Lucian Freud: The Life

Next month, Tate Britain launches a major retrospective of the work of our greatest painter. But who is Lucian Freud exactly? Here, John Walsh profiles the most enigmatic of artists

Sigmund Freud showed the world how the earliest experiences of childhood profoundly affect the sensibility of the adult you become. Psychotherapists would surely have a field day with Sigmund's grandson Lucian, looking for childhood clues to the combative, flesh-obsessed, appetite-sickened painter he became. Had there been a significant moment when the child was frightened by some gross adult behaviour? Why yes, there was one thing he witnessed, something so gross, intimate and frightening it would (surely) have traumatised the most steely disposition. It was when his grandfather used to remove his false teeth and snap-snap-snap them at him.

Sigmund used to come to Berlin from his consulting-rooms in Vienna to be treated by a specialist for his jaw cancer. Heaven only knows if it scarred Lucian for life, having his elderly, white-bearded, distinguished grandpa, the master cartographer of our unconscious terrors, gnashing those fangs at his face. But you cannot help wondering what it was that spurred his lifelong battle with the flesh and the spirit, his unflinching gaze at pallid nakedness, his love of vastness and dereliction.

It is hard to know whether horror or fascination is uppermost in his studies of the "poor, bare, forked" human body. He has always striven for cold objectivity. "I'm only interested in my sitters as animals," he once said. "I want to use, record and observe particular things about a specific person. I would wish my portraits to be of people, not like them. Not having the look of the sitter, being them. As far as I am concerned, the paint is the person."

As many of his sitters have found, having Lucian Freud recreate you in paint is not an unrelieved joy. Jerry Hall's portrait turned her into an amorphous lump of pregnant fleshy blubber. The Queen's portrait, unveiled last December, provoked a tirade of abuse for its unflattering delineation of a blue-chinned nightclub bouncer in a fright wig and a filthy temper. Baron Heini von Thyssen, the art collector, was portrayed with fingers splayed like the claws of some prehensile lizard. Freud's own honeymoon in 1954 was commemorated in Hotel Bedroom, in which the beautiful Caroline Blackwood is pictured lying in bed, jaundiced and woebegone, while her new husband, the artist, glowers, his hands suggestively jammed in his trouser pockets. "Mustn't be indulgent to the subject-matter," he said once. "That is a recipe for bad art." There's very little danger, one feels, of excessive indulgence ever creeping into his depictions.

He was born in December 1922 in Berlin, where his father, Ernst, the youngest son of Sigmund, had an architectural practice. His mother, Lucie Brasch, was the daughter of a grain merchant. The family was comfortably off, employing a cook, a maid and a nanny for the three boys, Lucian, Stephen, and the future gourmet and MP, Clement. They lived near the Tiergarten, where Lucian used to skate on the ice. And when Sigmund came visiting, according to William Feaver (Freud's biographer, friend and confidant), he gave Lucian books such as the Arabian Nights, illustrated with Dulac watercolours and Brueghel prints.

There was an alarming early disruption to haunt his imagination. When Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, the Freud family (Jewish but non-practising) swiftly relocated to England. Lucian, now 10, was sent to Dartington Hall, the liberal arts establishment in Devon, where he rode horses, milked goats and performed The Ancient Mariner. Invited to leave, he went to Bryanston School, where he explored a love for cartoons and discovered Seurat and Van Gogh; but he was expelled after dropping his trousers in public in Bournemouth for a bet. He got into the Central School of Art, which he quit after a term for the more relaxed East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, recommended by a girl in a coffee bar. It was run by Cedric Morris, a portraitist of frank, sometimes subversive intent, who taught Freud the crucial lesson that a portrait could be "revealing in a way that was almost improper".

Anxious to leave England in 1941, Freud signed on as an Ordinary Seaman on an Atlantic convoy bound for Nova Scotia; he was sent back, the ships were attacked by submarines, and Freud was shocked to discover how hopeless and inadequate he felt while bits of bodies flew through the air. Completing his unsentimental education was the cinema newsreel footage of the Nazi extermination camps he saw in 1945, and never forgot. Three of Lucian's great-aunts were arrested by the Nazis and executed in Auschwitz, and he was haunted all his life by an unclassifiable dread.

