The Lives of Lucian Freud by William Feaver

Author:William Feaver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

20

‘True to me’

For a year or so from 1950 Richard Hamilton lived round the corner from Clifton Hill. Born in the same year as Freud, he had since 1948 been studying painting at the Slade, also trying out as a fashion artist for Vogue and involving himself in the ICA. Painting, he became convinced, was pretty much a waste of time for someone his age. Freud remembered him saying, ‘“You know, I can understand why Francis paints, but I really and truly don’t see why you do it.” He said it quite nicely, considering.’

They were on neighbourly terms and, looking on, Hamilton found himself, he said, ‘always wide-eyed at the way [Lucian] moved through the art world (and other worlds for that matter)’.1 Where he had left school at fourteen for a job as an office boy and had gone to evening classes in art, Freud had left school early not because he had to exactly but to evade further formal education. Socially Freud had the advantage: name and reputation already. ‘Lucian was a fashionable young painter.’ Hard to believe he was nine months his junior. Looking back he was surprised, he said, that Freud ‘would have noticed, or cared, that I had an opinion’.2 And he could never quite tell whether he was truly as untrained and impractical as he seemed to be. For instance he remembered him saying once that his canvases were ‘difficult to paint on because they flapped around like sails’.3 This from a Slade tutor whose idea of art was founded on technical accomplishments allied to design stimuli and perceptual knowingness. Hamilton couldn’t believe that Freud was so unpractised. ‘When I explained the purposes of the little triangles of wood in the corners of the stretcher he said he didn’t feel up to coping with such a tricky technical problem and asked for help. I went round to his studio one evening with a little hammer in my pocket and was lucky to find him at work. There was a beautiful girl on a dirty mattress who wrapped an equally dirty blanket around herself – more to keep warm than to protect her modesty. I tapped in the wedges. Lucian marvelled at how beautifully taut the canvas had become in only a minute or two and admired my skill no end. I still think he was having me on.’4

In retrospect, Freud thought so too. ‘I was stroking his leg when I said how clever he was; but I was amazed how handy he was. He lived in Springfield Road, he and his first wife, and they made money doing models that included 400 tiny people. They were making these models of New Towns for the Festival and their baby girl was going round smashing forty people with one hand, and they were so patient. They just said, “no no darling”. They were saints in a way. And very skilful.’ He was curious as to why Hamilton chose not to paint personal things. Why not paint his wife, for example? ‘He more or less implied that it was an improper and unseemly subject.

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