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The Lives of Lucian Freud by William Feaver review – Youth: 1922-1968

Lucian Freud lived recklessly and selfishly – and made paintings unlike anything in the history of art

Lucian Freud painted very, very slowly, requiring sitters to commit themselves to examinations that went on for hundreds of hours. In everything to do with making and looking at art, he proceeded fastidiously (a word he liked), with utmost patience and seriousness. In ways he generally declined to interrogate (“I don’t do introspection”), this epic care was vitally related to the rapid abandon with which he ransacked his world for experience. The slow painter was in love with quickness and with risk. He lived with an improvisatory recklessness he would never have allowed himself in a brushstroke.

William Feaver has been thinking about this life for decades. A series of interviews in the 1990s grew into a settled rhythm of telephone calls “most days”. Freud (who died in 2011, aged 88) didn’t want a biography published in his lifetime; for one thing, he liked to be furtive, not accounted for. But he chose to talk amply with Feaver, whose future book he preferred to call “a novel”. Feaver was more interested in getting things down than making them up; with dictaphone stretched to the limits, he had the most superlative material – and he was bound to it. Large tracts of what we have here are Freud by Freud.

The first of two volumes, Youth begins with a jokily assertive boy in Berlin, and ends with a painter nearing his 50s, dedicating himself more than ever to his art. In between, it covers the enforced move to England in 1933, swaggering teenage arrival on the Soho club scene, art school in Suffolk, an adventure in the merchant navy, two marriages, much “getting up to things to do with girls”, at least four “broods” of children, and many transits in the Bentley between low-life dives he loved in Paddington and high-life parties with Princess Margaret and debutantes he might take to Annabel’s .

As a schoolboy at Bryanston he was already unruly, magnetic and doing detestable things. Refusing to make his bed (a maid’s job), he inspired other boys to follow his lead. He “positioned himself as a non-starter” in lessons and went off to ride horses and draw. Neither Freud nor Feaver go looking for causes; both avoid the methods of grandfather Sigmund. Embarked spectacularly on being himself, the question of what he could do, each moment, in each unfolding situation, seems always to have gripped Freud more than why.

He discovered that he could do anything he desired. The force of his vitality drew people to him and put him in control. He would get the girl he wanted for the night even if it meant setting the Paddington toughs on her boyfriend. (The artist Joe Tilson , for this reason, was thrown down the stairs.) Guilt did not interest or waylay him. Shutting out his mother, whose devotion he did not want, was apparently no cause for compunction but simply what he needed to do.

His driving was dangerous and he kept it that way, impatient with any notion of safety. After hitting an ambulance at Hyde Park Corner, convictions accrued as the accepted cost of joyrides. When he gambled (horses, dogs, dice), the stakes were high; he had no interest in a flutter. He wanted “to change things with the bets”, he told Feaver: “either be dizzy with so much money or otherwise not have my bus-fare”. In horror, always, of middle-class security, he courted trouble that would put him on his mettle. He chose the company of fraudsters and burglars, whose resourceful gumption commanded his affection and respect.

Greedily appreciative of “characters”, hungry for crooks, beauties and heiresses, he arranged his own version of la comédie humaine . He always had time for Balzac , and felt affiliation with Henry Mayhew and Henry James . Yet for all the sense of panorama, the intensity he needed was bred in close quarters. He painted what occurred between the bed and the window in cramped hotels and between four walls at Delamere Terrace by the Grand Union Canal.

Painting was the thing that could not be two-timed, paid off or made to wait. As he refined his meticulously graphic style, he made pictures unlike anything by his contemporaries or in the history of art. Zebra-long lashes rimmed saucer eyes; clothes asserted themselves more insistently than the drapery of saints in Memling or Van Eyck. Then he loosened his brushstrokes, confounded his admirers, and made something new again, painting sagging, changeable, feeling flesh. In superlative accounts of the pictures, Feaver articulates their trapped, pinioned force: the couch in The Painter’s Room standing daintily like a foal; Harry Diamond “aggressively bewildered”, squaring up to the palm tree in Interior at Paddington ; Freud’s “burnishing of perspicacity” in a portrait of Peter Watson; his wife Kitty a nervous effigy in Girl with a White Dog – “This is an ordeal.”

Hotel Bedroom was painted in Paris after marrying Caroline Blackwood , but that too was an ordeal. Finding the tie of wedlock off-putting while on honeymoon, Freud took up again with a former lover. “It was not a domestic life,” Feaver offers. A brief attempt at establishing a marital home in Dorset looks, at least in retrospect, absurd. Freud spent a few distracted evenings at a Blandford Forum drinking club, went riding at night, and returned to London, leaving the housekeeper weeping at the treatment of “poor Lady Caroline”. He was not offering monogamy, and most of the women who wanted him knew the deal. The ruthlessness was part of what drew them, though their voices are hard to catch here as Freud talks on.

There were many abortions and many children. He acknowledged 14 and knew there were others he hadn’t “come across”. Some, at least, he was legally bound to support, and how could he afford it? The very question feels wrong-headed in the face of Frank Auerbach’s view: “In a sense, his was a religious faith that these babies would be all right.” They were not all all right, but we don’t hear much about them. Since most of the children were marginal to Freud’s life, they appear here only fleetingly. A few fragments float on the page. One of his sons gets two lines: “He and Suzy took the baby Ali on a trip to the Scillies once, by air. ‘Flying over you could see the dolphins.’”

Feaver lets non-sequiturs produce their own effect. There’s some fine judgment in the way he does this. Early on, I puzzled at the disparate events held together in paragraphs. In the teeming chapters of incident I kept expecting the arrival of a controlled narrative, questions posed and resolved, significant others brought sharply into focus. This biography does not work like that. So what is Feaver doing?

In a memorable 2013 essay, Julian Barnes discussed Freud as an “episodicist” for whom “one thing happens and then another”. His was not a linear view of life, concerned with connections and continuities. To an extreme extent, he acted on impulse, barely connecting one moment with the next. Every page of this volume affirms the distinction. No course of action on a Saturday (even marriage) affected his choice of what to do on Tuesday and Wednesday. Feaver replicates this episodicism in telling the life story. This is Lucian Freudian biography, packed with momentary stories and fundamentally resisting narrative.

