Breakfast with Lucian by Greig Geordie

Author:Greig, Geordie [Greig, Geordie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781448138760
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-10-02T23:00:00+00:00

Lucian working on his final painting, Portrait of the Hound, March 2011

‘It was not just a need to paint. It was the need for perfection,’ said Victor Chandler. ‘Sometimes he bought back pictures which he felt were not good enough and should not have left the studio. It was the anger, real anger at himself when he did something wrong. And it was quite frightening because he’d jump backwards and swear. You got “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”’91

Success or failure rested on a knife-edge. ‘I think of Lucian’s attention to his subject. If the concentrated interest were to falter he would come off the tightrope. He had no safety net of manner,’ said Frank Auerbach.92

He painted whoever was in his life, sometimes those intimately connected with him, like his children or lovers, sometimes strangers with whom he became intimate through the very process of painting them. Mark Fisch, the New York property developer and Old Master collector, whose portrait Lucian painted, said to me, ‘I can remember him telling me once how a girl he had never met knocked on his door, he opened it, she enters, he fucks her against the wall and then he paints her.’ This was recounted to Fisch when Lucian was eighty-four. ‘Countless husbands and boyfriends could have put a sword through him. In so many ways he should not have lived till the age of eighty-eight,’ said Fisch.93

Sometimes his friendships splintered, as did the one with Tim Behrens, who for nine years saw Lucian almost every day. They had met in 1955 when Tim was a 17-year-old student at the Slade School of Art, and Lucian was his one-morning-a-week teacher, at 33 almost twice his age. For a time they were inseparable. ‘Everyone assumed we were having a homosexual relationship which was very far from the truth. For a time we lived together, sharing a house at 357 Liverpool Road, Islington,’ he remembered, fifty years after he first sat for Lucian.

The older and younger painter grew very close and as a sign of his affection Lucian gave his protégé an early self-portrait and a drawing of Caroline Blackwood. But sweetly as their friendship started, it was to end sourly.

One reason was the cross-over of women in their lives, remarkable, even by Lucian’s priapic standards. Three of Tim’s girlfriends became lovers of Lucian: Suzy Boyt, Susanna Chancellor and Janey Longman. Lucian also had an affair with Tim’s daughter Kate.

When they first met in 1955 Tim was the rebellious son of a prosperous banker. He had left Eton early to go to art school where he met Lucian, who immediately asked him to sit for a portrait (he painted him four times). He also encouraged Tim with his own painting and bought some of his pictures. It was as much a friendship of equals as a quasi father–son relationship. They partied hard, often very late, as well as hitting the pubs around Paddington, not that Lucian drank much. ‘We used to play pinball a lot, Lucian never won,’ recalled Tim.

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