London Calling (18 page)

Baudelairian dandyism (in intellect and manner as well as clothes); a quirkish and mordant wit; a keen ear for fine writing
and an incisive but irreverent eye for fine painting; a rejection of middle class values in favour of very low and, on occasion
very high life; and not least, a passion for big-time gambling.
¹⁸

When their friendship broke up, it was unpleasant. It was largely to do with the appreciation of each other’s work. Freud
thought Bacon was resorting to gimmicks and easy solutions and Bacon thought Freud’s latest work was dull and boring.

Lucian Freud was born on 8 December 1922 in Berlin, where his father, Ernst, was an architect. When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor
in 1933, the Freud family, including Lucian’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, Lucian’s brother Clement and his aunt Anna, Sigmund
Freud’s daughter, recognized the danger and moved to London. Lucian attended Dartington Hall and Bryanston and studied art
at the London Central School of Art and at Goldsmiths. By 1939, 17-year-old Lucian had had several drawings published in
Horizon
and was socializing with Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson, the leaders of what had passed for the avant-garde
in wartime London. After a spell in the merchant marine, in Atlantic convoys, Lucian had his first show at the Lefevre Gallery
in 1944.

Lucian Freud spent much of the late forties and early fifties in Paris, where he had patrons and was fêted by, among others,
the legendary Marie-Laure de Noailles, who was famously the great-granddaughter of the Marquis de Sade. As Lucian was the
grandson of Sigmund Freud, she invited him to accompany her to Vienna, where she wished to place a commemorative plaque on
Freud’s house. Notoriously manipulative, she arranged a meeting with a direct descendant of Baron Sacher-Masoch, after whom
masochism was named. When the three of them got together she announced: ‘Du bist Masoch, er ist Freud, und ich bin Sade’,
whereupon the Sacher-Masoch fled in terror.
¹⁹

In the mid-fifties Freud returned to London and set himself up in
Paddington surrounded by the peeling façades of bomb-damaged, boarded-up buildings, their cheap bricks revealed where the
Regency mortar had fallen away. Many of the buildings were unsafe, shattered by the vibrations from the Paddington Gun, part
of London’s anti-aircraft defences, which possibly did more damage itself to the surrounding buildings than did the incendiaries.
Most of the buildings repaired by the war damage crews had been patched up on the cheap: cracks filled with torn newspapers
and plastered over, floors crudely jacked up to make them level with little in the way of structural repair. Freud liked the
shabby, seedy ambience and has remained in the area ever since, buying several buildings there, including a top-floor studio
in Holland Park and a Georgian townhouse complete with studio and garden.

In addition to being celebrated as Britain’s greatest living artist, Lucian Freud has been reviled, in almost equal measure,
as one of Britain’s most notorious womanizers. The latter claim is based on the fact that he has fourteen children, twelve
of them illegitimate (the
Sunday Telegraph
of 1 September 2002 claimed there were forty). His first wife was Kitty Garman, Jacob Epstein’s ex-wife, whom he married
in 1948. (She had been Epstein’s lover since 1921 and was the mother of three of his children.) They had two children, Annie
and Annabel. This ended when Freud began an affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood, the daughter of Lady Dufferin, who very much
opposed the match. They were nevertheless married in 1957. He also had children with Jacquetta Lampson, the daughter of the
first Baron Killearn; Bella and the writer Esther Freud by Bernardine Coverley; five children by Suzy Boyt, including Rose
and Susie Boyt; and two by Margaret McAdam. Freud once said: ‘I’ve never been able to do that thing of courting. I need rather
instant reciprocation.’
²⁰

After his unsuccessful experiments with marriage and despite all his many children and ultimately grandchildren, Freud has
chosen to live alone. He has led an almost monastic life, painting in his studio until midnight, using a rotating series of
five regular sitters whose appointments are arranged weeks ahead. He keeps a rigid control over his social life: whenever
he wants to see his friends, he calls them; they are not given his telephone number, though this probably does not apply to
people like Frank Auerbach, who became his best friend after Freud and Bacon drifted apart. Francis Bacon had introduced Freud
to Auerbach in 1956 and they quickly found a lot in common, though Freud was difficult to be friends with. They were both
early risers and occasionally they still meet at Freud’s for one of his gourmet breakfasts: gull’s eggs, Cumberland sausages,
roast parsnips, game and good claret.

