Breakfast with Lucian Read online

  Chandler felt gambling was an intrinsic part of Lucian’s character. ‘My impression is that he wasn’t one for great self-analysis; he was almost animal. He went with his feelings, took what he wanted. That was his strength. You could also physically see it in his actions, eating with his fingers, tearing birds to pieces on his plate. When we cooked pheasant or partridge he wouldn’t use a knife or fork. I don’t think he ever articulated it, but the usual social rules that we apply to ourselves I don’t think he ever thought they applied to him. There were no rules really.’

  In gambling and in painting (as well as in kick-starting endless new affairs) Lucian found an adrenalin rush. Both occupations, he thought, relied on a degree of chance with a tiny margin of error between success and failure. ‘I would see Lucian put his boot through a canvas when he felt it had gone wrong, when only the day before he had been convinced that it was going to work. It mirrored the hope of winning before a bet turns sour, the difference between winning and losing can be the head of a horse, and with a painting one fucked up brushstroke,’ Chandler said.

  It became a rite of passage for Lucian’s bookies to sit for their portraits. It was the most practical way of reducing his debts, as they could buy his pictures at a discounted rate. Chandler liked sitting for Lucian as it gave him many hours of quiet time away from his hectic office. It immersed him in Lucian’s world completely. Sometimes at midnight they would visit the National Gallery using Lucian’s special 24-hour access. And they talked incessantly, and often provocatively.

  GG: ‘What was Lucian afraid of?’

  VC: ‘I think he had a fear of being poor. Underneath all that bravado it meant something to have security. It was as if by gambling he could sort of play with his biggest fear.’

  GG: ‘And women?’

  VC: ‘The conversation we had about that was that he needed sex to stay alive. It was his attitude to living, to need the release. I think he needed to dominate women in certain ways. He talked about everything. One night we had a long conversation about anal sex. He said unless you’ve had anal sex with a girl she hasn’t really submitted to you.’

  GG: ‘And as to the number of women he had in his life?’

  VC: ‘It was extraordinary. You never knew what the situation was. It was like a farce with girls coming in and out. He bought that house in Kensington Church Street so that he had somewhere to go with women. I went with him to buy the house.’

  His interest in horses brought pleasure and pain. Andrew Parker Bowles played a significant role in attempting to salvage Lucian’s reputation as a bad debtor. This was after Ladbrokes, the largest betting company in England, had placed Lucian on a ‘forfeit list’ in February 1983. It effectively prevented him from placing any bets with the bookmakers.

  Parker Bowles’s well-meaning, chivalrous aim was to prevent Lucian from dying with his reputation tarnished by having his name on racing’s black list. So on 27 February 1999, sixteen years after the ban had first been imposed, he sent, in confidence, a typed letter to Peter Grange, a senior executive at Ladbrokes Racing Ltd pleading for leniency and a pardon. ‘I write to you not as a director of the BHB [British Horseracing Board] or as a member of the Jockey Club but as a friend of Freud who believes he should not die while on the forfeit list.’ The dispute was over £19,045, which Lucian insisted he did not owe. Parker Bowles argued that it was a misunderstanding rather than any intentional dishonesty. ‘Freud is Britain’s greatest artist and his pictures average around £1 million. I was surprised to find that he owed this comparatively small amount. He told me that back in 1982 when he went to the local Ladbrokes he had offered Northern Irish pounds which the Ladbrokes clerk had refused to take, although, of course, it was legal tender. The horse he chose then won so he deducted the money he would have won from what he owed Ladbrokes. He is stubborn,’ warned Parker Bowles, who explained that Lucian would never simply hand over money to Ladbrokes he felt he did not owe. He suggested that Lucian write a cheque for £4,000 to a jockeys’ charity to end the dispute. The cheque was duly written and he was taken off the list.

  Parker Bowles had first got to know Lucian in 1982 by finding him horses to ride and draw in London. As commander of the Household Cavalry Regiment in Knightsbridge he had dozens at his disposal. ‘Lucian wanted to gallop or canter and would never wear any protective headgear. I was terrified I would be blamed for the death of our foremost painter when he landed on his head,’ he said.

  Lucian asked Parker Bowles to sit for a portrait in 2003. It was another vertical journey. He fitted into the same category as the Devonshires, Birleys, Rothschilds and other grandees in his aristocratic circle. The traditional genre of the ‘gentleman-soldier portrait’ can be seen in many country houses. Lucian wanted to take this classic genre and give it a twist. The inspiration for his picture of Parker Bowles came from James Jacques Tissot’s portrait of Fredrick Gustavus Burnaby (1842–85) painted in 1870 and hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. It showed a dashing cavalry officer relaxing on a chaise longue and was an archetypal but characterful, flamboyant Victorian portrait.

