London Times, February 27, 2010
I am not entirely sure what prompted me to volunteer to be transformed into a work of art. I’d known Lucian Freud for some years — I still do. We’d had lunch and dinner numerous times, gone to jazz concerts together. But I think it was probably the traditional aim of the portrait sitter — self-assertion — that prompted me to volunteer myself very tentatively one afternoon a few years ago. I expected a non-committal response. He has, after all, a vast choice of potential models, including the Queen and Kate Moss — and I’m no supermodel. In fact he said: “How would you like to start next Tuesday evening?” And so it was that I stepped through the looking glass from writing about art to being transformed into a bit of it — in fact, two bits, an oil painting, Man with a Blue Scarf, and an etching, Portrait Head, a process that carried on for more than a year and a half. To paint, he wears a makeshift apron made out of rags that he leaves lying around the studio, like — as David Hockney observed when he sat for Freud, “a butcher”. This receives the bulk of the paint stains, but some spot his trousers and shirt. At times, with his sharp gaze, aquiline features and brushes protruding like quills from his palette, he looks a little like a gigantic bird. He mutters to himself quite often when working: “Slightly!”, “Quite!”, “No-o, I don’t think so”, and, on one occasion while examining the side of my head, “Hmm, it really does look like that. Well, I’ll use it!” One of the first things he said at the initial sitting was: “I may sound like an absolute lunatic.”
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It was, as an experience, both marvellous and — or at least it seemed at the time — interminable. Freud is, of course, a painter now of immense renown. At 87 he has, more or less, become an old master in his lifetime (perhaps just about the last of the line). His Benefit Supervisor Sleeping holds the record, at £17 million, as the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction, and he has had several successful exhibitions over the past few years in London, New York, Venice and elsewhere. Next month another major exhibition opens at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The show is themed around the studio and features about 50 large-scale paintings that reveal the studio setting, as well as graphic works and photographs. The painter has not been exhibited in France since a retrospective in 1987 — “I am certainly pleased,” he told me last week. He long ago overcame the slight handicap of being descended from one of the most influential thinkers in Western culture — his grandfather Sigmund, of whom he was very fond — to earn international renown on his own account. In 1933, when the rising power of Nazism became threatening, his family emigrated from Germany to Britain. Since his teens Freud has pursued his own course, and by sheer talent and determination added a fresh chapter to a story that many in the art world believed was over: figurative painting from life.
Freud is, famously, a man who values his privacy. He has been interviewed on television only once in the past quarter of a century. By becoming a model, one enters into the most secluded of all areas — the one where the art is actually made. More, in a way — admittedly a humble one — you become a participant. Naturally, the artist does all the work, but the model is not a merely inert object. You are under observation — that’s the whole point of the exercise. And the more you reveal, by talking and behaving, the more material the artist has to use. That, at least, is the Lucian Freud method. This close scrutiny is a great deal more pleasurable than it might sound. The pleasure for me came from the always fascinating experience of watching the pictures grow, touch by touch, and also from the conversation that went on before, after and during the sittings.
Freud is not only an outstanding talker — witty, perceptive, with a mind unostentatiously stocked with memories and erudition — he also has the best, in fact probably the only, type of charm. That is, he is genuinely interested in the person to whom he is talking. That’s always the case, but the level of interest rises much higher when you are the subject of a picture. Then, for the duration of the sittings, you are enthralling to him: a mystery to be fathomed and transformed into paint. Of course, that intensity ends when the picture is finished, which I can imagine might be a bit of a shock for some sitters. In my case, a sense of deflation was almost exactly balanced by relief that it was finally over. After that, the picture left Britain. Bought by a private collector on the West Coast of America, it has been shown at the Correr Museum, Venice, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, though sadly the picture’s lack of a studio setting means that it won’t be in the Pompidou show. One realises after a bit that the picture isn’t a reflection of the sitter: it’s an entity in its own right, with its own fate. “You’re here to help it,” as Freud put it. There were times, late on winter evenings, when it looked a lot more vigorous than I felt.
Freud’s subjects form a sort of Dickensian — or Balzacian — panorama of society. At one end of the social spectrum he has painted the late Duke and Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and Baron Thyssen. At the other, he has portrayed a number of burglars, neighbours of his in the days when he lived in Paddington, plus an acquaintance of the 1950s whom, he recalled, “lived in dustbins”. In between there have been sundry writers, painters, wives, friends, children, grandchildren, lovers, restaurateurs, fashion models — including Moss and Jerry Hall — a jockey, several bookmakers, the now-celebrated benefit supervisor and the performance artist Leigh Bowery. What all these heterogeneous people have in common is that they interest Freud visually and as personalities. Most sitters, including celebrated ones, are reduced to anonymity in his titles (he sometimes makes an exception, especially for artist friends such as Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon). Some he pays, some not: I preferred to keep it on a basis of friendship. The other requirements are temperamental congeniality — after all, he is going to spend months if not years in the model’s company — and punctuality. Models who do not turn up at the appointed hour are among his greatest bugbears.
