Modernists and Mavericks Read online

  Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho, London, 1963. Photo by John Deakin

  About the Author

  Martin Gayford is the art critic for the Spectator. Over the years, he has spent innumerable hours talking to artists, including many who feature in Modernists & Mavericks, and has had his portrait painted by Lucian Freud and David Hockney. His books include Man with a Blue Scarf, A Bigger Message and Rendez-vous with Art (with Philippe de Montebello) all published by Thames & Hudson. He is also the co-author with David Hockney of A History of Pictures.

  Other titles of interest published by

  Thames & Hudson include:

  Man with a Blue Scarf:

  On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

  A Bigger Message:

  Conversations with David Hockney

  Interviews with Francis Bacon:

  The Brutality of Fact

  Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting

  See our websites

  www.thamesandhudson.com

  www.thamesandhudsonusa.com

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1Young Lucian: Art in Wartime London

  2Pope Francis

  3Euston Road in Camberwell

  4Spirit in the Mass: the Borough Polytechnic

  5Girl with Roses

  6Leaping into the Void

  7Life into Art: Bacon and Freud in the 1950s

  8Two Climbers Roped Together

  9What Makes the Modern Home so Different?

  10An Arena in which to Act

  11The Situation in London, 1960

  12The Artist Thinks: Hockney and his Contemporaries

  13The Grin without the Cat: Bacon and Freud in the 1960s

  14American Connections

  15Mysterious Conventionality

  16Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices

  17Shimmering and Dissolving

  18The Non-Existence of Acton

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  On the evening of 12 November 2013 Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) went under the hammer at Christie’s New York. After a lengthy bidding war, the work sold for $142.4 million (£89.6 million). A picture painted in London well within living memory became, for a while, the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.

  This state of affairs would have been utterly unimaginable in 1969, when the picture was painted, let alone in the mid-1940s when Bacon and Freud first met. It would have stretched credulity even in 1992, the year in which Bacon died.

  Of course, a price is just a number, and this one was perhaps a little freakish: an outlier. After all, few would claim that this triptych is even the greatest of Bacon’s works. Nonetheless, that such a record could be set at all makes a point: painting done in London in the decades after the Second World War has come to seem hugely more significant – internationally – than it did, for the most part, when it was being created.

  Those twenty-five years or so, from about 1945 to around 1970, are the subject of this book. It is not written in the belief that the pictures produced within reach of the Thames were greater or more important than those made in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Delhi or Cologne. But, rather, that this was a fascinating time and place for painting and painters; and one that, despite being so close and – in some ways – familiar, is still little known.

  For me, to speak personally, it has all the attractions and mysteries of the day before yesterday. At one time or another I have met and talked to many, indeed most, of the more prominent artists discussed in the following pages. Some have become good friends. With a few, I have spent uncountable hours in conversation. I was alive for some of the years covered in the chapters to come, though my interest in the contemporary art scene only came later. So, in a way, this is my investigation into what these fascinating people did before I encountered them.

  Yet, even for participants, the past is a place that needs constantly to be recreated and re-examined. Talking about the late 1940s some sixty years later, Frank Auerbach – one of the principal witnesses who have contributed to this text – remarked: ‘I’m speaking here for a young man who no longer exists and of whom I’m a rather distant representative.’ Something of the sort is true of all of us when we reach far back in time. Conversely, part of the art-historical attraction of this subject is that, unlike Cubist Paris, say, or Renaissance Venice, there is a plethora of first-hand testimony. Some of this is from people who have scarcely spoken about it before.

  Modernists & Mavericks is, then, a collective interview, or multiple biography, that includes at least two generations and numerous individuals. In aggregate, this amounts to an archive of many thousand words, recorded over three decades. The book is drawn from interviews, often unpublished, with important witnesses and participants, including Frank Auerbach, Gillian Ayres, Georg Baselitz, Peter Blake, Frank Bowling, Patrick Caulfield, John Craxton, Dennis Creffield, Jim Dine, Anthony Eyton, Lucian Freud, Terry Frost, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, John Hoyland, Allen Jones, John Kasmin, James Kirkman, R. B. Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, John Lessore, Richard Morphet, Victor Pasmore, Bridget Riley, Ed Ruscha, Angus Stewart, Daphne Todd, Euan Uglow, John Virtue and John Wonnacott.

  This book was undertaken in the view that pictures are affected not only by social and intellectual changes, but also by individual sensibility and character. There was no historical inevitability, for example, about the advent of Francis Bacon. Indeed, his psychological and aesthetic constitution was so unusual, so strange in some respects, that it still remains difficult to comprehend. Yet without Bacon – or the equally idiosyncratic contributions of Freud, Riley or Hockney – the story that follows would surely have been quite different.

  All histories have boundaries that are, to some extent, arbitrary. Time is a continuum; almost nothing starts or finishes neatly at a particular date. Books, however, often have to do so, if only to prevent them sprawling ad infinitum. The chronological parameters of this one – from the end of the Second World War to the early 1970s – correspond to notable turning points in British history, both political and cultural.

