British Council − UK at the Venice Biennale

The National Archives hold five letters from Lucian Freud to Lilian Somerville, the British Council's then Director of Fine Arts. Written in gluey black ink and green pencil, they're on the stationary of

Hotel la Louisiane,
60, Rue de Seine, Paris – 6e.

In an upstairs room in the Spring and early Summer, the painter was finishing Hotel Bedroom (1954) just in time for the Biennale:

My new painting is approaching completion and should be ready in ten days or a fortnight. The moment it is dry enough to travel I will bring it to London.

In it, Lady Caroline Blackwood, his wife since 9th December 1953 - the day after his 31st birthday - is lying distractedly, and clothed, in the bed. One of the hands Picasso had recently scribbled on is pushed nervously against her face, and Freud the sitter, the character in a painting, is stood apart, at a right angle. Rather than looking at her, he stands with his back to a window that opens onto the Rue de Seine, shadowed against the sunlit stone. Freud the painter is sat down near his wife, paying attention to her curls and the empty washbasin across the street.

Together, the painting and the letters plot out the exact room in which he took leave of his early style. It had given him 'a lot of eye trouble, terrible headaches because of the strain of painting so close', and from now on, he stood to paint, in less delicate strokes, of much coarser brushes.

As his mother-in-law had feared, bills were beginning to be a problem for the young couple, but there was a Biennale on the horizon, and, that winter, Cyril Connolly had bought a small portrait of Caroline – Girl Reading (1952). This was partly to help the couple out, though he also rather liked the sitter; Freud later felt it necessary to chase the chubby publisher down in Soho and kick his shins in. The green-pencilled letter tells Somerville

I am anxious that 'girls head' belonging to Cyrel Connoly of Oak Cottage Elmstead, nr. Ashford should be included. You told me the comittee had rejected this picture on seeing a bad photograph of it. Conolly's Phone number is Elmstead 272 and he is prepared to lend it. so please do show them the painting!  [All sic.]

As it happened the painting wasn't seen in public for another 20 years. Exhibition-organising was a fairly imprecise art in the 1950s, conducted with vague black-and-white photographs and dating and sizing information on scrappy green slips, but Freud also faced the more universal problem of not being seen the way he saw himself. 'Why did they chose me if they reject so much that is representative of my work?', he asked Somerville. It was a particularly organisationally-fractious year for the Fine Arts Administrative Committee, and the debate on which of his paintings would hang seems to have been rather overtaken by which rooms his older co-exhibitors, Ben Nicholson and Francis Bacon, would occupy.

Nevertheless, he kept working with the Council, and in 2002, curated the organisation's Constable: Le Choix du Lucian Freud, the biggest European exhibition of Constable's work since the posthumous Biennale in 1950. Impressed by Study of the trunk of an elm tree (c.1821), he painted Naked Portrait Standing (1999-2000), folding his model's arms behind her back like the branches, and hiding her legs, like underground roots, by cropping the canvas. It was Constable's reaction to detail that brought out, rather than admiration, what William Feaver called a 'fellow-feeling' in Freud:

I think if you are going to paint, you've got to use any art you see as being there entirely for you, to help you. If you 'admire' it in that sense, I think maybe you're gone, I don't know.

In this spirit, he once described Titian's Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, painted for Philip II of Spain between 1556 and 9, as 'simply the most beautiful pictures in the world. Once you've seen them, you want to see them again and again.'

He liked the content, telling Martin Gayford late in 2001, 'the more you look at them, the more dogs you seem to find', and, earlier that year, he'd had his own experience of court painting, finishing a portrait of Elizabeth II. As with Constable, however, a 'fellow-feeling' about the experience of sight was more important.

In the first painting, Titian shows Actaeon, a huntsman from Ovid's Metamorphoses, stumbling across the naked goddess and her nymphs whilst out in the woods. Holding back a curtain, he involves us in his accidental voyeurism, and Titian can paint the moment the way Constable did his morning with a Hampstead tree, or Freud did his open-windowed bedroom.

It's still completely unrepeatable, as Ovid's story hammers home: Diana challenges him to run off and tell his friends what he's seen, but catching his reflection in a stream as he flees, he realises she's turned him into a stag. As he'd expect, having trained them, he's quickly savaged by his own hunting dogs; some breed of hound, but not, according to Titian's Death of Actaeon (1559-75), whippets.

