Breakfast with Lucian Read online

  Poetry was an important stimulus, reinforcing his imagination, almost like a litany, a substitute for religion. He learnt it, declaimed it and was comforted by it. He told me how he used to invent little rhymes to distract his children from the boredom of sitting for him. His eldest daughter Annie remembers ‘a shared sympathy felt for Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo’s lonely life on the desolate coast of Coromandel in the Edward Lear poem, and our sense of dread for when Lewis Carroll’s Snark turned out to be a Boojum’.

  In essence Lucian used poetry as an extension or expression of the spirit of his own life. He savoured the truth of a line from Rochester’s ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’: ‘there’s something generous in mere lust’. Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Turnip-Hoer’ was another favourite: a macabre story of obsessive love involving stalking and an uncontrollable, destructive passion. The verse he enjoyed was about likes, hates, idiosyncrasies, obsessions. The poems often encapsulated for him the significant as well as inconsequential point of life, from playful humour to dark sex and the finality of life, and the sheer delight in looking. Like his art, Lucian’s armoury of poetry was about condensed, observed truth.

  CHAPTER THREE Early Days

  ‘I was born on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception,’ Lucian told me with a hint of self-mockery. For an atheist with few concerns for the concept of sexual sin, the timing of his birthday was a delicious irony. It also contained an undercurrent that he wanted to exist outside the orbit and control of his parents, which was exactly what he engineered. ‘I never knew anyone who wanted to deliberately cut themselves off from their parents to such a degree,’ said one former girlfriend.15

  His was an easy birth in the early hours of 8 December 1922 in Berlin, where his father Ernst was a modernist architect and the youngest son of Sigmund Freud, the most famous Jew in Europe. Lucian attributed a superstitious value to his birth date, gambling on the number eight or making bids in multiples of eight. Some friends noted that it was appropriate, and even preordained, that he died aged eighty-eight.

  He was named after his mother Lucie (née Brasch), the daughter of a prosperous grain merchant, who doted excessively on him. ‘She would ask me to draw for her friends, which almost made me never want to draw, and even worse she wanted me, aged four, to teach her to draw. It really made me feel sick,’ he said.16 It was the start of a complex mother–child relationship.

  Lucian, the middle of the three sons, remained Lucie’s favourite. Perhaps to create distance from her, at least in his mind, he sometimes claimed that he was named after the Russian-born psychoanalyst and author Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had been a friend of his grandfather as well as of Nietzsche, Rilke and Wagner.17 Her library had been confiscated by the Gestapo a few days before her death in February 1937, allegedly because of her friendship with Sigmund and because she practised ‘Jewish science’ and owned books by Jewish authors. Despite such a possible grandiloquent provenance to his name, though, within his family it was always assumed Lucian was named after his mother. His parents called him Lux (pronounced ‘Lucks’).

  The few surviving possessions from his childhood included letters written in a German Gothic script to his parents, and juvenile matchstick drawings in crayon which Lucie preserved. His mother later explained to Lucian that Ernst had wanted to be an artist, but had not been allowed to fulfil his aspirations; Ernst felt a responsibility to be the breadwinner for the family, and saw architecture as a more dependable means of supporting them. Lucian inherited and kept watercolour landscapes of German lakes and mountains painted by his father. In her will, Lucie left Lucian the most valuable legacy with a low Chinese table, an Austrian chest of drawers and a square mahogany tray, valued at £550. Clement received his father’s gold pocket watch and gold cuff studs, a sculptured head of Ernst by Oscar Nemon as well as a silver pill box kept on his father’s bedside table, all valued at £230. Stephen was left a bronze mask of his mother, a barograph, nine Venetian six-sided glasses and a black and gold tray, valued at £350.18

  Much of his early childhood was lived in a respectable quarter of Berlin near the Tiergarten, the magnificent park in the centre of the city. Lucian skated there, and competed with his two brothers at long-jump in their garden at home. Hanging on the walls, Lucian remembered prints of Bruegel’s Seasons given to him by his grandfather, Hokusai prints, and Dürer’s engraving of a hare.

