The painter who loves toffs may yet find that his status within the establishment is more secure than it is in the art world
Britain's variegated and vicious press are rarely unanimous about anything - least of all in hero-worship of an individual, however admired. But the past fortnight has been one such heart-warming occasion. Stand aside David Beckham and Paul McCartney. Lucian Freud, a seemingly misanthropic senior citizen who paints unflattering portraits of a chosen few in all their lumpy and lardy nakedness, has been proclaimed by the papers - again - as our "greatest living painter".
As yet another giant Freud retrospective opened at Tate Britain, the critics and columnists broke open the box of superlatives. In an orgy of praise of the GLP that could have been orchestrated by his own nephew, the PR guru Matthew Freud, we were invited to gaze anew on pictures such as Interior in Paddington, Girl with a White Dog, And the Bridegroom and Benefits Supervisor Resting, and to find them not only good, but products of the greatest British painter since . . . since . . . well, since Freud's friend Francis Bacon, at least. The chorus of consent was predictably disturbed only by the fluting counter-tenor of Brian Sewell, the art critic of the London Evening Standard, who can be relied on to rubbish every show he sees, good, bad or indifferent. In Sewell's eyes, Freud is "a minor painter, a footnote in the history of art" and "the worst important draughtsman of the later 20th century".
So who is Lucian Freud? And how, in a youth-obsessed, disposable trash culture that bounces on Tracey Emin's bed and consumes Damien Hirst's sheep, washed down with a pint of pee from Piss Christ, has this aloof and elderly recluse come to command such undisputed eminence? Freud was born in an "interesting" time and place, Berlin in 1922, bearing the name and genes of one of the modern world's presiding deities. Second son of Sigmund Freud's architect son Ernst and his wealthy wife, Lucie, Lucian passed his childhood under the lengthening shadow of Nazism - he saw the jeering, menacing Brownshirts as he was escorted to school. Hitler's advent meant an enforced exit to Britain, where, in 1938, the family was joined by the patriarch, Sigmund. There is a cine film of the old man with young Lucian and his younger brother, Clement, walking in their grandfather's Hampstead garden. By then, Lucian had blazed a trail through one progressive boarding school (Dartington Hall in Devon) and another less liberal (Bryanston), finally fetching up at a succession of art schools - Central, Dedham, Hadleigh and Goldsmiths - interspersed with a brief wartime stint in the merchant navy.
His early work owed much to surrealism, which was then fashionable, but he soon evolved his own style, a hyperrealism owing much to Old Masters such as Durer, Watteau and Rubens, but arguably more to two 20th-century Jewish artists: the German expressionist Ludwig Meidner and the Lithuanian-born French maverick Chaim Soutine. Subjects are seen through the prism of Freud's eagle eyes. There is something of the raptor in his own appearance, a look he shares with Samuel Beckett which has grown sharper as the years have honed it : half hawk and half wolf.
Although his work now sells for millions, money has not always been a Freud feature. Barbara Skelton's diaries recall her husband Cyril Connolly coming under pressure to buy an early Freud painting to rescue the struggling artist, stuck in a Paris hotel, unable to pay his bill. Commercial success and artistic maturity united in Interior in Paddington (1951), commissioned by the Arts Council for the Festival of Britain. It is an intense study in superrealism of a dwarfish young man contemplating a giant yucca plant in a bare room. In the same year, he completed his uxorious Girl with a White Dog, now his totem picture in the Tate.
The puritanical, philistine British public have always liked to think of their artists as poor, bohemian and sexy, and, in the last two respects, Freud has not disappointed them. Always a lover of women, his swordsmanship has continued into his eighth decade. Although "romantically linked" to scores of ladies, from Ann Rothermere, the Fifties society hostess, down to the 27-year-old journalist Emily Bearn (his current flame), Freud has been married only twice: to Kitty Garman - the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein - and to the late Caroline Blackwood, the Guinness heiress and writer. Freud's choice of bride shows an enduring side of his enigmatic personality: his love of toffs.
In the Fifties, he was the daring darling of a social set whose leading lights were the Connollys; Peter Watson, Freud's first patron; Lady Clarissa Eden, wife of Anthony, the prime minister; Ann Rothermere and her husband Ian Fleming; the Duff Coopers and the historian Peter Quennell. Rich, raffish and right-wing, these snobbish glitterati looked upon Freud as an uncouth roaring boy, talented and interesting. And although he naturalised in 1939, not entirely British - but still to be patted, petted and indulged. As Freud's wealth and fame increased, and these early patrons declined into drink and decrepitude, he became the one who could afford to be patronising.
Freud, somehow inevitably, ended up painting an official portrait of the Queen. That portrait, although typically unflattering, indicated that the British establishment had clutched this bad bohemian to its cold heart. That Freud accepted the commission, along with an establishment bauble in the form of the Order of Merit (for which he painted his own self-portrait) indicates that he was not unwilling to be wooed and won. He had one foot in Soho, but another in Buck House.
He moved into the more bohemian orbit of the Colony Club, the legendary Soho drinking dive run by Muriel Belcher, and her circle of artists, writers, wastrels and criminals. The leading lights were Freud's friends, rivals and subjects: Francis Bacon and John Minton; the photographers Dan Farson and John Deakin; the Bernard brothers; the writers Alan Ross and Francis Wyndham. His models were Henrietta Moraes and later, Leigh Bowery, the gay man-mountain. Once again, however, Freud was merely passing through: with the drinkers, but not of them.
Freud clearly still mourns Bacon, his friend from those days - the man, as well as the image, perhaps suspecting that Bacon's screaming canvases captured the zeitgeist of the tortured 20th century more completely than his own mannered portraits. Other friends who offended him, however, were unceremoniously dumped or frozen out, as was his brother Clement; the siblings have not spoken for decades. This ruthlessness does not apply to women. Freud's most touching and tender portraits are of his mother in her final years; he is also close to Esther, his novelist daughter, and her fashion designer sister, Bella.
What has Freud got to hide? Without getting too Freudian about it, it is clear that his early childhood in Weimar Germany produced an alert watchfulness of the world - which benefits his work - shading into a deep suspicion that has never left him. Those outside the charmed circle are held at bay. Attempts at biography have been seen off with warning letters from Freud's lawyers, and the official life has been placed in the safe hands of William Feaver, the former art critic of the Observer, curator of the current Tate show and a Freud acolyte.
Is Freud worried about his reputation? The girlfriends, the nocturnal lifestyle, the vague reports of the number of children he has fathered (figures of up to 30 have been mentioned) - surely such bourgeois considerations cannot disturb Freud. Or can they? Perhaps Francis Bacon was right when he chided his friend for being "too careful", and not only in his art.
As he turns 80, Freud is as obsessively productive as ever. We can all respect him for that as those eyes drill into the latest model on his shabby Freudian couch, peeling away the layers of flesh with a laserlike beam.
The world doesn't make men like him any more. As Sewell plaintively asks: "Who will take up the baton when he dies?" Who indeed? And what will posterity say?
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