As for Freud in his long “youth”: readers will reach their own views about the monstrous selfishness of the artist whose art is nonetheless a kind of gift. Feaver won’t tell you what to think about it. To keep admiring the pictures and overlook the worst offences is no answer: better look long and hard. The life, like the art, may make you question what you know about the basic contracts of living.

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William Feaver: The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011 review - mesmerising, exhaustive and obsessively detailed | reviews, news & interviews

William feaver: the lives of lucian freud: fame 1968-2011 review - mesmerising, exhaustive and obsessively detailed, second volume in feaver’s voluble biography puts anecdote above analysis.

This is a biography  like no other, more or less dictated by Lucian Freud . William Feaver spoke with the artist perhaps almost daily for nearly 40 years, visiting frequently, taking notes, recording, and being shown work in progress. The second volume of the resulting kaleidoscope – the two together, the first published last year, come to over 1,100 pages – is a mesmerising, entertaining account of Freud’s life and art. Freud’s own comments on other artists, his own paintings, and art in general, its purposes and his own aesthetic, are intelligent, enlightening and absorbing.

Feaver’s narrative is shaped by the artist himself, who is rumoured to have paid his interlocutor off with a goodly sum to make sure the result was a posthumous publication. The result is the opposite of a critical, analytical and evaluating biography, so Freud had nothing to fear if this was really the picture he wished to leave of himself. Feaver supplies the connective tissue between the remarks and observations of the artist. It is left to us to decide how truthful Freud is being about the events and relationships in his life. It is his version after all, although the author has compiled an astonishing archive of letters, interviews and conversations with friends, dealers, curators, relatives. Above all, the author seems to unreservedly admire the artist’s chutzpah , that almost untranslatable Yiddish word for brazen nerve, presumption, arrogance, guts and effrontery, which is one of the defining characteristics of Freud’s personal and professional life: he was always dismissing his dealers, and going off them and his framers, even his clients, not to mention his sitters . He described himself, justly, as completely selfish.

Freud was full of contradictions. In his later years, he became increasingly irascible, continually referring to his need for privacy and his irritation at paparazzi, even as he also backed into the limelight. His personal life was a web of endless affairs well into his eighties, despite being affected both by hypochondria and ill health. The final years are a sad coda with some mental confusion. Some of the confusion pertained to family, many of whom he lavishly if capriciously supported. There were at least fourteen acknowledged children, two from his first marriage to Kitty Garman, herself the illegitimate daughter of the sculptor Jason Epstein. But there may be and probably are several more – one lover amused herself by trying to count. There are so many offspring in a rather complex web that some kind of family tree wouldn’t have gone amiss: every few pages you have to try and remember who was who, and who is who. It is also a continual motif for various children, even into their middle age, to get in touch, be thrilled with attention, and desolate when things go wrong; several were obviously traumatised, and four acknowledged children – the McAdams – were completely cut out of the will (Freud left, after tax, some £42m). One sued to no avail.

The capriciousness of Freud, as he went off his models, his lovers and his children, for no apparent reason other than changes in mood, is a thread throughout the book. Yet his generosity was equally astounding. Models and lovers in favour were bought flats and cars and given quite astounding sums of money, with nothing claimed back, although there were some unpleasant episodes when works of art by Freud were promised, not given or, if given, not considered to be gifts. In one instance, he asked a young woman if she would do anything he asked. Yes, she said. He demanded a loan of £200: although it was more than she had in the bank, she gave the cheque. They gambled it away together, yet she found at the end of the evening that he had put £3,500 in her back pocket, which she used to start-up  her own gallery. This anecdote is typical of the power plays that infused his life.

If this were a novel, the reader would weary of the arbitrary carry-ons, which are exhausting to read about; what it must have been like to experience them, either as perpetrator or victim, is hard to imagine. But the point, of course, is that Freud was a painter who was becoming ever more famous. The book includes his commentary on his art, which, especially when allied to specific paintings and etchings, is invariably fascinating. If you are an admirer of Freud’s work, the book as a whole is like having a guided tour from the artist himself. With this in mind, it would have been helpful, although presumably prohibitively expensive, to have illustrations close to the descriptive prose. For the developments are not always clear, and the jury is still out on Freud’s ultimate stature, although of course that useful cliché “time will tell” is pertinent. The ferociously intelligent critic David Sylvester was sceptical.

Feaver himself is hardly of course dispassionate, and acts his own role as the critic, the collaborator and the curator: he is a recorder, not a biographer. He was a one-man Freudian, not only visiting Freud regularly to see works in progress, but also talking to him nearly every day for decades; socialising, writing reviews and interviews; and curating major and minor shows replete with publications and catalogues, as well as publishing several books. He tends to be dismissive, subtly or obviously, of other curators, critics and writers, from Catherine Lampert, curator of several shows in England and internationally to Geordie Greig (author of  Breakfast with Lucian ) and Martin Gayford (who wrote Man in a Blue Scarf ). This is truly a no holds barred narrative: Freud’s own disparaging remarks about dealers, critics, and lovers of whom he is tired, are threaded through. It's so far from any politesse that it becomes curiously liberating: how often  does protocol or courtesy cover up what people really think? It's not like Freud could  be sued for slander or libel.

The result is an exhaustive, obsessively detailed narrative of a figurative painter who was a leading figure in the continuing vitality of representational art. It is also a picture of a particular part of the London art world: a portrait of the period in which London took a role in the world of art for the first time. But at half the length, this biography would have been twice the book.

Typically, Freud did have at least one continuing relationship of mutual respect and affection: Pluto his whippet, the perfect model and companion, succeeded by Eli, the whippet of David Dawson, Freud’s assistant.

• The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968–2011 by William Feaver (Bloomsbury £35.00)
• Read more book reviews on theartsdesk 

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The Devilish Life and Art of Lucian Freud, in Full Detail

By Dwight Garner

• Jan. 18, 2021
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The critic Kenneth Tynan divided playwrights into two categories, “smooth” and “hairy,” and one could probably make a similar distinction among biographers. Smooth biographers offer clean narrative lines, well-underscored themes, and carrots, in the form of cliffhangers, to lure the reader onward. Their books are on best-seller lists. They’re good gifts for Dad.

