Published as Lucian Freud ~ In the Silo Tower
- Author: Sandra Boselli
- Date: Winter 2013
- From: British Art Journal (Vol. 14, Issue 3)
- Republished: JSTOR
- All rights acknowledged.
Lucian Freud was known for his extreme reluctance to talk about his youth; to the extent that the painter was blamed for propagating his own ‘version of his carefully reconstructed’ distant past. (1) Indeed, art historians and critics have had to juggle with information sparingly provided by the artist; a great observer of details when painting, but secretive when related to his personal life, in particular those regarding his late teens. The famous artist wanted his work to be considered on its own merit but since he described his work as autobiographical, unrecorded details matter, providing further threads to the tapestry of his life. Each new strand contributes to a better understanding of Freud’s myth.
The Lucian Freud Drawings exhibition that took take place in 2012 at the Aquavella Gallery, New York included many wartime works on paper in Rooms One and Two. It was a phase in the would-be artist’s life when he drew relentlessly, aware that any natural talent he may have had needed honing in order to become a figurative painter. Included are portraits of long lost friends such as the poet David Gascoyne or his fellow artist and erstwhile friend, John Craxton. Not only did young Freud’s apprenticeship take place under the tutelage of painters Cedric Morris and Lett Haines but also in the company of other friends, rarely mentioned, of his own age: David Kentish, a school-friend from Bryanston and Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, also an artist and close friend throughout the war. Emblematic of their closeness is the birthday portrait of Bettina painted by 16-year-old David in July, 1940 at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing; it bears similarities with Lucian’s of his brother Stephen painted the same year, both influenced by Cedric Morris’s teachings, an artist whose portraits often verged on the side of caricature, mostly unpleasant, according to Peggy Guggenheim.
David Kentish’s picture of Bettina was on display during the Cedric Morris retrospective organised by the Tate in 1984.
The closeness between artists, benefactors, poets, art critics and publishers in the early forties is hard to fathom nowadays. It was a closeted world-within-a-world at war, Britain an isolated fortress, its population unable to escape and its artists out of touch with their counterparts elsewhere. It was an elite undisclosed to most and remained thus, few of its actors surviving the onslaught of American abstract painting and too busy recovering from the war in warmer climates; they remain, however, the heirs of a period unique in the annals of British history. Of those young artists mentioned above only Lucian Freud had the stamina, discipline and patience to remain on course whatever the hurdles. It is all the more compelling to gain further knowledge about this stage in his early life to better comprehend what were the challenges the artist had to confront and some of the circumstances that may have helped him to come to terms with forces beyond his control.
Undoubtedly, the shock of suddenly being transplanted overnight at the age of eleven from a family home in Berlin to an English boarding school, however congenial, in September 1933 must count among the significant events that disrupted Freud’s sense of predictability and order. Not only did he feel that he had been ‘dumped’2 by his parents at Dartington Hall School, but with hindsight it seems likely that learning English and adapting to British mores must have been daunting for a pre-adolescent who had never travelled abroad. Speaking virtually no English and unable to read or write it, it was a matter of sinking or swimming. It is more than likely that frustration at having been betrayed by his parents and not speaking English got him into fights with other pupils. His first boarding school soon reported that ‘Lucian doesn’t seem to have mastered the English language but is fast forgetting all his German’.3 Lucian stayed at Dartington, according to its records, until 1935 and was probably removed by his parents from there to Dane Court school followed by Bryanston, since their twelve-year-old son appeared to be unable to speak either English or German correctly. He had been spending most of his time with ‘Bob the farmer’, with whom he milked the goats and went riding whenever he felt like it, finding comfort in the horses he tended and slept with: his gratitude to these animals was expressed in many pictures throughout his career. It was unfortunate that Lucian’s father had selected this very avant-garde school, which was based on an experimental concept that considered the child as a person in his own right, and where matters of discipline were a far cry from Lucian’s school in Berlin. He did not fit in, though the arts were an integral part of the Dartington curriculum, provided by such high calibre artists as Mark Tobey, Bernard Forrester, David Leach, Willi Soukop and Hein Heckroth. Had there been interaction between the arts and its relevance to teaching English as a foreign language, probably Lucian would have been more receptive.
