Aged 16, I began to sit myself. I?d often heard him mention that a certain model ?sat well?, so dutifully I took off my clothes and twisted myself into a position of discomfort, staring into the middle distance, determined not to blink. But I soon realised that being a good model had nothing to do with staying still. It was about being focused, relaxed, patient enough to let the artist get on with what they were making ? a picture ? that just happened to have you in it. Not even, really, a picture of you. ?It is unlikely,? the art critic Robert Hughes wrote not long after, ?that any painter since Picasso has made his figuring of the naked human body such an intense and unsettling experience for the viewer as Lucian Freud.?
My father was born in Berlin in December 1922. His father, Ernst, the youngest son of Sigmund Freud, was an architect who had painted as a student. From early on it was understood that Lucian would become an artist. Like most children, he began drawing young, but unlike most, he continued feverishly, until by the age of 12 it was, along with riding, his greatest passion. Having arrived in England in 1933 (the family left Germany when Hitler became Chancellor), he attended a succession of schools, including the progressive Dartington, which he loved (the only rule was that no one push any one into the swimming pool), and Bryanston, where he decided that if he never went to any of the classes he?d never be missed.
He found the keys to the art studio and spent his time sculpting, and it was a sculpture of a horse he made at 14 that won him a place at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1939. From there he moved to the smaller East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting run by the artist Cedric Morris. He admired Morris and drew prodigiously while there, but one night, in 1942, he accidentally burned the place down ? he hadn?t quite known what to do with his first cigarette.
Not long after he ran off to Liverpool, where he managed to get work on a Merchant Navy ship ? he said he?d lost all his documents on a previous ship that had gone down ? and so they took him on as a sea-going labourer, travelling as far as Newfoundland, from where he sent a postcard to his mother whose interest in him he?d always found overbearing. ?I thought, I?ll never be here again and she won?t be able to write back.? After several months he contracted pneumonia and spent time convalescing in a hospital in Liverpool before returning to Cedric Morris, who kindly let him stay in his own house.
It wasn?t long before he began to gain a reputation in London as an astonishingly talented young artist. His early work was spiky and precise. Rooms, faces, plants, furniture were its subjects, although the large head of a zebra in The Painter?s Room, 1943, gave the impression that he may have been more influenced by Surrealism than he actually was. But he found the rigidity of Surrealism limiting and anyway, he once told me: ?I?d never paint anything that wasn?t actually there.?
The artists he loved and was influenced by are those he continued to love. Ingres, Constable, Matisse, Degas, Rembrandt, Chardin, although in the early days he felt that his work didn?t have much to do with other art, that his admirations were separate from what he might actually achieve. He hoped, just by concentrating enough, the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures. ?I ignored the fact that art, after all, derives from art. Now I realise that this is the case.? He told me this once while we were cracking walnuts with the bottom of a jam jar. What was on the easel? The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer.
Although success and a certain amount of notoriety came his way early on, it wasn?t until the late 1980s that he became internationally known. He had his first solo touring show abroad in 1987, in Washington and then Paris, arriving at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1988, where his work had been shown some years before ? the only memory of which I have was of meeting him on the terrace of the South Bank and being amazed to find we didn?t have to join the queue but were able to skip right in. This new exhibition was advertised in one magazine with the nude painting of me ? Vile Flesh at the Hayward ? but although I blushed, I was also proud.
Since then there have been many exhibitions, including a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, the last piece of which was a self-portrait of the artist at 80, his mouth drawn down as if in determination ? exhausted, valiant, victorious with effort. A few years later the Wallace Collection showed work from the previous 10 years, an array of almost 100 paintings, many among them more beautiful and ambitious, more startling, unsettling, than anything he?d done before.
?Have you always felt you had to push yourself so hard?? I asked him once, pressing his hand, blue-veined, worn smooth with work. ?No,? he replied. ?Only since I?ve felt myself weakening.?
And as his last, almost completed painting, Portrait of the Hound, testifies, that was when he decided he really had better get on.
� Esther Freud, 2012
* ?Lucian Freud: Portraits? is at the National Portrait Gallery from February 9, www.npg.org.uk; ?Lucian Freud: Studio Life? is at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery from January 30, www.hh-h.com; ?Lucian Freud: Drawings? is at the Blain Southern Gallery from February 17, www.blainsouthern.com
Lee Grant Peter Graves Joel Grey Robert Guillaume Buddy Hackett
No comments:
Post a Comment