William Feaver, the author of “The Lives of Lucian Freud” — the second volume, “Fame, 1968-2011,” is out now — exists on the opposite extreme. There’s little smoothness in him at all. His biography is hairier than a bonobo.

Feaver, a longtime art critic for The Observer in London, doesn’t provide a fixed portrait of Freud, the great realist painter, so much as he leads us into a studio filled with crusty brushes, scrapers, half-completed canvases, easels, dirty floorboards, mahlsticks and distilled turpentine, and lets us poke through the detritus as if to assemble a likeness for ourselves.

Some critics have found the jumbled, unmediated quality of these biographies to be a feature rather than a bug. I’ve tried to see it that way. Reading these talky and cluttered books is like scrolling through microfilm: There are no grand vistas, but there are neck aches and, often enough, because Freud led life up to the nostrils, fantastic “aha!” moments.

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of January. See the full list . ]

A grandson of Sigmund Freud, Lucian was born in Berlin in 1922. His father was an architect. Lucian’s family fled to England in 1933, not long after the Nazis seized power. He was born with an extra toe on his small toe, which the family, to his disappointment, had removed. He later grew a sharklike fang, he claimed, between his front teeth. That was tugged out as well.

Freud served briefly in World War II as an ordinary seaman. He became a painter, Feaver writes, because “he used to go around saying he was a painter” and “after a time he had to do something about it.” Then began a career in art and social climbing. His second wife was Caroline Blackwood, heir to the Guinness fortune.

Sitting for one of Lucian’s portraits was not so unlike sitting on Sigmund’s couch. Sessions went on for months, if not years. One difference was that Lucian’s visitants usually took off their clothes.

Lucian and his furious id would have made an interesting case study for his grandfather. The artist was amoral: violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous. He lived like a puddle-stomping toddler. If he was not the devil, he was certainly the devil’s advocate.

Freud needed new lovers the way a diabetic needs insulin. He trolled for young women to paint and sleep with, but he hardly needed to. They came to him. He was handsome and a genius and offered, as one of his lovers put it, the lure of studio life, “champagne there on dirty floorboards.” To be painted by Freud was, increasingly, a shot at cultural permanence.

Freud painted slowly, by accretion. Feaver’s life of Freud is compiled similarly. The author, a gifted critic, knew Freud well during the last decades of his life, and they talked frequently on the telephone. It’s possible Feaver had too much access to his subject. He quotes Freud too freely, and at too great a length, on nearly every topic.

The reader nods when Freud comments, deep into Volume Two: “A lot of the things I say have got a semi-incomprehensible side.” You wish you could cover him, like a parrot, when you want him to be silent.

“Fame, 1968-2011” finds Freud finally receiving major exhibitions; the prices of his paintings soared. Feaver details Freud’s relationship with his great friend-foe Francis Bacon. They went tit-for-tat in terms of eccentricity.

Freud only rarely painted celebrities, but he did make portraits of the queen and of Kate Moss. (Feaver doesn’t mention the tattoo that Freud gave Moss: two tiny swallows at the base of her spine.) When the model Jerry Hall missed a few sittings, Freud painted her out of a portrait. He was an outlandish gambler. “Gambling must be all-out,” he said. “It must alter the balance of life.” He once paid off a debt by painting a bookie.

Freud was not a family man. He was not close to his brothers (they are barely mentioned in Volume Two), but he did paint a series of portraits of his mother, over more than a thousand four-hour sittings. Feaver calls those sessions “arguably the longest time ever spent by any mother’s painter son on any painter son’s mother.”

Family does intrude as Freud’s children, legitimate and illegitimate, begin to crawl from the woodwork. He had at least 14 offspring he acknowledged as his own. He called himself “one of the great absentee fathers of the age.” Soon there are grandchildren as well. Freud did not do much hugging, but his progeny could tap him for money.

Many got to know him by sitting for portraits. He painted his daughters naked. “They make it all right for me to paint them,” he said. “My naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Freud had a mean word for everyone. He put the knife in white and it came out red. A typical comment in this volume, about an aunt, is: “She was very nasty really, in a small sort of way. Her expertise was opening letters. Other people’s.” If he didn’t like you, he cut you from his life like cancer. You can always tell a monster: He wears scarves indoors.

He had a mighty work ethic, and he turned out paintings until nearly the end. He lived in the imperative tense and barely slowed down. He stood in the center of his own self-importance. There wasn’t a big gap, as there is in most lives, between being carefree and being carrion.

Can one pick up Volume Two of this biography if one hasn’t read Volume One? Feaver seems to suggest the answer is no. He doesn’t always bother to reintroduce people or topics. When “Clement” suddenly appears in Volume Two, with no surname attached, will every reader know this is Clement Freud, Lucian’s estranged brother?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. There’s a sense one could skip three or four pages almost anywhere in these books and not miss anything crucial.

Everybody has an opinion about Freud’s art, and no one is wrong, exactly. I tend to align myself, as Feaver seems to, with Robert Hughes, who asserted in 1987 that Freud was “the greatest living realist painter.” He made the ordinary gravid, and sublime.

Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner .

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968-2011 By William Feaver Illustrated. 556 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $45.

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The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth: rich and elaborate biography

William feaver draws on hours of interviews to chart details of painter’s life before fame.

Lucian Freud with Brendan Behan in a Dublin street: Youth explores Freud’s life up to the late 1960s. Photograph: Daniel Farson/Getty

William Feaver begins his intricate, densely textured biography with a remark made to him by the critic David Sylvester in 1995. Lucian Freud wasn’t, Sylvester said, “a born painter . . . [he] had applied himself to the art of painting”, later elaborating his point in an article in the Guardian. When he read it, Feaver reports, Freud laughed. Like most critics and curators early on, including John Berger, Sylvester did not really get Freud and rushed to erroneous judgment, but he had a point. As a painter Freud lacked natural facility and an instinct for or interest in composition. The former he learned to transcend, brilliantly; he remained indifferent about the latter.

