I didn't know who Geordie Greig was until opening this book while the radio mentioned his name in relation to the recent regrettable conduct of the Mail regarding Ralph Milliband. I don't know what part Mr. Greig played in that but one doesn't imagine he was on the side of the angels. However, it doesn't have much bearing on his authorship of this book because at the level of the life and art of Lucian Freud we are beyond morality and into an amoral, purely aesthetic range of values.
Greig was one of a select coterie invited to take breakfast with Lucian Freud regularly over many years and this is a memoir of those times. It becomes a biography of sorts of a painter whose life isn't done any justice by words like 'extraordinary'.
It might not have been so, though, as an intervention from the highest parts of government made his family's escape from Germany possible with only two weeks to spare in 1939.
After that, any number of stories that would stand on their own as remarkable join in concert to form a life story that makes for a gripping read with Lucian at the centre of it, apparently charismatic, more than incorrigible, cruel and relentless in his appetites. Officially recognized as the father of 14 children, two of them by a wife, other estimates reach up to 40. But, even though his affairs and encounters, nearly all of which were heterosexual, were countless and with the choicest of upper class women,
he did say that one man he would like to go to bed with was Lester Piggott!
He might have been a jockey himself at one time and slept with horses at school but his gambling habit was of similar proportions to his prolific sex life and devotion to painting. He's right when he says the attraction of gambling diminishes when one is so rich it doesn't matter if one loses but it wasn't always thus. On making an agreement with yet another art dealer, part of it involves the dealer settling a debt with a bookmaker. The dealer goes off to meet The Big Man for lunch thinking that the debt might be as much as a hundred grand but finds that it is 2.7 million.
Freud's paintings are obviously unblinkingly challenging, the product of obsessive dedication and a particular, unromantic view of the world but they aren't the sort of thing that everyone would want on their wall to look at. He seems the same in life, attracting unquestioning loyalty and love from friends, lovers and admirers but with a charm that is hard to appreciate seen through these stories alone. His treatment of girlfriends, asssociates and his children can be gracious but can equally be cold and worse than that. Random acts of violence were not uncommon. He didn't speak to his brother, Clement, for forty years. Which nonetheless makes for a book that one can't wait to get back to, that continues to provide astonishing anecdotes, possibly some insight but, most of all, ends all to soon.