  However, it lacked the drama of Freud’s picture. Parker Bowles had not worn his ceremonial uniform for many years and because it was too hot and uncomfortable to wear buttoned up, he undid it. The painting grew bigger with extra pieces of canvas being attached, and so took longer. The Brigadier (2003–4) shows him sprawled in his uniform, as if somewhat gone to seed. Red-faced, waxy, paunchy stomach billowing under his white shirt, the red stripe of the uniform hints at a sense of the dashing. But somehow the formality of the uniform is undone by the vulnerability of a man who has grown beyond the smartness of his military garb. The arm raised has a suggestion of pomp but the worn leather armchair reminds the viewer that not only the sitter but the setting and the furnishing have seen better days. This is no romantic take on a nineteenth-century portrait tradition. Lucian let the first viewing of the brigadier and his portrait be seen in Tatler after David Dawson photographed the painter and sitter in the studio.

  Lucian told Parker Bowles how a few years earlier Prince Charles – well known to be an ‘amateur’ artist, who had received tuition from Edward Seago, John Ward, Bryan Organ and Derek Hill – had sent a handwritten letter to him suggesting that he and Lucian exchange paintings. ‘It was such a cheek. It was almost like theft,’ said Lucian. ‘I never replied. What was there to say? It was embarrassing.’ Lucian was outraged, and when he crossly recounted this incident to the brigadier, Parker Bowles laughed. He saw the amusing side of a £3 million work being swapped for one worth perhaps £5,000, painted by the man to whom he had lost his wife.

  The portrait took its time. ‘The Brig, as yet mouthless, is slowly coming to life,’ Lucian wrote to Parker Bowles’s wife Rose on 9 December 2003. Six months earlier he had written a birthday greeting to her, adding ‘The bemedalling [sic] Brig is giving me invaluable help.’ The finished portrait prompted a clerihew from the satirist Craig Brown:

  Andrew Parker Bowles

  Is the most benevolent of souls.

  He was even overjoyed

  To be done by Lucian Freud.116

  * * *

  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. It was established by his father in 1921, first selling Renaissance paintings, and is based in an elegant, five-storey, French neoclassical town house on East 79th Street between Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue. It is a grand setting, and produced grand deals.

  Acquavella had once upset Lucian by wearing the wrong shirt. He had flown to London from his home in New York for ten days to sit for his portrait. Assuming all his blue shirts were identical (he usually bought six or eight at a time), he had not realised that he had worn one with a minutely different shade of blue for his second sitting. Lucian minded because
this imperceptibly different blue would alter his picture.

  Such subtleties were crucial to Lucian, and it was also why he never tolerated lateness. It changed everything: mood, light, routine, and thus the end result. In 1997 he had erased the Texan model Jerry Hall from a portrait of her breastfeeding her and Mick Jagger’s son Gabriel because she was late once too often. Lucian’s revenge was comic and cruel, but also pragmatic.

  Acquavella had some difficulty explaining this to Jagger, who called him to try to buy the painting. ‘I said, “It’s not even finished.” We negotiate, I sell him the [uncompleted] picture. Then one day, Lucian calls and says, “I want you to be the first to know: the painting’s had a sex change.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, Jerry didn’t show up for two sittings so I changed her into a man. I’ve got [his assistant] David’s head on her body.” I said, “You’ve got to be crazy.” But I knew immediately there was nothing I could do. Mick calls me up and says, “Hey, Bill, what the hell is going on? My wife sits with him for four months and …” Then I thought: how am I ever going to sell this picture? But the first person who saw it when I brought it back to America bought the picture.’117

  Lucian’s arrangement with his New York dealer was simple: Lucian named his price, Acquavella paid it. They never negotiated. It was probably an advantage that they lived on different continents in different time zones. It gave them space and it made Lucian less reliant than he had been on his former London dealers. 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.’

  Lucian had fallen out with and left six dealers prior to joining Acquavella’s stable in 1992. Most of his dealers had been run ragged, especially by the untidier ends of his personal life: late-night calls, demands for cash to sort gambling debts, and so on. When the shutters came down, he rarely made peace, especially when he was not at fault. Anthony d’Offay, his dealer in the 1970s, discovered this too late when he closed Lucian’s show at his gallery a day or two earlier than scheduled to open a show by the then fashionable German painter Georg Baselitz. It infuriated Lucian, who effectively fired d’Offay. Salt was rubbed in the wound by Lucian being supplanted by an artist who represented everything that Lucian opposed. Baselitz’s neo-expressionist, postmodern pictures were antithetical to Lucian’s work.