  Although he was proud of his lineage, he tried to escape his mother and come to terms with a degree of rejection by his father. Lucian told me of the hurt he felt at Ernst being dismissive of much of his work, but he also said elsewhere that ‘my mother was so keen on my becoming an artist it was a good thing my father was against it. If they had both been in favour I’d have had to become a jockey, which was my other idea for a career.’19

  A family portrait of the three brothers Clement, Stephen and Lucian c. 1927

  One of his first memories was of making a jointed wooden horse whose screws and bolts gave him ‘a sense of the mechanical attachment of ligaments to bone’.20 Another was of horses rearing in panic trying to escape a fire at the stables on his maternal grandfather’s estate near Cottbus. He had learned to ride there, and horses remained strongly and figuratively significant to him. ‘I feel a connection to horses, all animals, almost beyond humans. They have always been important,’ he told me. He even slept with them in the stables when he first went to school in England. Horses also brought him luck – the sculpture Three-legged Horse became his entry ticket into art school. (Asked why it had only three legs, Lucian answered simply: ‘I ran out of stone.’) He rode and painted horses all his life.

  In Berlin Lucian was surrounded by governesses, nannies, maids and a cook – but, as ever, it was his mother who made him feel trapped. Ann, his brother Stephen’s second wife, said that ‘Lucie seemed to want to know everything he did, what he was thinking, and this drove him mad.’21 Lucian and Stephen, the two elder brothers, ganged up and teased Clement, the youngest. ‘I felt sorry for Clement,’ said Ann, ‘as they made him go up to some Nazi soldiers in Berlin and ask if they had seen a monkey. Then he would hand them a mirror, which got him into trouble. The other two brothers found it terribly funny.’22

  In many ways Berlin was a comfortable and secure place to be a child, but the Nazi presence was of course evident at this time, and some of Lucian’s older school friends were in the Hitler Youth. Although too young himself to have been eligible to join, Lucian did, however, manage to see Adolf Hitler, as he explained to me:

  LF: ‘I photographed Hitler when I was nine. I was walking round Berlin with my governess and I happened to have my camera with me. I was fascinated by him because he had huge bodyguards and he was really very small. I backed along and snapped him.’

  GG: ‘Did you sense he was evil or feel vulnerable as a Jew?’

  LF: ‘Politics loomed over everything, even when I was nine. I was at an ordinary school in Berlin and some boys would say “Oh, we are going to the Nazi rally,” and I would say, “Can I come?” and they would say, “No you can’t, but you’re not really missing anything. We sing songs.” They made it sound innocent. I was allowed to invite those Nazi boys home.’

  Everything changed in 1933. In January, Hitler became Chancellor, followed in February by the Reichstag fire and subsequent reprisals. To be kept unaware of the fire’s damage, pupils of the Französisches Gymnasium, including the Freud boys, were sent to school by a different route. In March, Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, was completed.

  Then in April, a member of the Mosse family, the Freuds’ closest relatives in Berlin, died in horrific circumstances, possibly shot while having a cup of coffee on a terrace of a café on Kurfürstendamm on his routine weekly trip to Berlin. Rudolph died simply because he was a Jew. Another version of events is that he was driven to suicide ‘by throwing himself before a lorry while being brought under escort to a concentration camp’.23 His brother Carl was married to Lucie Freud’s sister, Gerda. Their father Rudolf was the owner of a wel
l-known Berlin publishing house. Volker Welter, the biographer of Ernst Freud, noted that ‘Even before that, the Freud family experienced German anti-Semitism, when, for example, in the summer of 1932 Lucie Freud was verbally attacked by a neighbour when she played with her own and other children outside their holiday home on the island of Hiddensee.’ Lucian’s cousin Carola Zentner recalls the fear and the intimidation. ‘My uncle Rudy was arrested at five in the morning in his home and marched off minus braces, minus belt, minus shoelaces. The indications were very clear: you’re not going to enjoy where you’re going, and what then happened nobody really knows, other than he died.’24