John Russell wrote:

Then as now [Freud] was
homo Londoniensis
in an exceptional degree: a man who used all London as the bison uses the long grass and lived with an absolute minimum of
circumstantial baggage. As far as possible in the late twentieth century, Freud owns nothing and lives nowhere, though it
could be said with equal truth that he has everything he wants and is at home everywhere.
²¹

Most of his time is devoted to painting. He famously sleeps very little, avoids holidays and travel, and has rarely left North
and West London. He is the master of the nude and the portrait, always preferring friends and lovers rather than professional
models:

I don’t use professional models because they have been stared at so much that they have grown another skin. When they take
their clothes off, they are not naked; their skin has become another form of clothing… I paint people not because of what
they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.
²²

Each painting takes eight to nine months and he works only when the sitter is present. He uses standard studio procedure,
with his subject sitting to him once or twice a week for several hours, with a rest every half an hour. He said: ‘The subject
matter is autobiographical, it’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really.’
²³

Both Freud and Frank Auerbach were from Berlin, but whereas Freud arrived with his family, Auerbach came as a nine-year-old
boy in 1939, leaving his parents behind, where they were consumed by the Holocaust. He spent a year at Borough Polytechnic,
studying with Bomberg, then four years at St Martin’s and three at the Royal College of Art. He became obsessed with the damage
to London caused by the German bombing and spent years sketching the workers clearing dangerous sites. He told Richard Cork:
‘London looked marvellous in those days. There were endless vistas in the gaps between buildings, and the sight of houses
sheared away by explosions was very dramatic.’
²⁴

For fifty years he has lived in and painted Camden Town, not the most beautiful neighbourhood of London. Auerbach: ‘I live
in Camden Town and I pass those streets everyday and it’s my part of London, so I’ve become extremely fond of it.’
²⁵
He uses only six models and these he paints time and
time again; one of them has been sitting regularly for twenty years. These include his wife Julia, David Landau and Catherine
Lampert.

There were many other painters on the London fringe; some had been badly affected by the war, others were alcoholics, unfashionable,
unattractive, or mentally unstable. Gerald Wilde was all those things. He was a classic Soho figure: deranged, unpredictable
and difficult, and in the latter half of the fifties he spent some time in St Ebba’s Mental Hospital, where he was given electric
shock treatments. These caused him to abandon painting. Jungian analysis seems to have helped to stabilize him and in the
seventies he began painting again after a twenty-year gap. He was blind in one eye from a childhood accident and presented
a curious figure: long body, long arms which almost touched the floor, short legs and an elongated face topped with a dome-like
skull. His friend Corinna MacNeice described him:

As he spoke, the left of his formidable electric light blue bulging eyes would swivel sideways and up to the heavens, his
hands carefully carving the air. The large, almost pendulous mouth, trumpet-shaped in moments of outrage, would transform
into a direct and sweet smile before giving way to gleeful laughter.
²⁶

Wilde was long thought to be the real-life model for Gully Jimson in Joyce Carey’s
The Horse
’
s Mouth
but in fact they did not meet until 1949, five years after the book was published. Wilde was an old-style Soho drunk, yelling
and screeching at the bar of the French, giving away pictures for drinking money or to friends on impulse. He was represented
by Erica Brausen’s Hanover Gallery but even though she gave Wilde a one-man show in 1948, it was not of his best paintings.
All the best things were gone, lost, given away, probably destroyed.