The first of two projected volumes, Youth charts Freud’s life up to the late 1960s, just prior to his eventual fame. Born in Berlin in 1922, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, he had a privileged childhood (his father was an architect). In 1934, as the Nazis tightened their grip, his parents moved to London. At boarding school, Freud had a rebellious, subversive attitude. He was much happier at Cedric Morris’s East Anglian art school. His efforts were often presumed to be naive or faux naif, but weren’t actually either. His meticulous depiction of any given subject produced images of obsessive precision that could verge on the surreal. Yet he was aiming for guileless veracity. “I was trying for accuracy of a sort. I didn’t think of detail; it was simply, through my concentration, a question of focus.” He never lost that quality of sustained, relentless focus.

Taken from numerous interviews with Feaver, in person or by phone over a period of many years, Freud’s voice is a startling, almost uncanny constant through the book, a ghostly commentary. His evident honesty is impressive, even if his recall is inevitably subjective (including such minor lapses as mixing the Abbey up with the Gate). Long-term lovers and friends provide essential balance. Even not so long-term. Joan Wyndham, who spent several weeks with him at the beginning of 1946, later wrote: “’One thing I liked about Lucian was that he always told me the truth, no matter how painful. And . . . you never knew where you were with him, and he liked it that way.’” In bed with him one morning she was woken by a girl’s voice saying “Cuppa tea, love?” She opened her eyes to see by Freud’s side a dark-haired girl with huge eyes, who “totally ignored me and didn’t offer me any tea”. Wyndham reported Freud saying that what he really liked was to pick up girls in the park “and bring them home like stray kittens”.

Scandalous anecdotes

Home, that is, to his flat in Delamare Terrace, “on the seamy side of Maida Vale”. Freud was barely into his 20s when he set up home there having lost his previous lodgings and always keen to put distance between himself and his mother. Delamare exemplified his desire to have a foot in diametrically opposite social camps. As “Lu the painter”, he nurtured his relationship with a neighbour, young Charlie Lumley, who became a sidekick and model for several superb paintings. They remained close until Lumley married in 1960. Freud liked to think of himself as streetwise, a bit of an outlaw – as Lumley was in reality – while being simultaneously a dedicated social climber, enraptured with titles, wealth, prestige and gossip. The great and the good, including Brendan Behan and Jack B Yeats, encountered in Dublin, drift continually through these pages, as often as not in scandalous insider anecdotes.

Lucian Freud: his painting The Studio (detail)

A beneficiary of the royalties on his grandfather’s writings, which grew over the years, but otherwise essentially dependent on selling his work, he was usually short of money but hated the idea of taking money seriously. Like his sometime friend Francis Bacon, he grew into a serious gambling habit, laying large sums, preferably on horses, and occasionally winning. The point, he said, was the all-or-nothing risk: a massive win, or lacking even the bus fare home.

He fell madly in love, serially. The problem was that when he won the object of his affections he didn’t seem to know what to do and sought distraction. Still married to Kitty Epstein, he pursued Caroline Blackwood obsessively, in the face of her family’s ferocious disapproval. Once they eloped and married, he set up a house in the country as though designing a theatrical production, apparently with the best intentions but with a complete absence of conviction and self-knowledge; he couldn’t abide being stuck there. Blackwood eventually walked out on him one evening, having cooked him a supper that he pushed thoughtlessly away. He was shattered.

Emotional turbulence

Earlier on, he fell heavily for Lorna Wishart, who was married, usurping her lover Laurie Lee. Enraged and devastated, Lee later wondered how it had never occurred to him that he would inevitably be the victim of the same deceptions and betrayals Lorna had inflicted on others to be with him. When she dismissed Freud – “I thought I’d given you up for Lent but I’ve given you up for good” – it was because he was clearly involved with someone else, more than one someone, in fact, but again he was utterly shaken and disconsolate.

Throughout all this emotional turbulence, it should be emphasised, he worked continually, creating a significant number of the finest figurative paintings of the 20th century. And he was a famously slow worker. He preferred to begin at one point and work from there, the intact image emerging bit by bit as if by magic as he progressed across the canvas. His subjects were those close to him, those he could persuade to pose for impossible lengths of time, each subjected to that unwavering, concentrated focus.

Apart from intimates – a long list – they included his wider circle, such as the truculent Soho habitue Harry Diamond, the subject of several excellent paintings including Interior in Paddington from 1951. Freud relates how, one evening, a drinking companion, Willy Willetts, who had been advised that his book on Chinese art would be a steady earner, said he was thinking of making Diamond the beneficiary of the royalties. Diamond went home. When he reappeared the next evening he told Willetts he’d been thinking about his offer: “Leave me out. I’m damned if I’m going to be the butt for your philanthropy.” Freud’s jaw dropped: ‘The butt for your philanthropy’, it cannot ever have been said by anyone before.” You can see why he liked Diamond’s perversity.

Aidan Dunne

Aidan Dunne is visual arts critic and contributor to The Irish Times

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William Feaver on Fifty Years with the Life of Lucian Freud

From the read smart podcast, presented by the baillie gifford prize.

To mark 21 years of rewarding the best nonfiction writing, The Baillie Gifford Prize has launched a new podcast generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. On the second series of the podcast, host Razia Iqbal will explore the increasingly popular world of nonfiction books. Each episode includes discussions and interviews with prize-winning authors, judges and publishing insiders, with guests including prize winner David France ( How to Survive a Plague , 2017), publishing director at John Murray Georgina Laycock, 2020 prize judge Simon Ings, 2019 shortlisted author Hannah Fry, and many more.

On today’s podcast, Razia explores writing biographies with Baillie Gifford Prize alumni Lucy Hughes-Hallett (2013 winner), Sir Jonathan Bate (2015 shortlisted) and William Feaver (2019 shortlisted). They discuss the joys and challenges that come with studying and portraying other people’s lives. Hughes-Hallet won the prize in 2013 with The Pike (Fourth Estate), Bate was shortlisted in 2015 with Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life , and Feaver was shortlisted in 2019 with The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth . This episode was recorded and produced completely remotely.

