The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922-1968 by William Feaver, published as a hardback by
Bloomsbury, on 5th September 2019, Priced at £35

4 ½/5 stars

Although Lucian Freud painted painstakingly slowly, taking months, or even years to finish a
painting, he lived fast, impulsively and recklessly.
William Feaver’s gripping biography of Lucian has taken him decades to write and mainly
based on a series of interviews and telephone calls in the 1990s. Lucian (who died in 2011,
aged 88) was ferociously private and didn’t want a biography published in his lifetime
preferring to be elusive and mysterious. During the years, I worked for Lucian in the late
1980s and early 1990s buying his paints, champagne and oysters, he mentioned that he
would not mind a “novel” of his life “appearing once he was dead”. He would not have been
disappointed with Feaver’s meticulously researched book, which is more colourful than
most fiction.
The first of two volumes Youth begins with a high-spirited, wilful boy in Berlin and ends with
a womanizing painter nearing his fifties, passionate about his portraiture, in an era when
figurative art had fallen out of fashion.
Lucian was born in Berlin, in 1922, where his father, Ernst, was a modernist architect and
son of the great Sigmund Freud. He was the middle of three brothers – Stephen older,
Clement younger. Both his parents were Jewish and he was named after his mother, Lucie,
who adored him. Always highly secretive, Lucian had felt stifled and emotionally shut her
out when he was young. He got on better with his easy-going father.
This book covers the family’s move to England in 1933, to escape the Nazis, his teenage
discovery of the pubs and cafes in Soho, high life with Princess Margaret and dancing the
night away with debutantes, to Paddington low life, with bookies and burglars, a
rollercoaster marriage to Kitty, daughter of the sculptor, Jacob Epstein and four broods of
children. He was definitely not offering monogamy and despised middle-class security. In his
20s he briefly dated Greta Garbo, she in her 40s. “There was a predictable and enjoyable stir
when he accompanied her to clubs where the male clientele were apt to dress up as her (or,
failing that, as Marlene Dietrich) and there was he, nervily escorting the real thing,” writes
Feaver.

As I personally discovered, Lucian was charismatic, charming and controlling and
magnetically drew people to him, rather like a spider in a web. He drove recklessly and
gambled dizzily. There was never a dull moment in his company.
As a schoolboy at Bryanston School, Lucian who was dyslexic and “rarely went to class”,
instead preferring to ride horses and draw. “He was the wayward spirit, impulsively
outrageous, yet shy and elusive,” writes Feaver. Throughout his life, his handwriting
remained a childish scrawl, contrasting the sophistication of his art. In 1939, Lucian enrolled
at the East Anglian art school run by Cedric Morris in Essex until he accidentally burnt it down

“by dropping a lit cigarette onto paint rags.” Hungry for adventure, he then enlisted in
the merchant navy, where he sailed to New York on the SS Baltrover and learned to tattoo.
Although he was unquestionably tricky and fell out with many people, including Epstein who
referred to his son-in-law as “the spiv”, Lucian maintained a lifelong friendship with fellow
refugee, Frank Auerbach, his closest painter friend and they had breakfast together every
few weeks for almost half a century. As teenagers they had both frequented the louche
cafes watering holes of Soho – the Café Royale and the Coffee An’, “a hell-hole buzzing with
gossip.”
I enjoyed this stylishly written book, which is full of intriguing little nuggets of information
that will surprise those familiar with Lucian’s complex story. It is not for the faint-hearted.
Highly recommended for art lovers. Block out your diary.

04.11.19