Wilde too was inspired by the London Blitz and did many drawings and paintings of burning buildings, many of which were in
turn destroyed by German bombs. He sold paintings for next to nothing and on one occasion, in order to show that he wasn’t
dependent on the gallery system, when he did get paid he famously threw the money on an open fire. Wilde was an abstract painter
before it was understood in Britain, and may have even been moving in the direction of the young Jackson Pollock. He held
strong opinions on painting and accused Bacon of stealing his colours. The St George’s Gallery arranged for him to make a
print, but of the edition of 100, not one sold; his colours were just too bright and aggressive for the English. As David
Sylvester put it: ‘We are a nation that evidently finds it difficult to live with difficult art.’
²⁷

In the late fifties and early sixties the property speculators had a field day; in the name of progress they were permitted
to demolish many beautiful terraces and listed buildings and slap up ugly office blocks and tower blocks in their place; while
all over London bomb sites still scarred the landscape. It seems that the bombs had inconveniently not fallen on the most
commercial sites. In 1959 a group of teachers and students from the Royal College of Art calling themselves the Anti-Uglies
finally decided to demonstrate against the terrible buildings that were making London into such an eyesore.

Their first demonstration was held in December 1958, when Caltex House on the Brompton Road and the new National Farmers’
Union building by Ronald Ward on Knightsbridge were targeted. The former had low-relief seahorses that the Anti-Uglies suggested
would be more suitable for an Italian railway station, the latter was a neo-Georgian non-entity; the Anti-Uglies’ point being
that the war damage should be replaced with something new that reflected the spirit of the times. It was ‘just the sort of
thing that Joseph Stalin would have liked’.
²⁸
‘Outrage! Outrage! Outrage!’ they chanted, the title of Ian Nairn’s famous attack on ‘subtopia’ published in 1955 in
Architectural Review
. The Anti-Uglies were not looking for polite traditional anodyne architecture, they wanted energy, guts, to ‘make it new!’

E. Vincent Harris’s new Kensington library was an early target; 250 students, mostly from the Architectural Association, the
Royal College of Art and the Regent Street Polytechnic, assembled in February 1959 to march from the Natural History Museum
to Kensington High Street. The organizer, Kenneth Baynes, was a painter and stained-glass student from the Royal College of
Art, where he later became head of the Design Education Unit. He led the parade seated in a bath chair and dressed as Christopher
Wren carrying a banner proclaiming ‘300 Years Old and Still Going Strong’. Other banners demanded: ‘Kensington! Where’s your
sense of beauty?’ and ‘Scythe it down!!’

His bath chair was pushed by Pauline Boty, the Honourable Secretary, known to fellow students at the RCA as ‘the Wimbledon
Bardot’. A television interviewer approached Pauline and, typically, asked her: ‘What’s a pretty girl like you doing at this
sort of event?’ Instead of breaking his microphone, she grinned and told him that the building was an expensive disgrace.
The interviewer said that the people who worked there thought that it was ‘very efficient inside’. ‘We are outside,’ Pauline
said, defiantly. Then the architect,
E. Vincent Harris, made an appearance. He called the demonstrators ‘stupid, duffle-coated, long-haired students’ and said
his library was ‘a well-mannered building in the best contemporary-traditional style’.
²⁹

‘It’s an outrage!’ yelled the crowd. ‘Pull it down!’ Then John Betjeman arrived. He was on the side of the Anti-Uglies. ‘The
art of architecture is at last getting the attention it deserved,’ he said, smiling at Pauline.
³⁰
The

march was accompanied by a fourteen-member traditional jazz band, mostly members of the Alberts, one of whom, Barry Kirk,
dressed as a town crier complete with silver buckles on his shoes, bellowed their message aloud.

The early marches of 100–250 people all attracted press attention but inevitably the press grew bored, and the members of
Anti-Ugly also moved on to other things. Their biggest success was their 1959 fight to stop the wholesale demolition of the
Piccadilly Circus site, including the Trocadero and the London Pavilion, which caught the public attention and resulted in
the government getting involved, scuppering the LCC’s old chums acts. Their last demo was on 23 March 1960 to protest at two
ghastly new buildings by Fitzroy Robinson, the Stalinist box (now demolished) that the BBC erected next to Nash’s All Souls
on Regent Street, and the equally pedestrian post office planned to blight St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Sadly the movement did not grow. Had it won national support, thousands of appalling sixties buildings might never have been
constructed and we would have been saved from the monstrosities of Seifert and his gang.