From the conversation:

Razia: Your relationship wit Lucian Freud goes back a very long way. You met him in the early 1970s—or even before that—but you certainly started interviewing him in 1973. At what point did you think, this is a man whose life I would really like to write about in depth?

William: It was a very slow progress from meeting him to deciding that. But the very first time I met him, I came down to London from Newcastle. I had been commissioned by the Sunday Times magazine to write about Freud. I was the sort of unwitting dupe because I was brought down from Newcastle as someone who knew nothing about him, and the first thing I said to him practically was that I wasn’t that interested in his private life. Then what followed is 50 years of very much his private life as well as his public artistic life.

Razia: Let’s look at the tension between the life and the work. This is obviously the core of so much that biographers have to deal with. Of course, Freud didn’t want you to write much about him in terms of the biography you were writing while he was alive, but he also said that everything is biographical and everything is a self-portrait. So when you started listening to the long interviews and daily conversations you had with him, how did you think about how you were going to shape the life you wanted people to read about?

William: Of course, all biographies have an arc: birth to death. That’s the basic structure which helps us all, I think. … Lucian loved telling stories full of insidious remarks about people he didn’t like and praise for others. He was loyal, difficult, and for all sorts of reasons the biographical years pricked up from years of knowing him and meeting him and gradually finding that as the years went on our relationship developed and changed and eventually became this extraordinary parallel world where I kept along aside him, caught up with him, and even overtook him in some respects. For a while, we collaborated closely on what would become this straightforward biography, but then he freaked after he read a chapter I showed him. He wanted me to stop, but I naturally didn’t want to stop. So we agreed that the novel could appear after his death. Then, having cleared the floor, we continued the exact same way each day over the next eight years.

To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Read Smart , subscribe and listen on iTunes , Stitcher , Spotify , or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Read Smart Podcast is commissioned by The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

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Three books about Lucian Freud's life and work offer insights that do not always paint a pretty picture

Eccentricity and singled-mindedness were part of the great painter's character, but he had many unappealing traits.

Bruce Bernard’s 1983 image of Lucian Freud and his daughter, Bella © Estate of Bruce Bernard

When Lucian Freud (1922-2011) read the original draft of William Feaver’s biography, it so appalled him that he paid the author not to publish it in his lifetime. Now the first volume has appeared and we encounter the artist during his youth. Feaver had access to Freud’s letters, he interviewed his sitters and confrères , and also transcribed hours of private conversation with the artist, which Freud knew would be used. Feaver captures Freud’s nearly psychotic wilfulness, his eccentricity, and his disregard for convention and the feelings of others. His pathological libido, reckless driving, absent parenting and rarity of expressions of contrition all demonstrate his disregard for convention and attest to his pursuit of satisfaction of momentary urges.

Much of the material will be known to those who have read about mid-century Fitzrovia and Soho. Freud’s social circles mean there is a vast array of individuals mentioned. At times it feels as if one is reading a montage of front pages from the News of the World and the gossip pages of Tatler . It is the unending string of pungent anecdotes that make this biography so unsatisfying. The sheer slew of events is indigestibly rich and one longs for a text more leavened by detached passages of analysis or factual scene-setting. Obviously, Feaver is right to use his treasure trove to generate this semi-official memoir of the artist. It needs to be on the record, but a tougher, more detached author needs to sift and shape this material into a less rich narrative.

Timed to coincide with the biography is Lucian Freud: a Life , a pictorial biography. In the handsome large-format clothbound hardback, a collection of personal photographs of Freud is augmented by paintings by the artist, as well as portraits of Freud by Bacon, Auerbach, Hockney, Cedric Morris and other artists. Many of these photographs are mentioned by Feaver in his biography, so this book provides an unofficial companion volume. For anyone who is a committed enthusiast, Life provides an attractive and personal insight into the artist’s life.

Freud was not an especially prolific self-portraitist but there was enough material just to fill the Sackler Gallery in the Royal Academy, published in the catalogue Self-Portraits . The quality of the works is variable. A handful of the unfinished paintings show us new aspects. The great bust, Reflection (Self-Portrait) , of 1985 is sublime, perhaps the best painting Freud ever made, but nothing else in the exhibition comes close. We find Freud playing games, losing his nerve or aggrandising himself. The self-portraits show Freud too often at his laziest and most self-satisfied. Is that in itself a form of self-portrait?

• William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922-1968 , Bloomsbury, 704pp, £31.50 (hb)

• David Dawson and Mark Holborn, Lucian Freud: a Life , Phaidon Press, 250pp, £150 (hb)

•  David Dawson, Joseph Leo Koerner, Jasper Sharp and Sebastian Smee, Lucian Freud: the Self-Portraits , Royal Academy of Arts, 160pp, £35 (hb)

• Alexander Adams is a British artist, poet, art critic and writer. His book, Culture War , is published by Imprint Academic

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Best Biographies » Artists' Biographies

The best books on lucian freud, recommended by william feaver.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968 - 2011 by William Feaver

Though ferociously private, Lucian Freud spoke about painting, the art world and his life and loves to his confidante and frequent collaborator, William Feaver , on the phone most weeks for many years. Feaver's transcript forms the core of his definitive two-volume biography . He speaks with us about the best books for understanding the life and work of this renowned painter, and the very particular collaboration that led to this magisterial account of one of the finest painters of the last century.

Interview by Romas Viesulas

Emil and the Detectives by Eileen Hall (translator) & Erich Kästner

Private View: The Lively World of British Art by Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), Bryan Robertson & John Russell

A Free House!: Or, The Artist as Craftsman by Walter Richard Sickert

Memoirs of the Life of John Constable: Composed Chiefly of His Letters by C.R. Leslie

Nollekens and his Times: Comprehending A Life Of That Celebrated Sculptor, And Memoirs Of Several Contemporary Artists

1 Emil and the Detectives by Eileen Hall (translator) & Erich Kästner

2 private view: the lively world of british art by antony armstrong-jones (lord snowdon), bryan robertson & john russell, 3 a free house: or, the artist as craftsman by walter richard sickert, 4 memoirs of the life of john constable: composed chiefly of his letters by c.r. leslie, 5 nollekens and his times: comprehending a life of that celebrated sculptor, and memoirs of several contemporary artists.