Seeing a goddess naked, then, is aesthetically pleasing, but turns out to be an uncomfortable amount of reality; not unlike a Freud painting. Robert Hughes called him 'the greatest living realist painter' in 1998, pointing out, Peter Conrad reckoned, the bloody-mindedness of insisting, in the Twentieth Century, on painting reality figuratively:

the experience of modernity abstracted people from society and from themselves; for painters, abstraction became the only true way of rendering the state of things.

Freud would have no problem with abstractionists like Victor Pasmore insisting on enjoying paintings without context, telling Feaver

when you find something very moving, the desire to find out more lessens rather. Rather like when in love with someone, you don't want to meet the parents.

He's not a man who's had trouble enjoying the here-and-now. But, in the Biennale press drive, Freud had told Encounter he thought abstract artists like one of his Pavilion-mates, were 'depriving themselves of the possibility of provoking more than an aesthetic emotion.' This was also the opinion of his friend Bacon, whose 1952 Freud portrait hung in the Pavilion that year, as did his own paintings; Conrad's idea of what makes things 'real' for Freud – a 'tendency to decay' – probably also applies to him.

Decay is an organic thing that grows, and a sense of it haunts the British Council's Girl with Roses (1947-8). Hanging in the same Pavilion as Hotel Bedroom, it showed his previous wife, Kitty Garman, birthmarked above the right knuckle, as we can see, and recently pregnant, as we can't. Over her shoulder in the later painting, he notices the wicker unravel on the chair – a predecessor of the battered, stuffing-spitting furniture in the West London studio of his later career – and let in an abiding whiff of greenish rot.

In Girl with White Dog (1951/2) , this is blended with what would become the more typically Freudian base note of medically-naked flesh and dog; this time a single bare Garman breast and a bull terrier, rather than the later full nudity and whippets.

In this case, Freud had met the parents: Kitty was the daughter of Sir Jacob Epstein, a sculptor who'd made a bronze bust of his son-in-law in 1949, and branded him a 'spiv' after the divorce. So, in an appropriately flesh-and-bloody way, the painting marks the handover between the greatest portraitists of the first and second halves of the Twentieth Century.

Elsewhere in 1949, at a society party at which featured Bacon booing Princess Margaret at a drunken piano sing-song, Freud met Caroline. The same social circuit got the couple invited to Ian Fleming's Barbadian holiday home, where he painted Bananas (1953).

The exotic location didn't exempt them from the eye he'd trained on the greyly-British Paddington Interior (1951). Here, Harry Diamond – then a stage-hand, who had to be told off for repeatedly checking his watch – looks as smog-damaged as the ornamental palm, and both look every bit as uncomfortably marooned and limbo-ed as Kitty's roses. Lawrence Gowing called this rotting refugee from the tropics 'one of the most memorable potted plants in the history of modern art', but it's hard to imagine it made it to 1952. Later, Freud would paint the infinitely complex Two Plants (1977-80), 'lots of little portraits of leaves' which he wanted 'to have a real biological feeling of things growing and fading and leaves coming up and others dying.'

Long after she and Freud had grown apart, Caroline wrote

it is interesting to remember that the many portraits he painted in the forties and fifties, in what is now considered his most romantic and gentle style, at the time were seen by many as shocking and violent and cruel.

'Lucian's painting changed violently after I left him', she added. The cut-off point before a more mobile handling of thicker paint, Hotel Bedroom recorded a uniquely odd moment in time to hang in the Pavilion, but with a more life-long sensibility. As Robert Lowell said of poems, though, the painting is an event in itself, rather than simply 'a record of an event'. It sets it in months' worth of fascinated detail, always out of what he called a 'hope that the picture might spring to life', which, all the time, every brushstroke bricks up in the past.

The year of the painting, and of the Biennale, Freud wrote that, for painters like him,

it is this great insufficiency that drives him on […] the process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming.

Tom Overton, 2009.

Sources
Lucian Freud, 'Some Thoughts on Painting', Encounter, July 1954.

Bruce Bernard & Derek Birdsall, eds, Lucian Freud (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996).

Bruce Bernard, David Dawson & Sebastian Smee, Freud at Work (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).

John Constable, Discourses, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970).

William Feaver, Lucian Freud (NY: Rizzoli, 2007).

William Feaver, Lucian Freud on John Constable (London: British Council, 2003).

Martin Gayford, 'Artists on Art: Freud on Titian', The Telegraph, 21st December 2001.

Lawrence Gowing, Lucian Freud (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982).