With the passing years, his attraction to women, and his dalliances with sitters, continued unabated. "He's simply dishy," says one intimate. "He's just one of those rare men that have sexual charisma... born with it." His attraction and his talent are inseparable from the work, the money and the complex, at times remorseful, legacy of the past. When Robert Lowell, America's greatest mid-20th-century poet, was found dead in the back of a Manhattan taxi in 1977, his fingers were clutching a parcel containing a Lucian Freud painting. It was a portrait of Lowell's wife, and Freud's former wife, Caroline Blackwood. That afternoon, Lowell's heart had given out while being driven along the Van Wyck Expressway from JFK. He had just flown from Dublin after himself splitting up with Blackwood, a woman by then ravaged by years of booze, chain-smoking and personal tragedy. Lowell had brought the painting of his wife to New York not for reasons of nostalgia, but for valuation. Death got him first. Blackwood herself died in 1996. And Lucian paints on.
Freud's deepest reserve is about his women, past and present: the stories of mistresses, muses and love children. His intimates have a habit of closing ranks. One would-be unofficial biographer claims that he became frightened for his life as he got closer to the facts. And yet the interest in Freud's relationships is not so much the names and numbers (the late Daniel Farson guessed ludicrously at 40 offspring) as the dynamic between the art and the relationships. Virtually unnoticed, the intimate reality has been penetrated by Feaver in a remarkable series of recorded interviews with Freud's sitters, filmed over two years with a simple digital camera without lighting. Viewing this material is a poignant and highly revealing experience.
Anne Dunn, who had an affair with Freud about 40 years ago, says to camera that she first met him in various nightclubs in London, such as the Antilles and the Gargoyle. Her beauty now faded, she talks of his "electric" personality and how he "had more life than other people". They spent time together in Ireland, and she began to sit for him: "I wanted to please him." The first sittings were done in a "domestic" atmosphere, she says, but after she fell in love with him, there came "the fact of being used by Lucian". Being painted by Lucian, she says, now took on "another meaning". Dunn says that she was used to sitting for painters, and hence familiar with the sense of being "like a still life, a bottle or an apple". Tears in her eyes, Dunn says: "I had a very strong relationship with Lucian... I loved him very much." When the sittings, and the affair, came to an end, it was, she says, "like being flung out of the Garden of Eden". Evidently she has still not got over the experience.
Another frank informant is Celia Paul, a distinguished artist in her own right, who has described how Freud turned up at a life class when she was an art student about 20 years ago at the Slade. Freud, wearing "a beautiful grey suit, and pale shirt, was smoking a French cigarette". He "stared intensely" at the model. He was "just very charismatic", she says. Afterwards, Paul approached him and asked him to look at her work. Then he told her, she says, "that he had come to the Slade to find a girl, and that girl was me". She sat for him; they had an affair and she became pregnant with his child. "I used to cry a lot," she says. "He was very nice about it." The painting became "a record of our closeness; you could see that he loves me in it..." Paul would model for a number of subsequent paintings. One picture, entitled Painter and Model, depicts her, brush in hand, painting a male nude on a bed, her foot squashing an oil tube, squirting the paint over the floor. She is convinced that the painting signifies a sexual role reversal in which, as artist, she has become the strong male, and the male model has become female.
Freud has at least 14 children. Several of his children and grandchildren have sat for him. Esther Freud, who began to pose when she was 16, says that his children had a choice to make. "You can get the good bit if you don't expect him to behave like other people's fathers." Rose Boyt, his daughter by Suzy Boyt, says that she was very tense when she first modelled for him. She concedes that she might well have burst out with: "Where were you when I needed you?" But she didn't. Instinctively she too opted for the "good bit". Today, Freud, the erstwhile tearaway, who was once mad about glamorous cars, horses and women, and who did "everything", Rose says, "to avoid ordinary family life", has become focused on family life through his employment of his children and grandchildren as sitters.
Outside his close family, the scope of his sitters has always been unpredictable. While Prince Charles's relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles proceeded inexorably towards marriage, Freud, who refused to paint Diana, executed a small and ill-favoured bodiless portrait of the crowned Queen and, separately, a huge rendering of Andrew Parker Bowles seated on
a throne-like chair placed upon a dais. The circumstance is one of queasy irony. Here is the right-royally cuckolded brigadier, a study in morning-after-the-night-before dissipation, while the indignant face of Her Majesty looks as if she's had her head chopped off. By the mere fact of committing them to his canvases, Freud has forged an immortal bond of disgruntled affinity between the principal malcontents of England's most notorious post-war adultery.
It is not to be thought, of course, that Freud sleeps routinely with his sitters or that he has the least regard for social standing. He often used Leigh Bowery, the 16-stone performance artist who died of Aids in 1994, and he has frequently employed a very plump job-centre clerk called Sue Tilley. Tilley, by her own admission, says of one painting: "I look horrible, like a great huge fat crab lying on the floor." Then she adds, shades of Dorian Gray: "It's a blessing that I look so horrible in the pictures, as people say that in real life I look a bit better." Sitters are often paid quite generously. Some refuse payment, but receive out-of-pocket travel expenses.
