Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon: Fraught friendship and art

JAIPUR: Of all reasons to turn down an invitation to a wedding, this must take the cake – artist Lucien Freud, once invited to a wedding, was forced to decline because he had slept not just with the bride, but also the groom and the mother-in-law! This was one juicy nugget that emerged during a discussion at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Sunday on the book ‘Art of Rivalry’ by Pulitzer-winning art critic Sebastian Smee.
Smee’s book is about the relationship between four pairs of artists. On Sunday, he chose to dwell on the fraught ties between Lucien Freud, grandson of the famous psychoanalyst, and Irish-born painter Francis Bacon.
Bacon was older than Freud by a decade or so. It was clear that the older artist was held somewhat in awe by Freud. Through a series of carefully chosen slides, Smee commented on how the artistic styles of Bacon and Freud were so different – yet their lives were woven together through strange bonds of deep friendship that later soured.
Smee said Freud, who died in 2011, had admitted to him that he had once got so riled by a violent lover of Bacon’s, who had thrown him out of the window and left him with an eye that almost dangled out of his face. Angry at the violence, Freud had held the lover by the collar – but he later realized that even the violence was some form of sexual expression that he did not quite understand. The relationship between the two artists was marred irrevocably by this “intrusion”.
At the end of the session, some members of the audience wanted to know if it was indeed helpful to assess an artist on the basis of his life. Smee said in response that it was not as if, standing in front of a work of art, one can infer anything about the artist’s life. Even so, he said, contemplating the life afterwards, one might glean some important insights. He spoke with great appreciation for Matisse, who he said was doing such amazing things with colour at a time when he was also troubled in his personal life.
Rajalaxmi Kamat, who was at JLF from Bangalore, said, “This is one session that I will remember for long. This is what I shall take away with me from this festival.”