  The three Freud brothers, Clement, Lucian and Stephen c. 1932

  Soon after the Mosse brother was killed in early April, Julius Streicher, the Nazi Party propagandist, organised a one-day boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses. In June, Lucian’s father went to London to find schools for the boys, to whom he had given copies of Alice in Wonderland and Black Beauty as their introduction to Britain. Further Anglicisation would see ‘Stefan’ becoming ‘Stephen’ and ‘Clemens’ becoming ‘Clement’, but Lucian retained his original name. In September, when Lucian was still only ten years old, Lucie and the three brothers left Germany for ever. Two months later Ernst joined them after their furniture and other possessions had been packed and shipped. ‘They wanted to murder us. Horrible as that was I am not sure I thought a lot about it as we just had to get on with our new life,’ he said.

  Sigmund stayed in Vienna until just after the Anschluss in 1938, when he made London his final home. His four sisters, all in their late seventies, stayed behind in one flat. ‘All four ended their lives in extermination camps,’ confirmed Anton Walter Freud, Sigmund’s grandson by his eldest son, Jean-Martin, at a lecture given at Sigmund’s Hampstead house at 20 Maresfield Gardens (now the Freud Museum).

  Sigmund himself survived only a year in exile. Film footage exists of Lucian as a teenager fondly walking with his grandfather in the garden at Maresfield Gardens. He remembered how Sigmund would clack his false teeth together in his hands and how especially kind he was to the maids in their house.

  Lucian’s life is indelibly linked to his grandfather, of whose playfulness and encouragement he had happy memories. Just like Sigmund, it was Lucian’s business to get people to sit on beds or couches, and to reveal more about themselves than perhaps they wished to show. 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. ‘Lucian was tremendously proud of his grandfather, not for having invented psychoanalysis but for having been an extremely distinguished zoologist. That is what he took from his grandfather, not the psychoanalysis at all. That is what he banged on to me about a lot, his grandfather as a zoologist,’ said Richardson.

  Lucian was proud that Sigmund was the first person to be able to tell the sexual difference between male and female eels, and other seemingly ambivalent or indeterminate species. ‘Lucian’s passion, absolute passion, for animals, even dead animals, like having a stuffed zebra head and dead chickens and things, all that came straight from Sigmund,’ said Richardson.

  The friendship between Lucian and John Richardson started in the late 1930s. He remembers Lucian being compared to E. M. Forster’s description of the poet Cavafy: ‘A gentleman standing at a slight right angle to the universe.’ ‘I was just seventeen and we met in the Café Royal and there was Lucian standing as thin and sharp-profiled as a cut-out, on one leg like a stork at the bar, which was still as it was in the days of Oscar Wilde, with all sort of Wildean figures hanging around muttering, “What did I tell you, Freud’s grandson.”’25

  Sigmund was key to Lucian’s liberty in England during the war. Lucian liked to tell it as a story of wonder and gratitude:

  It was very odd, like a very snobbish fairy tale. My grandfather had a great friend called Marie Bonaparte [Napoleon’s great-niece] who married Prince George of Greece, the Duke of Kent’s best friend. As the situation in Germany became more dangerous we applied for naturalisation but our applications were blocked and things got really dodgy. The Duke of Kent then got on the telephone and that same afternoon some people came round to see my parents and our papers were sorted. The Second World War broke out a week later. If we had not had our papers we would have been interned on the Isle of Wight.26

  This intervention by the royal family was partly why, seventy years later, Lucian gave the Queen the portrait he had painted of her: it was repayment for his freedom. Sitting in Clarke’s shortly after he had finished the painting, he was moved and amused at how he had repaid the debt to his adopted country, and how his grandfather’s name had safeguarded him. He was fascinated by the Establishment, a very different attitude from that of his friend Francis Bacon who turned down every honour offered him. Lucian felt he was in debt to the Establishment and eventually he became part of it, often befriending grandees, but never would he suffer dullness. It was not because people were from aristocratic lineage that he liked them, but he certainly moved in high circles as well as low. Whereas Bacon was a descendant of the earls of Oxford but put no value in pedigree or lineage, Lucian was far from dismissive of such things. As John Richardson noted, of all the art schools in the country, Lucian happened to choose to attend one run by a baronet, Sir Cedric Morris.