  D’Offay regretted his decision. ‘In the end I did behave badly and that was that. And so Lucian went. We didn’t see each other for fifteen years or so. When we changed the dates of our show and knocked off those days at the end of his show he was super-livid and had a right to be. By changing the date without discussing it, it led to a breach of trust between us. The minute that happened it felt impossible to repair,’ he said.118

  In the 1960s and 70s Lucian had been in danger of being left behind by the international art market. 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.̱119

  Kirkman, however, did set in place many of the coordinates that would help to make Lucian successful. Lucian got a toehold in America after an early portrait was given to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Kirkman was an astute and dedicated dealer who adored Lucian and protected and looked after his interests assiduously. He worked with the British Council promoting Lucian’s works, but it was not easy, given that outside Britain his paintings were met largely with indifference.

  Kirkman remembers him as a painter whose star was not on the rise. ‘His shows were non-events. The press cuttings about them were thin on the ground, but there he was plugging away. Lucian knew his works were not much liked, but he did not care. Others at the Marlborough were fairly dismissive and thought he was only there because he was a friend of David [Somerset, the Duke of Beaufort]. Marlborough did not do anything for him. He was seen as a bit of a bore, always wanting advances. It was a thankless task.’

  In 1972 Kirkman left Marlborough to set up on his own and Lucian anxiously asked what would happen to him, as Kirkman had been his main point of contact. No one had any helpful answers. ‘Lucian then said to me, “I’m not staying with those bastards,”’ said Kirkman. Lucian joined him and another young dealer – Anthony d’Offay. It was the start of a twenty-year relationship. Doff, as Lucian liked to call him, was an enigmatic half-French aesthete from Sheffield with a brilliant eye and prescient taste. He was stylish and funny and his gallery in Dering Street was far more influential than its bijou size suggested. In 1972, he and Kirkman put on a stunning show of Lucian’s pictures (at that time the top prices for a Freud work were about £1,000).

  James Kirkman was eventually to fall out with Lucian over the portraits of Leigh Bowery from the early 1990s. Whatever his own feelings about the works from a critical and purely artistic perspective, when Kirkman saw the first picture of the naked, obese, shaven-headed, preposterously coquettish performance artist, his first thought was, ‘Who on earth will buy it?’ The flesh was pink and blubbery, almost waxen, and verged towards the grotesque. Kirkman was just not sure he knew a buyer who would pay huge sums for pictures of this freaky Australian extrovert so indelicately exposed. ‘His penis was like a slug,’ helpfully suggested Lucian’s ex-wife Caroline. What was more worrying for him was that Freud always insisted his dealers buy his pictures up front, and then sell them on for whatever price they could achieve. For years Kirkman had successfully sold Freud’s paintings, many of them neither picturesque nor easy on the eye: the words ‘cruel’, ‘disturbed’ or ‘distressed’ were used by some critics of his treatment of women. Many portraits stretched the sensibility and taste of traditionally minded art collectors. But with the Leigh Bowery portraits, it was as if Lucian were deliberately testing Kirkman on a new level.

  Bowery was an unlikely cause of the break-up between Lucian and the sophisticated Mayfair dealer who had done so much for him. ‘An unusually big heifer carting around sixteen or seventeen stone,’ is how Bowery described himself. By profession he was an exhibitionist dancer who transformed himself into strange versions of human sculpture. It was often fetishistic or transvestite in style or he was naked. His entire head and body were shaved to facilitate what he called ‘body modifications’. The pictures by Lucian were sensational in every sense, with a tributary echo to Velázquez as he transformed a freakish performer into serious art. Hard core as well as high art: there was the rub. Were there buyers for paintings like these?

  And the Bridegroom, 1993


  The Bowery portraits were a step too far in scale and subject matter, but most of all price. With Lucian demanding ever higher figures while producing more and more paintings, it meant that Kirkman simply could not afford to keep buying them. They were not easy to sell and Kirkman felt he had come to the end of the road. ‘Lucian wrongly thought I was being neurotic or even homophobic because it was when he was doing Bowery’s portrait. But I wasn’t. I bought everything I could and always thought the Leigh Bowery paintings were some of his greatest works. Lucian had to make a row. It was like a divorce.’

  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.’

  Two years before their break-up, Kirkman had scented change and suggested that Lucian should find a new dealer. ‘Moving dealer is like moving house – you want to avoid it,’ Lucian had told him.