Jane Rye

Champagne on dirty floorboards

Jane Rye on William Feaver's biography of Lucien Freud

Jane Rye on William Feaver’s biography of Lucien Freud

Lucian Freud describes his paintings as largely autobiographical, which seems to imply some sort of readiness to expose his private life to the public gaze; but he does so on his own terms and is notoriously reluctant to let anyone else poke about in it. At the end of Lawrence Gowing’s 1982 monograph the author quotes Freud as saying ‘there is another reason for not writing about my life. IT IS STILL GOING ON’. William Feaver, it appears, is his licensed Boswell: recording conversations, taking photograhs of the reluctant artist, staying on for lunch. But Freud, painting for dear life at 85 (he can still do three or four hours at a stretch we are told) is not ready to turn up his toes, and Feaver has not yet been let off the leash.

This enormous volume contains very little text — only Feaver’s essay, which is more a desultory potter among the life and works than a sustained critical survey, and transcriptions of three conversations between Freud and Feaver recorded in 1992, 1998 and 2007. Gowing also wrote that ‘not only the work but the view of it here’ were Freud’s own, and though it might not be explicit or deliberate, one has the impression that a similar control has been exerted in this book, and that Feaver’s rather loose-knit, laid-back commentary, the substance provided by Freud’s own conversation, was probably all he was allowed.

And why not? Freud is particularly articulate. John Rothenstein commented on the contrast between the painter’s easy talk — ‘the wide-ranging expression of a sophisticated and well-stocked mind’ and the ‘intense difficulty he finds in drawing and painting’, describing him as ‘an anomalous figure, a socially sought after solitary with a seemingly facile mind to whom the pursuit of his vocation is a sombre ordeal daily renewed’.

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