It is difficult to ascertain at what point the young boy realised that his first language was undesirable; that assimilation was the only way out for him ifhe wanted to move forward. Furthermore, the consequences of no longer speaking fluent German implied extra-linguistic difficulties. His parents, by leaving Lucian at boarding school for over four years, too busy re-creating what they had had to abandon in Germany, relinquished their right to influence or socialise their son. They became increasingly unable to cope with their child’s painful process of readjustment to their new environment. Progressively, the boy would have severed his relationship with his parents and their network of German-Jewish friends and relatives; by losing touch with his first culture, communication with his family and relatives was bound to be strained, their social and emotional values at odds. When he entered adolescence, Lucian refused both school and parental authority He was deeply susceptible to any form of rejection, epitomised by his linguistic mistakes being corrected or laughed at, whether in German or English, as a result of interference between the two languages. There is no doubt that his improved command of the English language, while at Bryanston, enabled him to gather round him for the first time a number of friends, including Mervyn Jones-Evans, Michael Nelson and David Kentish. His need to belong would have created a strong desire for popularity, to appear sophisticated by endorsing the figure of the artist: his school peers admired his artistic skills but none of his art teachers, whether at Dartington or Bryanston, detected a ‘prodigy’ in the making. By the time he settled in London, he was shunning his family whenever possible and became increasingly dependent on a network of English friends and acquaintances to further his artistic creation.
By the age of seventeen, his personality and pedigree had attracted established intellectuals such as Stephen Spender – probably a family friend – who became his main entry to a world of letters and art. Meanwhile, in the company of his Bryanston school friends, Freud was also enlarging his circle of similar-minded teenagers by sitting around at Coffee An’ or Café Royal. On one such occasion, sometime around October 1939, Freud and David Kentish were introduced to Bettina Shaw-Lawrence. The three adolescents became firm friends; young Freud, though, would have felt a tinge of envy when the young girl described her year-long escapade to France where she had studied art. She would have told them about her friend David Gascoyne, the surrealist poet, whom she had known since the age of 15 – and how he had kept a benevolent eye on her for her parents’ sake. The families of David Kentish and of Bettina were a far cry from his own, his mother and father breathing down his neck, wanting to be kept informed about his progress or complaining that they never received any news since attending that haven of liberty known as the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing.
His pleasure was certainly marred by his emigré parents, who obviously felt insecure, incessantly worrying about whether they could afford the school, food, lodgings, painting materials; Lucian retaliated by telling his friends that his father, an architect, had become a toothpaste salesman. Their financial recriminations gave rise to clashes with their wayward child who must have craved for more liberal parents, to be free from their overbearing interference now that he was in the process of reconstructing a new identity unhampered by his parents’ German-Jewish culture. David Kentish, on the other hand, came from a stable background, his father one of the governors of Bryanston where Freud had studied for over a year. Had the war not been declared, David would have gone abroad to study art.
The young people’s determination to become artists, as well as their need for fun and freedom, increased their intimacy. Since neither Lucian nor David had received any formal training worth mentioning, it seems likely that the young woman’s artistic experience must have impressed the two youths: she had studied under Léger and Zadkine while in Paris, these classes further supplemented by ‘croquis’ at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Within weeks, they formed a close-knit threesome, and by the spring and summer of 1940, the trio would often catch the bus from London down to Suffolk. On such occasions, they mainly lodged at the Shoulder of Mutton pub in Hadleigh whilst awaiting the refurbishing of a 16th-century house called Benton End. The original East Anglian school building in Dedham had been destroyed by fire in the summer of 1939 and the rumour, encouraged by Lucian Freud, was that he had set fire to the school accidentally. As Bettina said: ‘Who knows! Lucian could say anything’. These privileged moments spent together in East Anglia were a relief from the grimness of London, its population on edge, uncertain where the German attack would come from. To leave behind the ‘dreary’ people of London expecting the worst and the whining air-raid warnings, if only for a short interlude, was to become once more carefree teenagers. Furthermore, most of the art schools in London had closed down leaving their students bereft of teachers. It was a godsend to be taught at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing by two well-known artists willing to share their knowledge with them. In the morning they attended life-drawing and on one occasion, Lucian had to model for his fellow students. He was so embarrassed that he refused to remove his underwear, his prudish persona perfectly conveyed by Shaw-Lawrence’s pen and ink sketch (Pi 1). Though the pose and its technique were obviously inspired by Rodin’s Le Penseur, she chose to focus, with great attention to detail, on her model’s hair and hands, Lucian caught peering apprehensively between his fingers. Who would have guessed that such a shy young man would become one of the great contemporary painters of naked portraits. After lunch – prepared by Lett Haines – the students would discuss their respective drawings or oil paintings. No erasing was allowed so that mistakes could be discussed. The advice dispensed by Lett Haines was to scrutinise whatever you were drawing or painting, to bring out its essence.
