In the early Twenties, Sigmund Freud developed the concept of the id, the ego and the super-ego. They were the main parts, he argued, of the structure of the human mind. The id, present from birth, is the instinctive life-force, seeking gratification without thought of the consequences. The ego embodies the reality principle, trying to reconcile the demands of the id with the facts of existence. The super-ego is the entity which internalises cultural rules, parental guidance, the quest for perfection. It is the psychological equivalent of the conscience.
Just before the founding father of psychoanalysis published these thoughts in their full form, his grandson, Lucian, was born, on 8 December 1922. When Lucian Freud died in 2011, he had become, in the words of Tom Wolfe, quoted on the cover of this book, “the greatest British painter of the past one hundred years”.
Reading this astonishing “portrait of the artist”, you find that Lucian Freud was almost pure id. If he wanted something, he grabbed it. He betted heavily, precisely because he did not have the money to do so. He slept with literally hundreds of women. He particularly demanded anal sex, because then, he felt, the woman had really submitted to him. However, he was not averse to conventional intercourse, as is suggested by the fact that he fathered 14 acknowledged children. He did not trouble to bring up any of them. He sometimes paid criminals to intimidate anyone he did not like, and arranged for paintings of his, sold on by their legitimate owners, to disappear. He would physically attack people, and send others anonymous death threats.
Freud eschewed morality. His only moral defence – the one always made by intensely selfish people – was that he was being “honest”. But in fact he lied when it suited him, concealing one woman from another, making false claims against people who had annoyed him, and abusing his dealers. He was, you might say, deep down bad.
Yet what makes Freud stand out from the other vile people whom one occasionally comes across in life is not just his talent, which was very great, nor his charm, which is well attested in this book, but his sense of purpose. He really did live for his art. History is littered with bohemians who sacrifice their artistic talent to drink, drugs, sex and poor time-keeping. Not Freud - his bohemian pleasures somehow served his artistic purpose, and nothing deflected him from his task. He was, for example, a martinet about punctuality, raging at his sitters if they arrived five minutes late because that might lose the best moment for the light. His only ethic was the work ethic.
Freud rejected parents, God, conscience and decency, but not the demands of art. He was as faithful to painting as truth as is any holy hermit to his life of prayer. His vocation as an artist justified his behaviour, he thought: “A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.” He lived by that creed to a terrifying degree.
In one of only two articles on art he ever published, Freud wrote: “The subject must be kept under closest observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject – he, she, or it – will eventually reveal the all without which selection itself is not possible.”
His words sound like something from a torture manual.
Torture it often was. Geordie Greig records many accounts of those who sat for Freud - how frightening and tiring they found the ordeal, how long he kept them. “I found it an excruciating experience to be scrutinised so pitilessly…It felt quite clinical, almost as though I was on a surgical bed,” said Celia Paul, herself an artist (and, incongruously, the sister-in-law of Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury). She bore Freud a son.
What was the artistic result? Some argue that Freud’s work shows a contempt for humanity (and it was humanity, plus a few animals, which was his sole subject). I would like to agree with this, because it would fit with my case about the artist’s extreme unpleasantness, but in fact I don’t. I think he was consistently searching for truth and, increasingly, as the years went on, finding it. Freud himself said of Chardin that he painted “the most beautiful ear in art”. Freud may not have been as good as Chardin – who is? - but his capacity to paint flesh and the life within it was uniquely strong, and therefore beautiful, and will last. He could even be tender in his art, as Celia Paul, despite her words above, also testified.
From a biographical point of view, Freud is both a dream and a nightmare. A dream because his attraction and repulsiveness, his ability and his transgression, his outsider’s dangerousness and his chosen aristocratic milieu, all make his story gripping. A nightmare because, in matters of love, sex, money, fame and art, people tell a great many lies and accurate records often do not exist.
Geordie Greig, by his own account, “stalked” Freud for many years. Eventually, he moved from stalking to talking. He became the artist’s friend and met him often for breakfast (hence the book’s title). From this informal method, he gained the trust to talk to many others – dealers, patrons, painters, bookies, the family and the women – who knew Freud. This free-and-easy method proves far the best way of introducing the world to a man who, though notorious, was also secretive. It is, indeed, a portrait. There will be more of these, some perhaps fuller, more scholarly, more meditated, but none more startling, gripping or vivid.