B efore we speak about the best books for understanding his life and work, who was Lucian Freud?

Did you choose him to write a biography about, or did he choose you?

It seems natural in discussing Lucian Freud books that we start with his childhood. Emil and the Detectives is a tale of boyhood derring-do, set in a time and a place that must have formed some of Freud’s earliest memories. 

Freud was a Jewish Berliner by birth. These facts gradually impinged upon him once he was no longer a toddler and became a boy. I chose Emil and the Detectives although there are other books from childhood that he was also very keen on – the poems of Christian Morgenstern, for example. However, Emil has this vivid atmosphere of growing up in late 1920s Berlin, in which the protagonist and his young accomplices, rough-and-tumble working class boys, set out to catch a mysterious man in a hat who had pinched money from Emil when he fell asleep on a train.

“Books and Lucian: the ties were close from the start”

It very much reflects what Lucian’s imaginative life as a child actually was. He was brought up in a privileged part of Berlin, Regentenstrasse, which is near the Tiergarten and bang in the centre of prosperous Berlin. He went to an ordinary local school and it was only in the very early 30s, when his classmates were being enrolled in the Hitler Youth, that he became aware of the differences between him and them. Which makes this particularly apposite as one of the five books under discussion. It’s a charming and funny tale, wittily illustrated by Walter Trier, who incidentally ended up in London just before the last war and became one of the greatest illustrators in town, much admired by the young Freud. These are important connections – illustration and lively childhood activities. Also, Lucian’s love at the time for being part of a gang, going around pocketing chocolates from sweetshops and the like.

One could easily read Emil as a stand-in for the young Freud, a brilliant but difficult child in many respects.

He was. Lucian didn’t particularly get on with his mother’s two other children – his elder brother and his younger brother. He was bright, mercurial and imaginative and in the early years he was very much tied up with his mother: centre of her attentions and affection. She introduced him to books. In this pre-Hitler Berlin, Lucian enjoyed something of a magical childhood. She got him reading Alice in Wonderland in preparation for the family’s move to Britain in 1933, right after Hitler had come to power. Another book that loomed strongly in his early imagination was Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty , the biography of a horse, much of it woeful, written in the 1870s. Freud’s love of horses was a fixture throughout his life – a love of spending money on horses and losing money on them, and actually riding them too. Children’s books were stimulants in his psychological makeup. Books and Lucian: the ties were close from the start.

In later life, Freud did assemble the most extraordinary gang of individuals, and your biography brings us into this inner circle of fascinating characters, ranging from lowlifes to high society. He seems a very self-aware protagonist in the narrative of his own life. As the title of your biography suggests, he appears to have packed several lives into his one life span.

Freud was extraordinarily versatile in his loyalties; his loyalty to people. I became a friend of his (as did others) however we were all compartmented. He liked conversations to be one-on-one, not two to three or more. He wasn’t good in a hubbub. A small table-load was okay, but not any more than would satisfactorily attune to his wit, his bandying of scandal, and of course his serious talk: never ponderous, always light-footed and self-deprecating, to some extent. This mix was a common feature I think among the painters, besides Lucian, that I became friendly with and involved with at an early age – the painters Michael Andrews, for example, and Frank Auerbach, whom I have sat for practically every Monday evening since 2003; the people I most admired as painters, who have been tagged the ‘School of London’.

In reading The Lives of Lucian Freud I was reminded of Dickens with this panoply of characters arrayed before us. Like Dickens , one character that Freud draws out very vividly is London itself. I was delighted to discover that Freud would grind charcoal into his paints to give them a London-like grittiness.

The next book you’ve chosen, Private View, brings to light the development of the British art scene in the early 60s. The book jacket cover describes it as ‘the first book ever to tell how London became with Paris and New York, one of the world’s three capitals of art’.

The surprising thing is that surely alongside this coffee-table book there should be companion volumes: a Private View (Paris) and Private View (New York) , but there hasn’t been, not specifically on this immersive scale as far as I’m aware. Obviously, there’s been lots published about New York as an arts capital, but nothing so vivid an encapsulation of a time and place as Private View by John Russell, Bryan Robertson and Lord Snowdon. Living in the far north of England, as I did then, to me Private View was my introduction to a wonderfully busy world of people achieving extraordinary things, a world centred on London. Snowdon’s telling photographs and John Russell’s text (as art critic of, successively, the London Sunday Times and the New York Times, writing in a slightly waspish manner) intrigued me at the time. Now all these years later, it looks to be a wonderful period piece. It’s a book which mixes illustration and photographs, very radically different photographs from what you might usually get in an art book, along with a certain lack of solemnity but a great deal of detail, some of it gossip – an admirable mix for any sort of art biography.

It’s striking how many entries in this book formed part of Freud’s extended circle. It’s almost like a visual Rolodex of his London ‘gang’.

The situation of the artists working in a big art centre like Paris, London or New York is that they lead lives of solitude during studio hours, and more often than not extreme sociability in the odd hours afterwards. You have to wind down and you have to see a bit of life. You need a social life and in Lucian’s case you have to have an amorous life too. All these things come together here, and this book was my prompt for getting involved in London. The writing of this biography did not depend too much on the London Library , that great public-private library, which allows you access to the shelves and which for writers of all kinds is a great asset to living in London. This was actually a book to be written not thanks to the London Library particularly, but in day-to-day conversations and in moving around and investigating what was happening.

A recent conversation we had here on Five Books featured the Warhol Diaries , a document that Andy Warhol practically dictated to a confidante. Your conversations with Freud – were they a calculated form of preparation for the ‘novel’ you were to write after his death? He famously remarked that a biography was out of the question, but that a novel would be acceptable, the first ‘funny art book’.

