old enough to be his granddaughters. At 79 he was dating a 27-year-old called Emily Bearn. His latest self-portrait (on show at the National Portrait Gallery) reveals a naked young woman, identified as one Alexandra Williams-Wynn, the 32-year-old daughter of a Welsh landowner and baronet. Her ankles are wrapped around his right leg; her left hand wanders, it seems, towards his fly; or is it his pocket?
Entitled The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer, it is, on the face of it, a portrait of male power and female desire. Yet for all her naked availability, his erect brush aims away from the girl and towards a canvas that replicates the portrait itself in a supposed infinity of mirror images. As the light dies and eternity beckons, Freud's resolve seems confirmed. Wild oats sown, though passion not entirely spent, he is focusing his remaining energy on the work, sole guarantee of immortality. He will sometimes drive a favoured sitter in his Bentley for gastronomic treats at the River Café, or Locanda Locatelli, on Seymour Street; but the gadfly days are over. Two years ago he agreed to visit the Paris exhibition John Constable, Selected by Lucian Freud, only when offered a lift by private jet. He is painting for up to 14 hours a day, all day and half the night, and hopes to die with nothing more than a paintbrush in his hand.
Although he is remorselessly secretive, the story of his relationships is like a living expression of the "many worlds" theory: from poets to East End gangsters, from gay performance artists to supermodels, from job-centre clerks to the Queen of England. Among his past, long-dead acquaintances he counts Orson Welles, Raymond Chandler, Greta Garbo, Count Basie and, amazingly, George Formby, the 1940s ukulele-strumming northern comic with a line in smutty lyrics. Like a spy master, he has kept his acquaintances separate. As for strangers, this is a man who used to respond to would-be inquiries via a series of telegrams from secret locations, like espionage drops, which might, but invariably did not, culminate in a call from a public telephone box. As he prepares for another retrospective, at the Museo Correr in Venice next month, in which almost 100 of his works will be shown, it is irresistible to attempt, yet again, to breach the bastions he has erected against a public scrutiny teased and tormented by lack of information. Freud has said: "Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait." Seen that way, the Venice exhibition illustrates not only Freud's work from the past 50 years, but also his own life and relationships: his women, some of his children, his friends, from Francis Bacon to Frank Auerbach, his inspirations, such as Leigh Bowery — and even his monarch.
The pitiless scrutiny of his artistic eye on tangled armpit, pubic hair and raw tickle-tackle ill accord with his personal bashfulness. But ever since he was expelled aged 16 from Bryanston school for exhibiting his bare bum on Bournemouth's promenade, he has displayed a rare talent for shock tactics. Not so long ago he stunned the art world with his painting titled Large Interior, Notting Hill. A fully dressed middle-aged man is on a sofa reading a book; in the background a second naked man sits in a chair breast-feeding a baby from his own nipple. The very notion, let alone the raw image, is enough to knock your socks off. Sigmund Freud's analytical successor, Melanie Klein, gave us the good-breast bad-breast. His grandson gives us the good-breast bloke-breast. Some sort of gay-couple baby-rights campaign? It emerged that the lactating gentleman, modelled by Freud's assistant David Dawson, was superimposed over a painting of a naked Jerry Hall suckling her baby. When I ask a friend of Freud "Why?" he says: "I guess the Jerry Hall image didn't work out."
I put this circumstance to the psychoanalyst and feminist Professor Juliet Mitchell. "The answer is simple," she says. "He's fallen out with Jerry Hall, and hence with women in general. So he's telling us: look, men are more nurturing than these hard bitches of women." Mitchell's opinion is echoed by the late 11th Duke of Devonshire, who collected Freuds for more than 50 years. He once remarked: "I'm not sure how much he loves women... for horses and dogs he shows affection; his portraits of the ladies are misogynous." Another view has it that after investing all his respect and reverence for womanhood in his mother, whom he even painted in death, he endows by contrast the rest of womankind with a sense of resentment and aggression.
The labyrinthine connections of Freud's story span the decades and a gamut of complex relationships and emotions. Born in Berlin in 1922 at the beginning of the dysfunctional Weimar years, he was the youngest son of Ernst Freud, a successful architect and himself the youngest son of the famous Sigmund. The family was affluent: there were servants, Dürers on the walls, horse-riding in the Tiergarten.