  Lucian’s fondness for his grandfather was in bitter contrast to a rift with his two brothers, partly stirred by their outrageous claims concerning his legitimacy. Stephen and Clement suggested that Lucian was not Ernst’s son, and so was not Sigmund’s grandson. ‘It was a really disgusting thing to say. Vile and very difficult to forgive,’ he said. Whether this was a bad joke, or the brothers’ belief, Lucian never forgot or forgave it. Aged eighty-seven, he was still complaining about this slur on his bloodline to Mark Fisch, a New York property developer and collector of Old Masters who in 2009 sat for two portraits. Having closely studied photos of Lucian and his grandfather at the Freud Museum, Fisch is convinced that the accusation was unfounded and untrue, but the slur was felt no less keenly. It was not so much the fact of being born out of wedlock that he minded – Lucian himself had at least a dozen children who were not ‘legitimate’, and having or being a child outside marriage was not an issue – it was the dishonesty of the slur and being excised from the family. It was about a blood link to the man with whom he had bonded closely, and who gave him his famous name and identity.

  ‘His biological link to Sigmund mattered to him. It was key to his identity, where he had come from and also why and how he had survived in England. It hurt him more than seventy years later,’ said Fisch. ‘He was incredibly sensitive, like an exposed nerve, much more than anyone would imagine. His self-portraits always showed him as he wished he was, or how he wanted the world to see him. What they do not show is a picture of somebody who has spent seven decades worrying that he was an illegitimate son. He was still harping on about it to the point that it no longer mattered if it was true or not, the accusation had become part of his psyche.’27 The tension between the two brothers had early roots. A school report from Dartington noted ‘Mr Allen commends Clemens for his keenness in games but adds that he still craves attention and special treatment. When he and Lux were playing on the same side in cricket, and Lux caught out Stephen, who was playing for the seniors against them, Clemens seemed to show real annoyance, his feelings for his older brother quite outweighing his feeling of fair play.’28

  Not to be a Freud would undo much of what defined him, and Lucian found it difficult to forgive his brothers. Lucian did not mince his words when rowing with Stephen. In the late 1980s they fell out over money. Lucian always borrowed money to gamble, but in this particular case it was Lucian who had loaned money to Stephen. On 12 January 1987 Stephen tried in a letter to explain their financial arrangement and any misunderstandin
g between them: ‘Herewith my cheque for £1,000. I am almost sure the loan was for less than that, so please let me have your cheque for the change. I find it disappointing that after spending twenty-plus hours in my company in the last year or so you are now able to believe that I am both a crook and an imbecile … I could say plenty more but as I cannot remember a single occasion in all the years we have known each other when you admitted that you had been wrong it would seem a little pointless.’

  It resulted in a classic spite-bomb reply, sent on a postcard showing on the back Lucian’s pen and ink drawing, I Miss You: Thanking him for the cheque he chastised him for not sending the right amount, bitterly blaming Stephen’s selective amnesia. Lucian ended up saying Stephen was certainly a king-size wanker, colourfully adding that his pockets were stuffed with red herrings. It was followed by a two-page missive from Lucian saying that he was beyond caring if Stephen paid back the money or not but that he would never lend him anything ever again.

  Many years later, Lucian partly made up with Stephen, sending a girlfriend round to his house in Chiswick, West London, on Stephen’s eightieth birthday to deliver a bottle of champagne and a handwritten card. At Lucian’s memorial service, Stephen’s wife Ann handed me the card, keen to assure me that the rift had been mended. Lucian had painted a portrait of Stephen in 1985, which he specifically included in his National Portrait Gallery exhibition.

  He never forgave Clement, though, towards whom his bitterness endured. He later variously accused him of cheating in a race at sports day and of failing to honour a debt. Their trust never recovered, and nor did the friendship return. They did not exchange a word in forty years.