posted on 07 Feb 2020

Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist by Geordie Greig

I remember thinking when I first saw this book advertised that I wouldn’t buy it because it was by a Daily Mail editor and ex-editor of Tatler magazine. Was his account of a friendship with Lucian Freud likely to be a version of the man that I would find interesting? Had I not found a copy in an Oxfam shop for a tenner I would have stuck to that view – but I would have missed out on a book that both confounded and confirmed my personal prejudices.

Geordie Greig was taken to a Freud exhibition as a teenager (by a master at Eton) and became fascinated by the man. As a student journalist he tried repeatedly to get the notoriously private and infamously confrontational Freud to agree to an interview, but always without response. Many years later, while editor of Tatler, he did convince Freud to write a short piece about painting for the magazine; he was also successful some years later in convincing him to revisit this ‘manifesto’ and update it. But the basis for this book – as the title suggests – is that many years later Greig went on to become a regular breakfast companion of Freud’s at the artist’s favourite local restaurant, Clarke’s, just a few streets away from the eighteenth century townhouse that was Freud’s home and studio in Kensington. It was here during the hour or two before Freud’s long working days began – while the restaurant was closed to all but Freud and his guests – that they would meet, usually with Freud’s assistant David Dawson, for food, gossip, conversation and confidences.

For a more balanced – and certainly less scandalous – view of the artist, I recommend Martin Gayford’s Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud. When I reviewed it for Letterpress I praised it for providing a privileged glimpse into the still, intense, disciplined world of the working artist’s studio. Greig’s book also does this but to a lesser extent, because the real focus here is Freud the man and his intractable, ferociously independent and ruthlessly selfish life – very much that of one of the last bohemian figurative painters, as at home with the market porters and East End gangsters he lived amongst in his early years, as the grandees and society hostesses and aristocratic circles he moved amongst in his later years, especially after the early-90s when a change of agent ensured stratospheric prices for his paintings and fame of a genuinely global kind that had previously eluded him.

The book is marvellous on Freud’s early years and his daily life, on his dealings with galleries and agents, his family relationships (or lack of them), on the importance to him of grandfather Sigmund Freud, and on the artist’s profligate gambling addiction and attitudes to money. None of this is exactly news but Greig covers it well and his account is well-researched and elegantly written.

However, as the first more-or-less biographical work to surface following Freud’s death in 2011 aged eighty-eight, it is somewhat different to books that have gone before because the wall of silence and privacy that Freud erected around himself and defended ruthlessly in his lifetime has crumbled, and a bright and unforgiving spotlight is shone into the darkest and least attractive corners of his life. And Lucian Freud, the notoriously priapic womaniser, the man who ‘acknowledged’ fourteen children but was rumoured to have fathered at least a dozen more, the fabulously contrarian figure who was completely and utterly dedicated to his art to the exclusion of all else, the man whose aristocratic disdain for bourgeois morals, mediocrity and conformity was breathtaking – is also revealed as a monster.

I’m not saying that Greig’s book is a muck-raking demolition job. It isn’t and in any case, all it really does is confirm in detail what was widely suspected during Freud’s lifetime. But even so, I believe it does diminish the man, and I say this for a very specific reason.

As a struggling, penniless artist, a German Jew whose family fled Hitler, and as a figurative painter obsessed with the primacy of the human form who rejected every single modish ‘advance’ in modern art (whether abstractionism, pop art, or his particular bête noir, conceptual art), Freud conducted his life as an outsider. Today we might say he lived ‘off-grid’ – he wouldn’t sign anything, accepted no visitors, never voted, would be bound by no contracts and accepted no rules or conventions other than those he personally invented, his own highly individual and transgressive moral code. In this he bore remarkable similarities with the old friend he had long fallen out with, Francis Bacon.

But in Greig the artist met his match, because what clearly fascinates Greig – and as a former editor of Tatler how could it not – is English aristocratic society, and consequently the most detailed chapters, those about Freud’s wives and girlfriends, his affairs and his children, read like some kind of Debrett’s of sex. And it becomes clear that far from being the outsider of personal myth, Freud was an absolute master at playing the aristocratic ‘system’ for everything it had to offer – influence, wealth, power, patrons. And while it is true that every aspect of this personal advancement was placed at the service of his painting, even so a deeply disenchanting and disillusioning picture of Freud emerges.

I must also say that after reading in detail about his relationships with women, I also felt – for the first time – that his painting of women (and almost every woman he painted was either a sexual partner or the offspring of a sexual partner) also began to look different, the raw, splayed uncomfortable nude figures as much an exercise in domination as prolonged and intense artistic scrutiny.

And yet – and I am slightly ashamed to say this – I still found the book completely fascinating. For Freud, perhaps now more so than at any point in his lifetime, can be seen as a figure from a lost age, more renaissance man than twentieth century artist, a figure from the pages of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, the ‘gilded chaos’ in which he lived the last shout of haute-bohemia.

Anyone who shares a fascination for Lucian Freud will find something of interest in this book – but be prepared to think the worst of the man too because rest assured that somewhere in these pages you will find it.

 

Alun Severn

February 2020