Two years ago, I was asked to be one of the judges for the annual BP awards
mounted by the National Portrait Gallery in a forlorn attempt to keep the
British portraiture tradition alive. It’s a lost cause. One day the NPG will
need to face up to the fact that the age of Gainsborough and Reynolds has
passed, never to return. But until that miserable morn rises, I am as happy
as them to keep up this modest pretence. Looking through the colossal pile
of bad face painting entered for the award that year was not proving good
for the soul. Until an irritatingly familiar face hove into view.
What was it about her? The eyes? The hatchet of her profile? Something about
this gnarled old woman, shoved brusquely before us and painted in triplicate
by someone called Andrew Tift, rang a bell. Her name, announced the NPG’s
director, Sandy Nairne, was Kitty Godley. Which meant nothing. But you might
know her better, he expanded, as Kitty Garman. No! we hissed in unison.
Kitty Garman? Never. But it was her. The first wife of Lucian Freud, the
fabulous Kitty with the cat’s eyes, the beautiful, wide-eyed brunette who
inspired Freud’s first real masterpieces, was still alive and before us now.
Kitty Garman was the daughter of that randy old sculptor Jacob Epstein and of
another Kathleen Garman, also known as Kitty, who scandalised London society
in the 1920s by having three children by Epstein while he was married to his
first wife, Margaret. This first wife was so enraged by Epstein’s bedroom
enthusiasm for the first Kitty Garman that she shot her, wounding her in the
shoulder. Our Kitty, the one painted as a waterfall of wrinkles by Andrew
Tift, was the second child of Epstein’s amour fou.
This Kitty met Freud in 1947, and they soon married. Freud, meanwhile, had
already had an affair with her aunt, Lorna Garman, so he knew the family
intimately. It was Lorna Garman who gave him the stuffed zebra that pokes
its head into the room in one of Freud’s strangest bits of early surrealism.
Lorna — “the first person I got keen on”, he later confessed — appears in
various early drawings gathered in a new book of Freud’s works on paper,
published by Jonathan Cape. In the most memorable of them, she sports an
outrageous ocelot coat that turns her into a wildcat. Lorna became a
Catholic and soon took against Freud’s habitual sinning with other women. “I
thought I’d given you up for Lent, but I’ve given you up for good,” she is
reported to have spat after their violent separation.
Having developed a taste for Garman girls, Freud quickly switched his
allegiance to Lorna’s niece, whose eyes were even more oval and cat-like
than her aunt’s or her mother’s, and when this second Kitty was six months
pregnant with their first daughter, they got married. Freud’s portraits of
Kitty are his first unquestionable achievements. The Tate owns his famous
Girl with a White Dog, from 1951, in which Kitty sits with a white bull
terrier dozing on her lap, one milky breast popping out from her dressing
gown with that startling directness that Freud habitually brings to his
portrayals of women, and which seems to oscillate always between excitement
and cruelty. The dog was originally meant to be black. Freud gave Kitty two
bull terriers as his wedding present. But the black one got run over.
Kitty Garman also appears in the book of drawings tucked up in a Parisian
hotel bed looking petrified. She’s the Girl in the White Dress too, staring
harshly over your shoulder as if she’s spotted an approaching slasher. It’s
dark and fascinating portraiture. And whatever happiness or innocence these
two tormented Jews shared in their lives is brutally suppressed in Freud’s
art. In one of the self-portraits from the same era, Freud, who never
smiles, compares himself with a “potted hyacinth standing on a table”. With
his scary combination of neatness and fierceness, he has something about him
of the Anthony Perkins persona in Psycho. And poor Kitty Garman looks as if
the only possible reaction to being with him is fearfulness.
Freud’s other great love in life, apart from Garman girls, was the animal
kingdom and particularly birds. In the years after the war he used to keep a
pair of sparrowhawks in the house, which he also drew. “I was always excited
by birds. If you touch wild birds it’s a marvellous feeling.” To feed them,
he would go out shooting rats on the canal bank of Regent’s Park with his
Luger. And on trips around Britain he would draw the eerie assortment of
dead beasties that washed up on his shore. Puffins. Pigeons. Lobsters.
Rabbits. According to Kitty, he once brought home a pair of buzzards, but
she drew a line at that. The animals, like the people, seem always to have
faced up to the ultimate pointlessness of life. It’s Freud’s most chilling
pictorial observation. We’re here. We go. That’s it.
Although we think of him these days as Britain’s greatest living painter,
Freud is actually an Austrian Jew, born in Berlin in 1922.
His father was Ernst Freud, youngest son of the celebrated Sigmund. Growing up
in Berlin, little Lucian even saw Hitler once, and remembers it vividly. “He
had huge people on either side of him; he was tiny.” The Freuds left Berlin
in 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, and came to London. Lucian spoke no
English. Already a teenager, he had no choice but to allow a sense of
alienation and discomfort to well up inside him. My guess is that the
secretiveness and shyness that characterise him now are the result of this
abrupt uprooting. But you’ll have to consult his granddad for a full
opinion on that. While you’re there, see if he has views on the way
Freud treats women, which is shocking. Why they put up with him I have no
idea. But they do. Lots of them.
Freud’s wildness was too much for Kitty. His drinking, gambling and womanising
led inexorably to a break-up. The next volunteer onto this dangerous
conveyor belt was Caroline Blackwood, who would later earn fame as a Booker
Prize-listed novelist. She had huge eyes, and was, on the evidence of
Freud’s art, blonde, vulnerable and fiercely sexy. Blackwood was introduced
to Freud by her friend Ann Fleming, wife of Ian, and Freud would spend a
notable summer in Jamaica with the Flemings while Casino Royale was being
written. Blackwood later married the American poet Robert Lowell, who
described her as “a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers”.
There is only one drawing of her in the book, her eyes turned sadly
downwards, and the plump sofa that is her mouth demanding that you throw
yourself onto it.
It was also around this time that Freud met Francis Bacon. They were
introduced by Graham Sutherland and met at Victoria station while setting
off for a Sutherland weekend. Bacon seems to have freed Freud of any
remaining guilt he may have harboured. “His work impressed me, but his
personality affected me.” Bacon, who talked fondly of “the sensuality of
treachery”, showed Freud “how to wing it through life, how to court risk,
tempt accident and scorn the norm”. When Freud drew him one evening, Bacon
pointedly unbuttoned his trousers.
“I think you ought to use these,” he said, sliding them down to reveal his
hips. How strange that the only signs of unmistakable eroticism in Freud’s
drawings should be supplied by a man.
In 1954, out of the blue, Freud gave up drawing. It had been what he was best
known for. But the critics had begun complaining about an “affected manner”,
and Freud himself seems to have found drawing limiting. He also gave up
sitting at a table to make his art. From now on he would always stand at an
easel when painting. The book of drawings enters a stretch of uncertainty.
And when Freud returns to drawing in the early 1970s, his art had redoubled
its extreme efforts at objectivity. His father, the architect, is watched
closely as he dies. So is his mother. The reclining girls keep queuing up
for a closer inspection, but Freud’s art has given up pretending they mean
much to him. Stretched out interchangeably on a bed, either whole or in
bits, they rarely have a name. Head of a Girl. Girl with Necklace. Naked
Portrait. They’re more like descriptions in a mail-order catalogue than
picture titles.
All pictures taken from Lucian Freud on Paper, published by Jonathan Cape on
December 4, at £50. Copyright ©Lucian Freud. The book is available
at the BooksFirst price of £45, including p&p. Tel: 0870 165 8585
