Freud was a great divider. He allowed few of us to see any of the others. The central crossroads in his later life were his painting studio and Clarke’s. Everyone important to him in his final years met there.
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.
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.
According to Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, who was also Lucian’s confidant and subject, perhaps the most important influence was Sigmund’s biological study of animals, which had a far greater impact on his grandson than anything to do with Oedipal complexes or interpretations of dreams.
When my father died she [Lucie] tried to kill herself. She had given up. I actually felt I could finally be with her because she lost interest in me,’ Lucian said. ‘I tried to be unavailable to her when I was young. She was very intelligent and highly observant. I felt oppressed by her because she was very instinctive and I’ve always been very secretive. It was hard to keep things from her. The idea of her knowing what I was doing or thinking bothered me a great deal. So it was a strained relationship.
He was on the threshold of his ‘disturbing’ or ‘hallucinatory’ period, which led Herbert Read, the critic and co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, to describe him as ‘the Ingres of existentialism’. It was a compliment that Lucian enjoyed, Ingres being one of the painters he most admired.
She was mesmerised by his focused intent, the combination of a strict work ethic with an unstructured moral code. While his subject was before him, they were all-important. ‘The aura given out by a person or an object is as much a part of them as their flesh,’ he once wrote. ‘The effect they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell. The effect in space of two different individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and a light bulb.’
Once Sophie had started an affair with Lucian, she too quickly realised that he was incapable of sticking to one sexual partner. ‘I was intensely involved but aware that other people were involved too. You don’t know things and just have to work them out. You’re not quite sure what’s going on. When Lucian was out of the room I would look at the paintings turned against the wall and see a bit more of someone’s breast. It would make me terribly jealous. He gave a lot of attention when you were there with him, but when you weren’t then you knew there was a whole other life happening. That was tough,’ she said.
Annie identified with him, almost obsessively. ‘We looked alike. We even sounded alike in the way he slightly rolled his Rs in words like “free” or “restaurant”. And I loved his assertions… how he would say, “I take bribes but they never influence my judgement: that’s true incorruptibility.” I was one hundred per cent part of him.
Hers had always been a childhood full of bewildering contrasts. ‘To break one’s addiction for continuity was an essential way of dealing with him,’ she concluded.
His hobby was reading people. Some people wondered why he would sit with a young girl, a model or one of his grandchildren and not speak much. It was because his eyes were swivelling round reading people’s movements and looks. It was what he did professionally,’ said Doherty.
The end of Lucian’s gambling days coincided with gaining a new dealer. William Acquavella was ambitious, and transformed Lucian’s reputation and prices. His New York gallery was the ultimate blue-chip modern art dealership, presenting exhibitions by Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Picasso and Léger.
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.
The collectors of his work were mainly English aristocrats like the Devonshires or Colin Tennant, who were willing to pay between £5,000 and £25,000 per painting. ‘It doesn’t seem a great deal now but it was then,’ said d’Offay. There were one or two early purchases by the Tate and other public collections in the 1950s, but that petered out. Certainly compared to Bacon he seemed an artist in the second division. On top of that, dealers considered Lucian difficult as he would sell works on the side, or slip them off quietly to bookmakers to settle a debt.
D’Offay’s relationship with Freud had started in the 1960s through an introduction by a bright young art expert called James Kirkman, the son of a general, who worked for Marlborough Fine Art and looked after Lucian there. Marlborough, part-owned by the Duke of Beaufort, was the most prestigious British contemporary gallery, representing Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, as well as Lucian. But Lucian felt ignored and sidelined compared to his friend Bacon, who in 1962 had a show at the Tate Gallery and was rapidly gaining a global reputation. ‘Lucian was by no means a star then. He was actually thought to be something of a has-been,’ said Kirkman. ‘No one was really interested in figurative art, especially what he did. Pop art and kinetic art was what modern art collectors desired. All that passed Lucian by, making him seem traditional, even old-fashioned, but still with an ability to shock with his raw nudes. He was doing pictures that were considered less attractive, that were not really appealing to anyone. It sounds strange now but that was the reality and how he was received and perceived.
Kirkman appealed to Lord Goodman to arbitrate to prevent the split and saw him twice, but even England’s greatest fixer could not mend the relationship. Victor Chandler also tried to broker a peace deal, but to no avail. Kirkman said, ‘I didn’t want to go on. I had another life and other artists. Lucian was very demanding. I never went away for more than ten days and he would phone within five minutes of my coming back home. Even on Christmas Eve he would call and ask for some photographs of a work to be sent to someone. It never occurred to Lucian that he could be wrong, however monstrously he behaved to his children, wives or even his dealers.
There was one slight hitch. Lucian owed money to a Northern Irish bookie, and asked Acquavella to sort it out. He had often asked his dealers to sort out similar financial headaches in his life. Lucian said that the bookie’s name was Alfie McLean, and that he had bought many of his paintings. Acquavella duly arranged lunch with McLean, whom he recognised at once as ‘the Big Man’ in Lucian’s portrait of that name from the 1970s. ‘When I sat down with Alfie McLean at the end of the meal I asked what Lucian owed him. I was thinking of some preposterous figure like £100,000. When he spurted out £2.7 million I was blown away.