It was a very odd relationship. Initially, after I had written the first major magazine article on Freud in the early 70s, I became the art critic of the Observer . Which meant, as Lucian mockingly said, that ‘eternal vigilance’ was warranted. I did have to be careful not to appear to have my favourites and un-favourites. I had to serve the reader as opposed to serving the interests of anybody else, including my own. That meant that for the first fifteen or twenty years of my friendship with Lucian, this was a consideration. After I left the Observer in the late 90s however, when the idea of doing a short monograph on him had cropped up, I had already curated exhibitions with him and we were quite close. It was not out of the blue, but it was a change of direction that I was doing the portrait of Lucian and not the other way around.

Lucian had inquired two or three times whether I should like to sit with him. No, I would not like to sit for him was my response, because I was the one behind the easel, as it were. This book developed, therefore, from being a short monograph into a longer book. The more we talked and the more I recorded him talking, the more it seemed that this was sort of an infinite resource and that I had to stick with it. Rather like keeping a diary I suppose. It was dutiful as much as anything else, even before it became a signed-up project with Bloomsbury, the publishers.

“He wasn’t good in a hubbub”

By that stage, the monograph was already ten years in the making, we’d already had ten years of me not writing the book. It was very disconcerting for me when he said he really couldn’t bear the idea of it being published. He did not like the sound of his own voice too much, and although I assured him it was good, he disagreed and didn’t like the exposure. I don’t blame him. It must be the most ghastly thing, having a book written about one without one’s control, not just from an editorial perspective, but just for the sheer scope of potential embarrassment all around. So it was understood that this would appear as a ‘novel’ after he died. I would continue and we talked and talked. Every afternoon as he knocked off from work for a bit, he liked to phone people he enjoyed speaking to: the art historian John Richardson in New York from time to time and a few more. All of us in our compartmented boxes, of course. It was this exclusive entrée, that was also non-exclusive, although none were committed to the book as I was. So I was special. He noted that.

His relationships with his models similarly often had a certain reciprocal commitment to accomplishing a particular work.

It’s a strange situation, sitting for a portrait, somewhat like going to the doctor but in reversed order. I’m speaking now as a seasoned sitter for paintings by Frank Auerbach. One turns up, gives one’s hours, enjoyably it must be said, as there’s conversation and part of the job of the artist is to be at least a little entertaining, keeping you alert and even keeping you awake. It’s intimate. Almost as intimate as going to the dentist.

Certainly it fires the imagination thinking about some of the unrecorded conversations that took place between Freud and his sitters. In selecting the best books on Lucian Freud, you might have chosen books by or about Auerbach or Francis Bacon as part of your selection, both contemporaries and you might say ‘partners in crime’. Why did you choose A Free House by Walter Sickert, an English post-impressionist painter? 

Sickert was Austrian-Danish-British, a great European figure. He was a follower-student of Degas, knew Whistler very well, and they were almost competitors for a time. He wore very loud suits, was a great dresser-up and loved being a kind of artist rascal, always against the establishment, as he saw it. The London establishment was peculiarly stuffy in his day, roughly from the 1890s to the 1930s. And he wrote brilliantly.

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His book A Free House is a selection of his writings. He calls the bluff on Roger Fry for example, who in the early 1900s was forever earnestly proselytizing for Cézanne, while Sickert came out fighting, questioning everything including Cezanne. That’s very much Lucian’s style, too. His exaggerations and his scorn, and his general larking around in verbal form is something perhaps not to emulate but certainly to admire. Like Sickert, he liked to taunt received opinion.

Sickert’s technique, with the thickness of his painting method, also seems to be a precursor to Freud’s. Arguably, too, the documentary realism with which he painted his surroundings in Camden. Then I suppose there are the lifestyle habits of his artistic practice. Sickert seemed to have at least as many mistresses as he had studios, which recalls some of Freud’s romantic adventurism as well.

Let’s talk about Constable. Freud certainly seemed very aware of his artistic lineage. You’ve remarked on the influence of the Flemish Old Masters for example on the young Freud. He never lost his Continental inflection, but by choosing this as one of the best Lucian Freud books – Memoirs of the Life of John Constable – are you positioning him in a lineage of great British painters? 

You might say that Freud and Constable were literally close. At the age of 16, Lucian went to a rather odd and eccentric art school in East Anglia run by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. Morris was a distinguished painter, but one who hadn’t much recognition since the 1920s, really. Freud attended around 1939-1942. This art school was in Dedham, in the heart of Constable country, the parishes Constable had been brought up in and where he lived and painted with this landscape as his chief subject. When he died, Constable’s closest painter friend CR Leslie rather hastily put together letters and anecdotes about Constable and bound them up in a book which had mezzotint illustrations by David Lucas, copies or versions of Constable’s work. This book, which was a vanity volume to begin with – Constable didn’t have the wider public that he got later on – shows the importance of illustrations of works of art in an artist biography. They are an essential element in the same way that, if you were writing about a general or a movie star, you’d visit libraries to gather press cuttings and articles. With a painter’s life, you keep looking at the works: they tell you most.

“Painting is a fundamentally straightforward practice”

In Freud’s case, as indeed was the case with Constable, the work was the man. The illustrations and the book itself had to be a mixture of the personal and the objective. Never more so than with Lucian. Indeed in 2002, he and I put on an exhibition of Constable (working with the British Council and the Louvre) in the Grand Palais in Paris, which was a kind of diplomatic reintroduction of Constable to the French public. It was my idea that Lucian should help choose it. We had often said that Constable was a great portrait painter, and it would be great wouldn’t it one day to put together an exhibition of his portraits as well as his landscapes and to mix them together? We did, and it was a success.

It was exciting to do, going through the works with Lucian, who even took a private plane trip from New York to Chicago to persuade the Art Institute of Chicago to lend Stoke-by-Nayland , one of the great last paintings for the show. So it was a collaboration, and I think Leslie’s Life of Constable therefore pre-reflects the relationship between me and Lucian over practical things, like which pictures to choose and how to present them. In my case, I was the one to do the actual hanging of them all, and when Lucian flew with a few friends over to Paris to look at the exhibition, he told me he congratulated himself on the installation, which of course he had nothing to do with.

Self-assured as always. I was able to find a very fine facsimile of the 1845 edition online.