  The first marked not only the end of hostilities, but also the advent of the Attlee government and the beginning of a long period of steadily, if slowly, increasing optimism and prosperity. The second turning point was less sharp but, nevertheless, the end of the 1960s signalled the conclusion of that era of hope and the start of a decade of crisis and decline.

  In the arts, too, these were moments at which change occurred. After 1945 there was a great opening-up. A London art world that had previously been small and provincial turned its attention to what was happening elsewhere; at the same time, a much larger and wider group – in terms of both gender and origins – began to pour into the capital’s art schools. The mid-1970s, in contrast, were an era in which painting of all kinds was out of fashion, neglected in favour of a variety of new media that included performance, installation and a radically redefined type of sculpture.

  On the other hand, no single moment in art history represents a clean break. Several of the most prominent figures in these pages began their careers in the 1930s, including William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and Bacon himself. Arguably several more, such as Freud and Gillian Ayres, produced their finest work well after the end point of the book. Some, Hockney and Auerbach among them, are energetically at work at the time of writing, still trying to outdo what they have done before.

  In addition, the scope of Modernists & Mavericks is de
fined in two other ways: by place and by medium. Of course, the focus on London is not intended to imply that nothing important happened elsewhere in the United Kingdom, in Edinburgh, Glasgow or St Ives, for example; on the contrary, it clearly did. These are excluded because they were different centres, with their own stories. Consequently, when certain painters move – as Patrick Heron and Roger Hilton did – out of town, they also exit the narrative. Other talented individuals, such as Joan Eardley and Peter Lanyon, don’t feature at all because their mature careers were spent far from London. Admittedly, I have followed certain individuals on journeys – Bacon to St Ives, Hockney to Los Angeles – my justification being that, in doing so, they remained London painters but, to use Hockney’s phrase, ‘on location’.

  My other self-imposed choice of focus means that this book is almost all about paint. The rationale is not that sculpture made in London in these years is not worthy of attention, but that it belongs to another story. And again, where the border zone becomes blurred, I have allowed myself some wriggle room – for instance, when painters such as Allen Jones and Richard Smith moved into three dimensions, or sculptors, including Anthony Caro, used the very painterly ingredients of bright colours and flat shapes.

  One reason for concentrating on the quarter-century after the end of the war is that this was an era in which the community of painters in London was still a village. Not that everybody knew everybody else well – they don’t in most real villages – but that it was a relatively small world crisscrossed by friendships and acquaintances, some quite unexpected. Nor were the divisions between generations as sharp as they might, in retrospect, appear. It is intriguing to note that in the early 1960s Bacon was meeting and talking to students and graduates of the Royal College of Art who were more than twenty-five years his junior.

  I believe the proposal made by R. B. Kitaj in 1976 that there was a ‘substantial School of London’ was essentially correct. There was indeed a critical mass of major artists then at work in the city. Kitaj’s phrase caused confusion, however, because it seemed to imply that there was a coherent movement or stylistic group when there was no such entity, and this was not, in fact, Kitaj’s thesis. He meant the term, he told me, ‘in the way one had always used “School of Paris” or “School of New York” in quite a wide-ranging, loose way’.

  ‘School of London’ has often been taken to refer only to figurative artists, but, even among those, there was great diversity: a range that encompassed both Leon Kossoff and Patrick Caulfield. However, there were also important abstract painters working in London. No stylistic label could be stretched to cover Francis Bacon and also Bridget Riley. Moreover, as Kitaj pointed out, in this period London became, like New York and Paris, a cosmopolitan centre in which ‘a lot of interesting artists work upon each other’. And many came from distant places: Kitaj himself hailed from Ohio, Frank Bowling from British Guiana and Paula Rego from Portugal.

  One of the underlying themes of Modernists & Mavericks is that the barrier between ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ – which seemed, at the time, a positive Iron Curtain – was in reality much more porous. There were individuals who crossed this line in both directions, more than once; others, such as Howard Hodgkin, whose work makes nonsense of the distinction. The truth – which lies at the core of the book – is that they were all obsessed with what Gillian Ayres has defined as ‘what can be done with painting’. They all shared a belief that with paint they could accomplish works that in other media – photography, for example – they could not. This was the common factor binding them all together: the confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvellous things.

  Chapter one

  YOUNG LUCIAN: ART IN WARTIME LONDON

  He was totally alive, like something not entirely human, a leprechaun, a changeling child, or, if there is a male opposite, a witch.

  Stephen Spender on the young Lucian Freud

  In 1942, London was partially in ruins. Robert Colquhoun, a young painter who had arrived from Scotland the year before, was astonished by what he saw. ‘The destruction in the West End is incredible,’ Colquhoun wrote, ‘whole streets flattened out into a mass of rubble and bent iron.’ He noted ‘a miniature pyramid in Hyde Park’ constructed from the wreckage of destroyed buildings. One suspects that, like other artists, he found the spectacle beautiful as well as terrible.