Prior to moving to Hadleigh, the two teachers had rented a cottage for a year in Dedham where they had trouble coping with village landlords, up in arms over money matters in part related to a couple of unscrupulous elements among their pupils.4 Finally, they were able to move into Benton End, in the summer of 1940, with some of their students but the threesome remained at the Shoulder of Lamb pub in Hadleigh itself, within a stone’s throw of their new school. Each day they would walk up the hill, encountering on their way the local prostitute invariably wearing her high heels and atop a man’s bicycle in search of customers. In spite of this wartime haven for the three young artists, David and Lucian were apparently at loggerheads by the end of the summer. Undoubtedly, the trouble had been brewing since the winter of 1939-40 when they had spent nearly three months together in a cottage in Wales.5 In February 1940, David Kentish wrote to a friend that he was ‘terrified of being alone with Lucian for any length of time’.6 Not only had their personal relationship been destabilised by Stephen Spender’s lengthy visit in January 1940 – as a result of the exclusive rapport between the poet and Lucian – but it would appear that Lucian also had been emotionally disturbed, venting his frustrations on the younger and temperamentally vulnerable David. One can surmise that Freud’s veneer of sophistication had been fissured by his conversations with the older man, who insisted on Lucian being true to his German-Jewish roots for the sake of his painting. The inner turmoil of both boys is reflected in Lucian’s pen and ink of David huddled foetal-like in an armchair.7 His recently acquired British citizenship combined with his newly found raison d’être in art had given him self-confidence, but it was unfortunately only skin-deep. It was at the mercy of what he would have sensed as a form of rejection and it is likely that the young artist had a feeling of social uncertainty as a result of his efforts to be accepted by his English milieu at the expense of his family. Freud was in the process of reconstructing his identity so that it should be in conformity with his second culture, shifting from German to English, a painful mutation requiring difficult cognitive and emotional adjustments.
Presumably, the admiration David felt for Lucian had been seriously dented by the unhappy events in Wales, though Bettina remembers them as being close at Benton End. Competition, as the young men vied for her affection, brought matters to a head. When Bettina, attractive with a warm and forceful personality, finally became ‘romantically involved’ with David, a ‘brilliant mind but highly strung’, it did not prevent ‘cheeky Lucian’ from leaving the young woman notes under her pillow and setting up ‘secret assignations’ to meet her in the Benton End silo tower. Did the fledgling artist record their first rendezvous in his 1940 drawing In the Silo Tower? Whatever the answer, the tension within the ‘infernal trio’ became increasingly palpable and one day, towards the end of the summer, Shaw-Lawrence recounts that she found Lucian wearing the blue pullover given to her for her birthday by David. A terrible row ensued which turned into a fight between the two youths when Freud refused to hand back the garment. Their art teacher, Lett Haines, ordered Bettina and David to move out of Benton End on the spot, forcing them to leave behind all their belongings – including the picture of Bettina painted by Kentish – their drawing blocks, and all of David’s personal property. Lucian was forgiven and allowed to remain at Benton End. David’s exclusion from the school, however, did not abate Freud’s vindictiveness as he destroyed or helped himself to most of his friend’s possessions and in particular to his books in a green trunk. In his letter to David’s father, Owen Kentish, at the end of November 1943, Lett Haines blamed his son for not heeding his warnings ‘of how invariably destructive Lucian is’.8 David appears to have been the young artist’s alter-ego, unarmed and over-sensitive, who could not counter or contain his friend’s deep-rooted insecurity. It was not surprising, therefore, that Lucian, in his 1940 painting Landscape with Birds, represented himself as a prancing figure with black face and hands (surely indicating guilt), his childhood innocence drifting away in a small boat in the foreground. Like the birds in the curdled sky, Freud is rootless, free to do as he likes, for better or worse.