As an innocent eight-year-old, I got my grandfather to give me for Christmas a colour reproduction of Constable’s The Leaping Horse . Lucian, decades later, said that this painting, of a boy triumphantly astride the sort of cart horse used for hauling barges, was very much a self-image of youthful Lucian. Whereas I now recall, at the age of about eight, imagining that I was that boy jumping over the low obstacle on the towpath near Dedham.

These are the ways that things just happen to link together. You can’t find connections such as these by going through archives only. Anyway, a lifetime later our exhibition Constable: le Choix de Lucian Freud was a great success in Paris largely on the grounds that Lucian’s name was up there on the banners. His American contemporary Jasper Johns, for one, envied him for getting the chance to curate, for once, and at the Grand Palais no less.

Ever a bit of professional rivalry in artistic circles…. That exhibit may have been an early example of the juxtaposition of contemporary artists with Old Masters, something that’s become a trend in curatorial circles in recent decades.

Your final selection among the best Lucian Freud books, Nollekens and his Times , was not easy to come by. At Five Books we are always keen on prompting our readers to seek out interesting and authoritative texts whether in print or out of print.  You’ve described this book as the rumbustious memoirs of a portrait bust maker. How does this book illuminate Freud? 

As I was halfway through my Lucian volumes, I was shown this book by another of Frank Auerbach’s sitters – you see, this is how things happen! – David Landau, who normally lives in Switzerland but comes back to London every now and again to sit for Auerbach as he has done for decades. He recommended this book to Frank as a really extraordinary, funny and observant book. Frank then passed it on to me, and I was completely charmed by the scurrilous, sardonic, sarcastic and farcical account of the life of this very eccentric, miserly, unhappily married person who made portrait busts of eminent people such as the bibulous politician Charles James Fox.

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It’s a splendid book, with none of the pieties of standard art biographies . What makes these so irritating to my mind, and to my eyes, is that they often see more intellectual substance and indeed more cunning in painting than is actually there. Painting is a fundamentally straightforward practice. If you’re making portrait busts like Nollekens did, it’s practically a nine-to-five occupation and not something to be larded in mysticism. Here is a splendid, scabrous book rather like Boswell’s Life of Johnson, but even livelier with its focus on the perennial follies of the art world. Incidentally, Boswell’s work is one that I had shied away from over the years but, in this awful plague year and particularly since finishing my Lives of Lucian Freud , I’ve turned to and relished. Rather to my surprise, I found myself falling in with its persistence and the wonderful way in which Dr Johnson strolls and hobbles through the pages so memorably, when his actual writings were less than memorable. It’s the person that counts.

Do you find yourself with more time to paint now that the second volume has been published?

It’s good to get back to painting more consistently now. I think it’s quite important in a critic to be a practitioner as well. Otherwise the methods of working, particularly in painting, are simply mysterious not to say inexplicable. You don’t want literary explanations or rampant theory. You want hands-on explanations, understanding brushwork and the whole business of using paint. Lucian would come to my exhibitions and look around and every now and again and he’d say, ‘well, that’s a landscape you could walk around in’, which was approval. It was a bit excruciating watching him look at my paintings.

Who do you feel are the true heirs to Lucian Freud among painters or artists working today? Many would cite his influence on their technique. Who do you, as both a painter and a critic, feel achieves some of the qualities that Freud was striving for, the greater ruthlessness or, as you’ve described it, the intensification of reality that characterises his best work?

Well for intensification, I think Frank Auerbach particularly: a painter still working, who I’m personally close to and with whom I have enjoyed endless discussions over the years, which have been a great help with the Freud book. Also Christopher Bramham. Other painters who are not necessarily very well known. I’m a defrocked critic, basically, and don’t do art criticism any longer, to my great relief really! The people I know are the people—such as the painter Robert Dukes—I’ve taught with on-and-off at the Royal Drawing School over the last twenty years, who I think have infinite promise and accomplishment. Perhaps like Lucian, who until he was 50 didn’t command real media coverage. It’s good to work in obscurity for a while. Not too good for the bank balance necessarily, but it’s good for being able to continue. Me, I’m a critic that paints. It’s been that way around forever. Painting has risen up into focus again, and it’s been great to get back to it.

October 8, 2020

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William Feaver

William Feaver is a painter, curator and author, and was the art critic for the Observer for 23 years. He is on the Academic Board of the Royal Drawing School where he also currently tutors. He curated Lucian Freud's 2002 retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, and the 2012 exhibition of Freud’s drawings in London and New York. He has sat, weekly, for the artist Frank Auerbach since 2003.

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Lucian Freud Hardcover – Illustrated, 6 Nov. 2007

• Print length 488 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Rizzoli International Publications
• Publication date 6 Nov. 2007
• Dimensions 26.57 x 5.36 x 31.75 cm
• ISBN-10 0847829529
• ISBN-13 978-0847829521
• See all details

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"This latest effort will be useful as a sweeping visual appreciation of a painter of major importance." Choice Magazine

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Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rizzoli International Publications; Illustrated edition (6 Nov. 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 488 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0847829529
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0847829521
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 26.57 x 5.36 x 31.75 cm
• 755 in Art Printing Processes
• 818 in Human Figures in Art

About the authors

William feaver.

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Lucian Freud

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Lucian Freud Hardcover – Illustrated, November 6, 2007

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 488 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Rizzoli
• Publication date November 6, 2007
• Dimensions 10.46 x 2.11 x 12.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0847829529
• ISBN-13 978-0847829521
• See all details

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From publishers weekly, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

Never turns him to the bride. Here, like lion and lamb, the ostensibly incompatible bodies harmonised. Later, as Girl Sitting in the Attic Doorway, Bateman perched high up like a candidate for a ceiling painting. In Portrait on a Red Sofa, she sprawled as though falling; as Naked Girl Perched on a Chair, she was overtly distraught. Bowery died of AIDS on New Year's Day, 1995.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rizzoli; Illustrated edition (November 6, 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 488 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0847829529
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0847829521
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.71 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 10.46 x 2.11 x 12.5 inches
• #243 in Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions
• #364 in Individual Artist Monographs
• #1,258 in Art History (Books)

About the authors

William feaver.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Lucian Freud

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