66 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
cracked, Freud began to look much bet-
ter. In 1989, Robert Hughes devoted a
book, both brilliantly descriptive and
shallowly polemical, to Freud’s painting,
and to the insufficiently recognized
importance of his “School of London,”
which alone, Hughes maintained, had
kept in place the central artistic princi-
ple of seeing and looking and investigat-
ing and recording. This school was, like
all schools, somewhat willed into exis-
tence; its name seems to have originated
with the fine painter R. B. Kitaj, who
had used it in his 1976 exhibition, “The
Human Clay.” That phrase, in turn, de-
rives from Auden’s great poem in rhyme
royal, “Letter to Lord Byron”: “To me
Art’s subject is the human clay,/And
landscape but a background to a torso;/
All Cézanne’s apples I would give away/
For one small Goya or a Daumier.” It
was the keynote of the movement.
Freud was an odd pick for Hughes’s
faith in the centrality of skill, since it
was exactly the klutziness of his hand
and the deliberately primitive look of
his early work that had first brought
him to attention; even late in his career,
his was still an awkward hand, from in-
difference as much as from choice. The
classroom craft of life drawing was some-
thing he largely disdained. “I’ve always
felt that I long to have what I imagine
natural talent felt like,” Freud told Feaver.
If he had been a better painter, he would
have been a less interesting artist.
As the polemics dividing represen-
tational painting from abstract painting
gave way to an acceptance of plural paths,
Freud rose in critical favor; today, his
pictures sell for many millions of dol-
lars at auction. We now laud the hero-
ism of close inspection, not as exposing
an anti-ideal but as itself a kind of ide-
alism, one somehow close, in its fidelity
to detail, to the transcendence of truth.B
iographies of painters depend on
incidental pleasures—since the core
subject is present only in minimal re-
production—and the pleasures of Feaver’s
two volumes lie in his novelistic depic-
tion of the London art world in which
Freud came of age and flourished, from
the onset of the Second World War until
the end of the century. The parallel
generations of New York painters tended
to war with one another, with work the
principal preoccupation, and were, aside
from specifically art-mad writers like
Frank O’Hara, largely isolated from the
literary currents and quarrels of the day.
In London, not working, or not being
seen to work, was the principal preoc-
cupation; Freud’s early days were spent,
in Feaver’s account, in a fever dream of
racetracks and Soho clubs, with literary
and political and artistic lives mixed,
mostly in a lake of alcohol. Everyone
drinks everything. Everyone has sex with
everyone else. (Although Freud behaved
in ways that encouraged the idea that
he had gay affairs, it isn’t clear whether
he actually did.)So the School of London painters
appear in these pages, of course, with the
wise Kitaj philosophizing and Francis
Bacon fellating a stranger in a Soho club.
But pretty much everyone louche and
literary shows up, too, to act in charac-
teristic ways. Here’s Orwell, at Oscar
Wilde’s Café Royal. There’s Stephen
Spender, who becomes smitten with
Freud. Auden turns up to condemn
the painter as crooked with money. Ian
Fleming hosts him in Jamaica, shortly
after having finished “Casino Royale,”
Fleming’s wife, Ann, being a close
Freud friend. Henry Green and Graham
Greene drop by. Caroline Blackwood,
the femme fatale of the sixties literati,
shows up to marry Freud, briefly, before
eventually moving on to Robert Lowell.
The eccentric memoirist J. R. Ackerley
is here. Even his dog Queenie is here, to
drive Freud crazy as a portrait subject.
The interpenetration of these circles
seems a sign less of Freud’s worldliness
than of the kind of world that London
offers: an equable, if often bad-tempered
concord of tables, more companionable
and less ideologically divided than New
York, with right-wingers and left-wing-
ers breaking bread, and spivs and earls
sharing spaces, and people. Political and
ideological differences are less hard-
edged, sexual and erotic liaisons are more
open-ended, and judgments about peo-
ple are both more malicious (everyone’s
motives are assumed to be sordid) and
more tolerant (since everyone’s motives
are sordid, self-righteousness is a bore).
Less is expected, and less is received. For
an American reader of artists’ biogra-
phies, accustomed to following the daily
slog from the studio to the bar to the
bedroom, the peculiar density of Lon-
don intimacies is heady. It produces para-
graphs as delightfully batty as this one
in the first volume, about the artist during
the late fifties:Freud had already painted the Duke’s sis-
ters, Elizabeth Cavendish, whom he hardly
knew, and Anne Tree, with whom he was more
friendly, and who conducted investigations into
bird sperm at Mereworth in Kent; he had met
her through [the sculptor Jacob] Epstein, who
made heads of both her and her husband, Mi-
chael Tree—owner of Colefax & Fowler, the
interior decorators—whom Freud also painted
and with whom he used to enjoy staying. (He
had a snapshot of his host naked painting him-
self.) They had a chauffeur called Waters, for-
merly employed by Peter Beatty, the previous“ You’ve drifted very far from the center.”