Revealed: young Freud's clash with art establishment

The spidery, ink-stained scrawl, littered with cross-outs and spelling mistakes, could be that of a primary school pupil. Few would guess it was the handwriting of Britain's greatest living painter as he expressed his dismay at the art establishment's rejection of his work.

Letters written by Lucian Freud, obtained by The Independent under the Freedom of Information Act, detail his bitter dispute with some of the most powerful figures in the art world after he was asked to represent Britain at the 1954 Venice Biennale, the world's leading contemporary art exhibition. The publicity-shy portrait painter locked horns with gallery officials after a selection committee rebuffed his suggestions of works to show in Italy.

Declaring himself "depressed" by their decision, Freud refused to tell them when he might complete another work for the exhibition and complained that organisers had got the titles of some of paintings wrong. Freud, who was chosen alongside his friend Francis Bacon, was 32 at the time and relatively unknown.

One reviewer of his portraits described him as "the Ingres of existentialism". But documents released at the National Archives in Kew, west London, show that his transformation from a little-known maverick – described in the Biennale catalogue as "coolly eccentric, ruthlessly observing" – to one of post-war Britain's up-and-coming stars was not smooth.

Several paintings that Freud suggested for the show were snubbed by the selection committee, which included the heads of the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery and the Arts Council.

The disgusted artist wrote a series of letters – including one in green crayon – to the British Council official overseeing the process, complaining at the "purge" of his preferred list.

One said: "I realise of course that it is quite within their rights to reject my work when it fails to please them but why did they chose [sic] me at all if they then reject so much that is representative of my work? It is hard to make further suggestions when they reject paintings I know to be less bad than those I have not suggested."

The letters offer an unusual insight into the thinking of Freud, who came to Britain in 1933 as a child refugee with his German Jewish parents and is regarded as one of the world's eminent portraitists. Earlier this year, one of his paintings, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold for $33m (£17m), a price which set a new world record for a work by a living artist.

In his slightly juvenile handwriting, Freud was consistently vague about the completion date for a painting which he had undertaken to complete for the Biennale. He would only promise to bring the work to London "the moment it is dry enough", and made a point of giving his full birth date for a biography to accompany the show catalogue.

He finishes one letter to the British Council with the enigmatic sign-off: "Love (and to the man in the green tie) from Lucian." The artist also noted that the titles and dates for some of his works had been listed incorrectly by the council.

The selection committee, which was chaired by Sir Philip Hendy, a famous curator who was at the time the director of the National Gallery, eventually decided on 18 Freud paintings for the Biennale. They were loaned by private collectors, including the artist's father, and public galleries ranging from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Preston Art Gallery.

Among the paintings shown were Girl with White Dog and Girl with Roses, which are now considered among Freud's finest early works, and a still-life of bananas painted at Ian Fleming's Goldeneye estate in Jamaica when the James Bond author was writing Casino Royale.

Although the painter broadly received positive reviews of his exhibition, the adulation was far from universal at the time. The respected art journal, The Burlington Magazine, described Freud's works as "affected rather than truthful".

Profile: From refugee to legend

*Born in Berlin in 1922, Freud was the son of an architect and the grandson of the founding father of psychology, Sigmund Freud. His Jewish family fled the rise of Nazism in Germany, coming to Britain in 1933. The young Lucian attended the progressive Dartington Hall school in Totnes, Devon. After attending art schools in London and the Essex village of Dedham, he served briefly as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941, before being invalided out of the service. His early paintings were affected by surrealism, offering strange juxtapositions of people and objects but by the 1950s, Freud moved into the genre with which he has achieved huge fame and significant fortune. Many of the subjects for his starkly realist portraits have been people in his life – friends, family, lovers and fellow painters, including Francis Bacon, above.