In late 1940, the 18-year-old Lucian Freud sent a series of highly decorated letters to the renowned poet and critic Stephen Spender. The pair had become fast friends and, despite their 12-year age gap, would later become lovers. In their exchange — one of many collected in the brilliant new volume Love Lucian — Freud embellishes his messages with pencil illustrations and not-so-subtle hints of their growing romantic attraction; Freud gave himself a pen-name meaning “juicy fruit“.
Their correspondence is remarkable not just for the intimacy it reveals, but for the fact that the volume exists at all: while Freud was alive, none of these letters would have seen the light of day. He was obsessively, obstreperously concerned with his privacy. One biography was halted after Freud felt too disconcerted by its revelations, and another was stopped at Freud’s behest by the very persuasive presence of a group of East-End gangsters. The first volume of William Feaver’s weighty account was only published in 2019 — eight years after the artist’s death.
Martin Gayford — who edited the new volume with Freud’s long-term assistant David Dawson — was uncompromising about how Freud would see this latest book: “I’m sure he wouldn’t have welcomed it… [but] posterity is owed the correspondence.”
It’s not hard to see why an intrepid writer would run the risk of Freud’s wrath or even hired violence. Freud’s life is made for a biography. The grandson of Sigmund Freud, he was born in Berlin and moved to London to escape the rise of Nazism in 1933. He dated Greta Garbo, danced with Marlene Dietrich, was friends with Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon, married the sculptor Jacob Epstein’s daughter, Kitty (after an affair with her aunt), eloped with the Guinness heiress and socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood, and, in his later years, was friends with the supermodel (and future subject) Kate Moss. He dated the artist Celia Paul — after having met her when she was his student — and had scores of other mistresses. He is the acknowledged father to 14 children, and the suspected father to dozens more.
It is this celebrity — his “fame and infamy” — that the new retrospective at the National Gallery, Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, hopes to “look beyond”. The exhibition’s curator, Daniel F. Herrmann, writes that Freud’s artistic practice has been “overshadowed by biography”, and he hopes to bring the paintings back to the fore.
It’s a worthy aim — who doesn’t want an art exhibition to be focused on the art? — but, when it comes to Freud, the line between biography and creation has always been rather fraught. After his early portrait of his art teacher and friend Cedric Morris (Love Lucian also features letters to Morris), Freud rarely painted portraits of named sitters. His pictures of his first wife, Kitty Garman, often refer to her only as “girl”: Girl with a Kitten (1947); Girl with a White Dog (1951 – 1952); Girl with Roses (1948). Garman may have been Freud’s muse, but he was meticulous about keeping her name, and any hint of their joint biography, out of his work.
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