I was in search of someone else when I stumbled across Lucian Freud in Highgate West. There had been a storm the night before and the flat-topped grave was still wet, with a mix of early autumn leaves ripped from their trees and plastered to its surface, some already a yellowed gold while others retained the vigorous green of mid-summer. But it was the surface of the grave itself which arrested my attention and held me entranced, for beneath the leaves it seemed suffused with a lambent radiance, a lustrous turquoise glow.
It was, no doubt, a trick of the spectrum, a refraction of the autumn sunlight caught in the damp surface of the stone, or a malfunction in my eye to brain co-ordination. When I returned later the surface of the grave was a uniform grey and so it appeared in my photographs, but for a fleeting time I had been bewitched, mesmerized by the glowing colour.
It was felicitous that such a phenomenon offered itself at Freud’s grave for his paintings have a magical luminosity. His early works are surreal depictions of people, animals and wilting house plants often in strange juxtaposition, and his description of cyclamen as divas,
They die in such a dramatic way. It’s as if they fill and run over. They crash down; their stems turn to jelly, and their veins harden.*
reveals a mastery of words as well as paint.
The later portraits must rank amongst the greatest of the twentieth century. The figures in his paintings emerge from sombre backgrounds of muted interiors, bare floorboards, stained mattresses, and the heaped sheets which he bought from rag and bone sellers to wipe his brushes after each stroke.
Against these stark, inhospitable backgrounds his often-naked figures burst from the canvas. Their flesh is impastoed, textured, highly coloured, vibrant, and disturbing. These unsentimental portraits are of his friends: the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the benefits supervisor Sue Tilley; his fellow painters: Bacon and Auerbach; and his family: wives, children, and lovers. Nothing is romanticised and when relationships deteriorated this was mirrored in the paintings, which, as he repeatedly claimed, were all autobiographical,
Everything is autobiographical, and everything is a portrait.*
My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings.*
The subject matter is autobiographical. It is all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really.*
But his biographers have supplemented Lucian Freud’s painterly autobiography, and if the manipulation of light playing on his grave seemed appropriate, the wording on the stone seemed odd. Beloved Father and Grandfather?
This does not sound like Freud whose failings as a father are well documented. He acknowledged fourteen children, others have estimated more, but did not live with any of them. His son David McAdam Freud described the absent and distant Lucian with wry understatement as “hardly father material.” Frank Paul states that the longest time he ever spent with his father was when he sat for his portrait. The portraits of his daughters while classed as affectionate by some critics are considered intrusive and inappropriate by others. When his daughter Annie would not let her own daughter sit for Large Interior, London 11 (After Watteau) Freud’s response was spiteful and ugly.
His personal relations do not make Freud any less talented an artist. The arguments about great art versus morally problematic artists are well rehearsed. Without defending the indefensible, it may be possible to separate the art from the artist. Moreover, Freud’s personal failings were petty and selfish, not evil, he was not a Gaugin or an Eric Gill. Yet when I reflected upon the strangely unconvincing epitaph, I liked his paintings a little less.
*Quotations from William Feaver, Lucian Freud: Life into Art, Tate Publishing 2002.
See also Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist, Vintage Publishing, 2013