Devastated, David Kentish never returned to the school. However, what Cedric Morris and Lett Haines had taught David and Bettina enabled them to continue working on their own during the war in Richmond. For David, the blow of having been excluded unfairly would have been obliterated by the young woman’s presence. Unfortunately, his health deteriorated during the winter of 1941, having contracted a form of tuberculosis. And did David guess, when he returned to Richmond for his convalescence, that his girl-friend and Lucian were having a liaison? Whatever David’s feelings on the matter, it did not prevent the threesome meeting at the Cafe Royal, in Soho pubs or sometimes going to night-clubs. Alternatively, Lucian would join the couple in Richmond where they would work in Bettina’s studio on the top floor. At such times, the three friends felt like ‘a chosen people’, totally unique in their approach to art. What mattered to them was their interpretation of visual life around them. Each would come up with suggestions and solutions – for example, ink and watercolour, ‘a nice way of combining colour and line’ – David slightly aloof whilst Lucian and Bettina would discuss vehemently the mediums that would best interpret what they were observing or rendering. Lucian was extremely competitive, ‘not a bad thing in itself’ but offensive when he would say ‘You have taken one of my ideas’, to which she would retort, ‘What do you mean one of your ideas?’
One such heated exchange occurred, seemingly, in the winter of 1943-44, over Shaw-Lawrence’s pen and ink of Flowers in a Bucket, a vessel used by Freud for his Chicken in a Bucket (PI 2, PI 3). As far as Bettina was concerned, ‘Things seep in, are absorbed without meaning to be. You integrated what was happening.’ In this case, what both artists had noted were the numerous buckets placed under leaking roofs and skylights in London homes as a result of the V-bomb attacks. Beyond this war symbol, there appear to be no other similarities between the two drawings. Indeed, under Freud’s close scrutiny, his dramatic rendering of a dead bird’s feet and claws protruding out of a vessel, resemble the hands of a drowning man, any hope of escape thwarted by a coffin-like door. None of his graphic works of dead animals of that period, reflect with such violence the artist’s inner turmoil; surely, Freud would have included this early work, along with Evacuee Boy, as one of his most truth-telling pictures about his sense of alienation at that time.9 Unlike Freud’s expressionist graphic work of a chicken, Shaw-Lawrence’s is a detailed depiction of a wilting bouquet placed in an Alice in Wonderland pail, saved from undue pessimism thanks to its single luxuriant bloom against a vast skylight, perhaps a wish fulfilment for peace. Although these two painters had counted on each other to improve their draughtsmanship during the war, their pen and ink drawings confirm that their individual creativity had remained intact. Each had drawn a still-life ‘kept under closest observation’ and yet their respective sensibilities bear no resemblance.10 Even if their wartime hardships had drawn them together and both had the highest regard for their teacher, Cedric Morris, their creative inspiration was the result of two different cultures.
There is every reason to believe, therefore, that young Freud was still undergoing the long process of his metamorphosis which would enable him to reconstruct his persona in order to become an integral part of British society. It was time for him to turn the page, to seek new horizons, though it was not yet the parting of the ways between Lucian and his two long-standing chums; they had too many friends, acquaintances and venues in common. They had shared so many life-enhancing experiences that their camaraderie lasted into the 1970s, at least in the case of Bettina and Lucian. Their common passion for the visual arts never wavered whereas David Kentish turned his attention to acting and stage management. Bettina and Lucian’s drawing skills, so painstakingly acquired during the war, remained the hallmark of their respective works. Both artists remained committed to the representation of life despite the barrage of abstract expressionism. Freud’s work gradually became more painterly and muted in colour, his attention increasingly obsessed with nudes. Shaw-Lawrence’s, by contrast, retained the pleasure of the linear, her brush succumbing to the luminous colours of Italy.
Special thanks to Bettina Shaw-Lawrence who shared with me her reminiscences and to Lucian Freud and Diana Rawstron who gave me permission to publish them. Sandra.boselli@noos.fr