Freud says that he likes to feel that every aspect of a portrait is "provisional, changeable, removable". His portrait grows organically outwards from a single point, often an eye, and the sitter must be prepared for weeks, months, and years of remaining in one position for up to three times a week and for several hours at a stretch. He often works with a palette knife, says Feaver, "constantly scraping the oil off the canvas and wiping it on the wall or on rags", which explains the strange foliage-like paint strokes on the walls and on the festoons of frayed old sheets.
He ensures that the studio high in his Kensington property is warm, and there is often a rich aroma of game roasting down in the kitchen for succulent meals, washed down with champagne, during the breaks. From time to time he will approach the sitter, unnervingly close, centimetres away from the face. He has remarked of his sitters: "I'm interested in them as animals." One says it's like being at the dentist. Sometimes he works in silence; at other times he chatters. Tilley says that sometimes he loses his temper when things are going wrong and shouts out "F***! F***! F***!", whacking the paintbrush across his thigh. One sitter tells how he attempted to discourage Freud from conversation in the hope that the painting would reach an earlier conclusion: in vain. Martin Gayford reports that the process for his portrait was so "glacial" that he lost count of the sittings. "My hair was noticeably greyer by the end of it."
Freud is by all accounts a fascinating and witty conversationalist: literature, current affairs, art, life. He speaks in an educated "1950s accent" with a slight guttural tinge and rolling Rs. He is well informed, taking all the broadsheet papers every day, with a particular interest in gossip and art criticism. He is not interested in television although he has one. He is given to quoting Schiller in German, Auden, T S Eliot and Philip Larkin. Sometimes he will sing. He likes to give a rendering of George Formby's When I'm Cleaning Windows. Not an inappropriate ditty for a painter of nudes: "If you could see what I can see/When I'm cleaning windows".
He is a deep reader, especially of Henry James. He plunders his grandfather Sigmund's works, he says, "only for the jokes". The best of all, he has said, is the psychoanalyst's contention that Moses was an Egyptian. Freud has weird, paranormal beliefs: for example, that the air circulates in peculiar ways around some individuals' heads. But he is not religious. He does little exercise, and the sitters I have spoken to have observed that nowadays he is a little stiff. In his fitter days he rode horses in Hyde Park, "without a hard hat", says Andrew Parker Bowles disapprovingly.
Freud's working day is divided between the daylight sittings, which start at 8am and go on sometimes till 3 or 4pm, followed by the night sittings, which start at 7pm and can go on until 2am. He sleeps very little. The artist and critic Patrick Reyntiens focuses precisely on Freud's assiduous working habits to insist he is "not a genius" but achieves his effects simply
"by working very hard".
There have been theories aplenty to explain Freud's genius and originality. Robert Hughes, for example, focuses on his remoteness from mass-media images, resulting in a "a dissent from any kind of visual orthodoxy and received idea". Most critics, however, remain mystified as to quite what puts him so decisively in a class all of his own. There is a tendency to snatch at truisms and generalisations. Celia Paul insists that his paintings "defy narrative", that they are ultimately about "truth". Freud himself indeed speaks of "truth-telling" in painting as something quite different from "fact". It is a matter, he insists, of making choices. William Feaver writes that not so long ago he was talking with Freud on the phone. "It was a conversation about terrible this and horrible that, when he came out with a sort of epitaph, 'The only thing that's interesting about art present or past is quality. The whole mystery of art is why good things are good.'"
The comment tells us everything; and yet it tells us nothing. It is an admission that Freud himself is as mystified as anybody else as to what constitutes great art, including his own. One thing seems certain: that Freud's quality emerges from prodigious control, application, changes of mind, like a thousand drafts of a single poem, or countless takes of a movie scene; rather than the inspiration of the moment, intuition, spontaneity, artistic expression in real time. Contrast, for example, the 3½ months he spent on a "quick" portrait of David Hockney. Hockney returned the compliment, painting Freud in 3½ hours flat. And another thing seems certain: that his obsessive privacy and hatred of publicity have done his fame no harm. In fact, there is every reason to suspect that his reclusive habits and evasion of the limelight have attracted only further attention and deeper fascination, immeasurably enhancing and amplifying his fame and fortune. As he looks forward to the world's acclaim at the Venice exhibition, his reputation as the world's greatest and most famous living realist artist seems secure, despite the puzzlement, the mystery and the seclusion.
THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN
Lucian Freud's most prominent children are the fashion designer Bella and the novelist Esther Freud. The other offspring have largely been ignored by the media, as the sculptor Jane McAdam Freud and her sister, Lucy Everett, admitted in a Sunday Times interview last year. "People doubt us all the time," Lucy said, "because we are not out there publicly saying who we are." But they have always been privately acknowledged by their father. They and their brothers, Paul and David, are the children of Katherine McAdam. They have more contact with their half-siblings than Lucian now.
Lucian Freud is at the Museo Correr, Venice, from June 11 to October 30. To book tickets, call 041 5209070. For more information, visit: www.museiciviciveneziani.it
