an unconventional trajectory, there was
recognizable authority to what he painted
early on. Choosing painting was, one
senses, an affirmation of the body over
the brain, a way of rejecting his father’s
and his grandfather’s more intellectual
manners. He quickly evolved a faux-naïf
style, with sharp outlines, flat surfaces,
and a folk-art treatment of figure and
face, all of a kind that might remind an
American viewer of Ben Shahn, though
this is Ben Shahn with a switchblade in
his back pocket. Freud’s “Man with a
Feather (Self-Portrait),” from 1943, is still
the most presciently punk picture of the
time, with Freud showing himself in
string tie and black suit, looking, eerily,
like the rock musicians who would blos-
som decades later—a proto-Pete Towns-
hend. Just as Bacon was at his best in his
enigmatic pictures from the fifties, be-
fore he became the self-consciously
Grand Guignol painter of screaming
Popes, Freud staked a claim to greatness
in the pictures he painted in the decade
after the war. Certainly, his wartime por-
traits of Londoners at night—newsstand
agents turned into Minotaurs and Soho
spivs into saints—possessed a black-com-
edy flair. His renderings of his girlfriends
(first Lorna Wishart and then her niece
Kitty, whom he married) were all big
eyes and slashed mouths and bright col-
ors. They belong to a noir sensibility
sweeping through the world at the time:
the same spirit that lit up—or, rather,
celebrated in shadows—Carol Reed’s
“The Third Man.”
A case can be made that Freud’s very
best work is that of the fifties, when his
hard-edged images of poignant futility
hadn’t yet been overwhelmed by his ap-
petite for expressing the same emotion
exclusively in human fat. Indeed, one
could argue that the real annus mirabilis
of British painting came in 1954. It’s the
year when Bacon painted “Two Figures
in the Grass” and “Figure with Meat,”
compressed pieces of enigmatic Larkinian
melancholy, not yet inflated by his later
grandiosity. And it’s the year when Freud
painted “Hotel Bedroom,” a sad, simple
scene of a man gazing at a (fully clothed)
woman on a Paris hotel bed, as tense and
suggestive as a Pinter play, and still hard
to top in his work for emotional power.
As an intimate of Freud’s, Feaver is
able to reproduce many conversations
and monologues, which explain a lot of
Freud’s weird magnetism—and some-
how resemble his art. That’s often the
way with artists: to meet Wayne Thie-
baud is to witness sweetness of temper-
ament married with iron certainty and
organized rigor, like a Thiebaud paint-
ing; to meet Ed Ruscha is to hear la-
conic expression matched to an obvi-
ously heightened ambiguity of meaning,
like a Ruscha print. Artists speak their
styles, to those with ears to hear.
Feaver hears Freud. The painter is
not exactly witty, and his apothegms are
rarely memorable, but they have a qual-
ity of unemotional evaluation, almost
clinical in its detachment, that recalls
his grandfather’s treatments, albeit with
the subjects naked in a London studio
instead of clothed on a Viennese couch.
Freud’s gaze is perfectly reproduced in
his conversations: not cruel, but never
flattering. They show exactly who Freud
was and what he felt. He’s often at his
best on small things. On the experience
of filmgoing: “That thing of coming out:
all the people on the pavements having
proper lives and you’re all full of what’s
been on the screen.” Or the superiority
of bathing to sleeping: “A bath makes apunctuation for me often stronger than
a night, or what remains of one, and
often it has a stronger moralising effect—
by which I mean a strengthening of my
moral fibre—than sleeping might have.”
Or on the interconnection of touch and
sight: “You only learn to see by touch,
to relate sight to the physical world. I
look and look at the model all the time
to find something new, to see something
new which will help me.”
Freud’s sex life is too central to his ex-
istence and art for a biographer to ignore.
Placed on a kind of proto-penicillin as a
young man by a wary family doctor, as a
prophylactic against the syphilis threat-
ened by his constant adventuring, Freud
went on to father, by legend, as many as
forty children. To his contemporaries, his
defection from the obligations of father-
hood seemed just one of those things.
“Sometimes, instead of counting sheep,
I count Lucian’s children,” one ex-lover
says. In the new volume, one of his other
lover-models quotes him: “Women were
always taking children off him, he’d say,
‘Nothing to do with me they’re having
children.’ ”And though she adds that this
was “an outrageous thing to say,” she still
had a child with Freud, who paid it
scarcely any attention. Freud’s fascina-
tion for women is tellingly detailed in
Celia Paul’s recent memoir, “Self-Por-
trait.” Paul, a first-rate painter herself who
began an affair with him while she was
his student, documents Freud’s mixture
of cold indifference and sudden bursts of
apparent affection. (“Lucian arrives with
a huge bunch of yellow narcissi. I am
trembling so much because of the unex-
pected gift that I can hardly lead the way
up the stairs.”) Several of his neglected
daughters, perhaps desperate for their
father’s attention, became his models,