For the oil I would arrive at about 6pm and Freud, who might already have worked on two other pictures that day, revved himself up to work while we chatted and drank — usually tea for him, sometimes claret for me. Then we would go upstairs to the studio, a perfect Georgian room with bare boards and some walls encrusted with paint-scrapings forming an accidental abstract design. Other pictures were going on at the same time — a full-length portrait of Andrew Parker Bowles in military uniform, a couple of nudes. The sitters for these were like invisible colleagues. Freud would tell me a lot about them, and vice versa as it turned out. When I finally met Parker Bowles he began, disconcertingly, with the words, “I’ve heard a lot about you!” Once in the studio the work would begin. It is, as far as Freud is concerned, a gruelling business, which depends on his energy (which is considerable). Light and lean, he stands up to paint, or rather constantly moves about: back to examine what he has just done, or forward to add a touch of paint or peer at me, a bit like an explorer confronting a new bit of jungle. One evening, he suddenly asked me where he could get a set of scales. “When you work on your feet even an extra pound or two makes a difference.” I suggested John Lewis. Freud paints and etches very slowly, and once a picture is begun it must continue in precisely the same circumstances, in my case sitting in a chair with my head at a certain angle, about which he was extremely particular. “Could you turn your chin a little to the right?” he might say, dozens of times an evening. “No, that’s too much. Now that’s very good.” Posing is both strangely intimate and overpoweringly relaxing — a combination of a visit to the barber’s and transcendental meditation. There were moments when we got as far as my clothes — Freud tends to work outwards from a central point, in my case a spot in the middle of my forehead — and then he would apologetically rearrange the folds for me.
One realises that this slow, deliberative pace is crucial to the quality of the results. A great deal of his time is spent not painting but thinking: mixing the precise shade and tone for each stroke of the brush, considering the strategy of the next mark in advance, pondering the result afterwards. One day my upper lip appeared, in an unexpected shade. “You’ve given me a moustache,” I observed. “Yes,” he replied with satisfaction, “it’s a lovely green colour.” Eventually, when the patchwork of brushstrokes was complete, it fitted in perfectly. After half a year, I remarked that I might have changed since the beginning — my hair was probably greyer, for instance. “Oh, have we been working for six months?” he replied, mildly surprised. “It seems like five minutes.” We talked about everything from Goya and Rembrandt to what was in the day’s newspaper. Freud, who is fond of poetry, quoted from memory works by Larkin and Byron, and recited several of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales. One afternoon he gave a creditable rendition of a calypso he heard on a voyage to the Caribbean in the early 1950s: “Well it was love, love alone/Caused King Edward to leave his throne.” A subject that came up quite often was Freud’s times in Paris in the 1940s and 1950s, and we spoke again about this when I visited him last week. “When I was very young,” he recalls now, “just the mention of Paris was the most exciting thing. Everything there sounded marvellous.” It was then the undisputed world capital of art, still inhabited by great artists such as Picasso. “I spent a lot of my time in the Deux Magots [the celebrated literary and artistic café]. I had no money, so I used to wait for someone to buy me a drink. I was staying in a hotel very near there. Giacometti went there a lot after he had finished work and I would meet him.” In Jamaica, he stayed with Ian Fleming, who told him that the character of James Bond was partly based on him. “I thought that was a strange idea — but I got into fights, which was more than he did. There was a period when I used to feel it was easier to hit somebody often than to have a conversation.” (Proof of that remark recently emerged, in a previously unknown SelfPortrait with a Black Eye.) One thing that you learn from sitting is that, effectively, inside the studio you are in an eternal present. Attention is always on the painting of the moment, and on the next brushstroke. That is one of the aspects of sitting that makes it strangely therapeutic, even addictive. There is nothing required of the sitter except punctuality, and, once placed in the required pose, simply to be. Although it is true that, after a while, you begin to wonder how long it will last.
As far as Freud is concerned, a picture takes as long as it takes to finish (sometimes years). The only concern is whether it is really and truly finished, and when it is — then on to the next one. So painting — looking, thinking, making a mark — is how he has spent by far the largest proportion of the past seven decades. To him, it is scarcely work, but “what most interests and entertains me”. He has no secret, he remarked once, except concentration, “and that can’t be taught”. Freud’s work in fact now represents one of the marathon feats of concentration — on his subjects and their individuality and on the language of paint and forms — in the whole history of Western art.
Martin Gayford’s book Man in a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud will be published in September (Thames & Hudson). Lucian Freud is at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (centrepompidou.fr, 01 44 78 12 33), March 10 to July 19
