He was entrenched in life-study portraiture and he made it provocative. ‘It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious,’ he said.
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He made most things sound or seem less ordinary, be it the cut or shape of a lapel, or his thoughts on love, or even spinach: ‘I can imagine that if a woman I was in love with cooked spinach with oil, I would also enjoy the slight heroism of liking it, although I didn’t usually enjoy it served that way.
In the 1950s and 60s, when abstraction and postmodernism were in the ascendant, he continued obsessively painting the human figure in a studio.
Lucian had been remarkably fast out of the starting blocks in his teens and early twenties (the Museum of Modern Art in New York had bought a picture in the 1940s), but then there was a very long period when his paintings sold only to a small number of English people and he enjoyed almost no international recognition. In the early days of their relationship Freud was encouraged by Bacon and eventually he followed his more reckless, free-style approach, abandoning his Germanic tightness of line and fine surfaces.
He was often virtually penniless in his early days, spending almost all his money on paint. ‘Until I was fifty I never had a bank account, always lived from hand to mouth. I used to lie awake at night wondering if I’d be able to go on with my paintings or whether the paint would run out.
When Acquavella took him on, he said bluntly: ‘Lucian look. I’m an art dealer. I’m not an accountant. I’m not a nursemaid and if you need any of those things you’ve got the wrong guy. But you paint them and I’ll sell them.