Invalided out of the Navy, he stayed in St John's Wood by day, studied at Goldsmiths College, and hung out at night, in blacked-out Soho, with the "Fitzrovia" crowd of writers and artists. In 1943, he moved to Paddington, and lived in the vicinity for 30 years. At his first one-man show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, he was praised by the eminent John Piper for having "a cultivated feeling for line, when he can be bothered with it, and a natural feeling for colour". He had fallen in love with Lorna Wishart, his first proper girlfriend, who made him a gift of the stuffed zebra's head that featured in his key work, The Painter's Room.

She dumped him a year later – but a life of intense relationships with women, as both lovers and muses, was under way. He married Kitty Garman in 1948, daughter of the sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and had two children with her, Annie and Annabel. When the marriage failed, Epstein dismissed him as "a spiv". Caroline Blackwood, a favourite model, later to become an accomplished writer of black social comedy, became his second wife; as we know from Hotel Bedroom, it was doomed quite early on. He had five children with Suzy Boyt, including the novelists Rose Boyt and Susie Boyt; and a further two with Bernardine Coverley: they were Esther, author of Hideous Kinky, and Bella, the fashion designer.

Married twice, with nine children and umpteen mistresses, he shocked the British press last year by taking up with a new girlfriend at the age of 79. She was Emily Bearn, a waif of 27 (though some tabloid papers claimed that she was 17), who was seduced while sitting for a portrait in his studio. Recent reports suggest that he grew tired of his new girlfriend and moved out of the house that they shared.

Freud met Picasso and Giacometti in Paris after the war, but the most important arty relationship of his life was with Francis Bacon. They met in 1944. Freud was startled by Bacon's louche lifestyle and genially careless approach to his art. Fired by his friend's example, Freud took to painting in a less constricted fashion – literally: he started to paint standing up rather than sitting down. Indeed, a self-portrait from 1993 shows him standing, with palette and scraper, stark-naked. His only portrait of Bacon, painted in 1952 and acquired by the Tate, was described by William Feaver as "the most important small portrait of the 20th century". Sadly, it was stolen in 1988 from a British Council exhibition in Berlin, and Freud went to the lengths of asking the thief to return it – 2,5000 copies of a "wanted" poster featuring his plea – "Would the person who holds the painting kindly consider allowing me to show it in my exhibition next June?" – were plastered over the city.

Freud's interest in painting figures waned in the early 1970s, and he began obsessively to paint the scene outside his back window – thistles, buttercups, urban detritus. When his father died, he produced Wasteground With Houses, Paddington, and began a 15-year sequence of studies of his declining mother. Later, he turned to spectacularly amplitudinous naked sitters – Leigh Bowery, the gay performer, and Sue Tilley, the gargantuan flesh mountain in Benefits Supervisor Resting, for example.

Freud is known these days as "The Hermit of Holland Park", though he has a second studio in Kensington. He never gives interviews, and emerges only very occasionally to appear in the corner of parties or restaurants. His voice is still soft, guttural, recognisably old-German. He has been a seasoned gambler over the years, sometimes accepting commissions to pay off debts. But he is not a man who takes commissions with enthusiasm. When Prince Charles let it be known, in 1994, that he was keen to own a Freud portrait – and offered one of his own pleasant watercolours as a swap – he was turned down flat. Freud also rejected commissions to paint the Pope and Diana, Princess of Wales. He still paints all the time with a ceaseless flow of energy and ideas that startles his admirers. "I don't know how much time I have left," he says, "and I'm full of aches and pains. So I want to paint as much as possible. I'd like, ideally, to die in the studio, brush in hand."

His life has been 80 years of gazing – with horror, with compassion, with chilly artistic detachment. A friend of mine who watched him lunching in Soho recently described how Freud's elongated foxy face looked as though it was "stretched out by scrutiny", his features physically changed, drawn out by the effort of looking, the whole map of his face attenuated by a lifetime of straining to see what's really there.