  Graham Sutherland, then one of the most celebrated British artists of the generation under forty, travelled into London by train from his house in Kent to depict the desolation. He would never forget his first encounter with the bombed City of London during the Blitz in the autumn of 1940: ‘The silence, the absolute dead silence, except every now and again a thin tinkle of falling glass – a noise which reminded me of the music of Debussy.’ To Sutherland’s eyes, the shattered buildings seemed like living, suffering creatures. A lift shaft, twisted yet still standing in the remains of a building, struck him as resembling ‘a wounded tiger in a painting by Delacroix’. This was a city under siege that had just escaped armed invasion. The arts, like every aspect of life, were rationed and much reduced. At the National Gallery, just one picture a month was on display.

  Yet, amid the destruction, new energies were stirring. The war isolated London from the rest of Europe and exacerbated the endemic insularity of Britain as a nation. But new ideas were germinating in the minds of artists-to-be who were currently in the services, prisoner-of-war camps, schools or digging potatoes in the fields as conscientious objectors. A few, like Colquhoun, were already at work among the bomb sites of London.

  In the same year in which Colquhoun penned his description of the ruined city, two young painters, just past their nineteenth birthdays, moved into a house on Abercorn Place in St John’s Wood in North London. It was a fine terraced building in the early nineteenth-century classical style. There were three floors, providing room for a separate studio each (the ground floor being occupied by a classical music critic who became increasingly irritated by his new neighbours). The tenants’ names were John Craxton and Lucian Freud. Neither was in the armed services: Craxton had failed the medical examination, while Freud had been invalided out of the Merchant Navy. And so, with financial support from a generous patron, Peter Watson, they were free to live la vie de bohème, Second World War-style.

  Suitably enough, given the devastation that lay around, the environment that Freud and Craxton created for themselves was full of shattered forms, sharp-edged vegetation and the smell of death. The decor at 14 Abercorn Place was, as Craxton put it, ‘very, very bizarre’. The two painters would buy job lots of old prints at the nearby Lisson Grove saleroom, where fifty or sixty items would go for ten shillings. Among these were some that had nice frames, which they would keep, breaking up the rest and making a fire with them. ‘We’d lay the glass on the floor – a new sheet of glass for a special guest – so the entrance to our maisonette, [as] they were called, had dozens of broken sheets all over the floor which went crunch, crunch under your feet – which very much annoyed the man living underneath.’ The whole effect was completed by an array of headgear hung on hooks in the hall – ‘any sort of hat we could find’ – including police helmets, while on the upper floor there was a selection of ‘huge spiky plants that Lucian had growing up all over the place’. Freud also owned a stuffed zebra head, bought from the celebrated taxidermist Rowland Ward on Piccadilly. This was intended as an urban substitute for the horses he had loved since he learned to ride them as a child on his maternal grandfather’s estate outside Berlin. Various kinds of dead animals, not mounted or preserved, were favourite subjects for both Freud and Craxton. From time to time, the nostrils of the music critic were offended by a stench of decay wafting down from upstairs.

  Lucian Freud, c. 1943. Photo by Ian Gibson Smith

  Once, an important art dealer, Oliver Brown of the Leicester Galleries, made an appointment to inspect Craxton’s work in his studio. Unfortunately, however, the painter had forgotten the arrangement and was
still asleep at his parents’ house. ‘Brown arrived wearing a bowler hat and carrying a briefcase and a rolled-up umbrella, rang the bell and, to his amazement, a naked Lucian, walking on this broken glass, opened the door.’ This apparition must doubtless have startled Mr Brown. From early on, Freud had struck people as a remarkable personality. Craxton remembered the sixteen-year-old Freud dropping in at his family home in the late 1930s:

  Lucian was very on his own, reacting against everything. He horrified my parents, because he had an enormous amount of hair – a wild, untamed appearance – he was a very odd character in those days. My mother said, ‘My God, I don’t want any of my children looking like that’.

  The photo editor Bruce Bernard – brother of the journalist Jeffrey and poet Oliver – met Freud during the war and was struck by his ‘exotic and somewhat demonic aura’ (Bernard’s mother, like Craxton’s, thought this youth might be dangerous to know). Freud’s earliest work, whether done from observation or from his imagination, had an intensity that marked it out as unmistakeably his. The critic John Russell, looking back on these years, compared the young Freud to the figure of Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912), a ‘magnetic adolescent’ who seemed ‘to symbolize creativity’. In the circles around the periodical Horizon and its backer Peter Watson, ‘everything was expected of him’. But neither his true path, nor the importance of what he was eventually to do, would have been easy to predict in 1942. Who could have guessed that, to quote Bernard again, he would eventually become ‘one of the greatest portrayers of the individual human being in European art’.

  Both the Freud and Craxton families lived in St John’s Wood, near Abercorn Place (hence Craxton’s choice to return to the family home every night to sleep). Harold Craxton, John’s father, was a professor at the Royal Academy of Music; Freud’s father, Ernst, was an architect and the youngest son of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. The Freuds had lived in Berlin, but left Germany shortly after the Nazis came to power. Consequently, Lucian had a privileged and cultured Central European upbringing until the age of ten, after which he went to a succession of progressive English boarding schools, getting expelled from all of them for wild behaviour.