Bodyguards accompanied Ernst's three sons, Stephen, Lucian and Clement (the TV personality and former MP) to school. It is said that he has not spoken to Clement in 30 years because of a quarrel over a silly wager. They came to England in 1933 after Hitler took power. Lucian attended various private schools in England, including Dartington Hall, then art schools, one of which, the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham, he set on fire with a careless cigarette stub. When the war broke out he went to sea on a merchant ship. He wanted to see America. He made just one crossing of the North Atlantic on a convoy run. Small, no more than about 5ft 6in, his frailty and "girlishness", according to his biographer William Feaver, made life on board a living hell. Suffering from acute tonsillitis, he was invalided out of the merchant service on his return, and started painting in earnest. He rented a flat in run-down Paddington, where he worked for the next 30 years. There was a brief interlude in Paris, where he met Giacometti and Picasso, and then Greece, where he worked with the painter John Craxton on the island of Poros. Returning to England, he fell under the spell of Francis Bacon and his impulsive way of living.
His first marriage was to the sculptor Jacob Epstein's daughter, Kitty Garman, in 1948. She modelled for a number of his pictures, including Girl with a White Dog, which hangs in Tate Britain. After meeting Lady Caroline Blackwood, considered a ravishing beauty in the early 1950s, he asked her to sit for him and began an intense affair. Kitty bore him two daughters but divorced him in 1952. He then married Blackwood. But she too, allegedly unable to stand his drinking and gambling, divorced Freud in 1959, reportedly on grounds of mental cruelty. There was then talk of his marrying Lady Jane Willoughby, the 24-year-old daughter of the Earl of Ancaster, but nothing came of it. There would be many partners, but no more marriages. Among the women with whom he had children are Suzy Boyt, his former student; Bernadine Coverley, a teacher; Katherine McAdam, a fashion designer; and the painter Celia Paul.
What is the attraction? One of his women sitters says being with him is "like putting your finger into an electric socket and being wired up to the national grid... he's exciting company... you feel spiritually uplifted". His daughter Esther Freud says that being in his presence is "like standing on one toe... not being grounded..." The dowager Duchess of Devonshire, one of the Mitford sisters, who has known him since the 1950s, says that he is "mercurial, not quite like a human being, more like a will-o'-the-wisp". She speculates that he must have been "a killer" to be married to. She says that in the early days of his success he would be up all night running around London. Often he got into scrapes. Freud recently told Martin Gayford, the art critic, that he once spent a night in the cells. He had attempted to break into the Cambridge theatre accompanied by a one-legged poetess (he did not realise she had a false limb until later). He was said to be a scary driver, and there were brushes with the law. He was banned for a period after being charged with dangerous driving. The policeman who gave evidence later reported him for driving while disqualified. He was cleared after Jane Willoughby, backed up by their cleaning lady, testified that it was her ladyship who had been at the wheel and not Freud.
We get a glimpse of him in those days through the eyes of the impresario and film agent Mim Scala, who used to organise gaming parties in Mayfair. Lucian Freud, according to Scala, accompanied by Francis Bacon, knocked on the door in the early hours with a "pretty boy with a scar face" in tow. He describes Freud as "a weird-looking man, pale, thin, with bright, dancing eyes and a mop of unruly curls. He had a nervous twitch, beautiful hands, and used safety pins for cuff links". Freud was a "lunatic punter" and settled his whopping debts at 10 the next morning with a cheque. It was Lucian Freud, according to Scala, who was instrumental in bringing the menacing Kray twins into his life.
The gangsters are significant. When casinos were still illegal in Britain, it was the Krays who provided one-night legal gaming parties for late-night gamblers. There was a time, in his younger days, when Freud would finish work at 3pm to spend the rest of the day and night at the betting shops, dog track, racecourse and tables. In 1983 he was characterised as a "dishonourable man" by the Jockey Club and warned off all British racecourses for failing to pay a debt of £19,000 to a bookmaker. Betting only began to lose its savour, he has confessed to a friend, when he became so rich that losing no longer hurt.
The gambling is a crucial clue. "He used to do it for the sheer pleasure of losing," one old friend says. "And he needed to get rid of the money somehow. He saw the money as a kind of excrement. And now his painting is a form of gambling." This is perhaps the most important and least-known secret of Freud's working life.
"Lucian has put his foot through at least half of his paintings," says another intimate. "There comes a point, and it may be months into a painting, when he has to make a crucial decision between options on the canvas. He will hazard the success of a nearly finished painting, possibly worth millions, on one decision that can't be undone. If he realises that he's made the wrong choice, he'll slash it, destroy it." Like a losing number on the roulette wheel — pop goes a fortune! A lesser painter, a non-gambler, would put the painting in the attic for a rainy day. But given that this year alone, two paintings by Freud were among the top 10 most expensive works sold at auction, he has no need for such caution. (His Red Haired Man on a Chair, 1962-63, fetched the second-highest price: £4.15m.)
