I’m sitting watching the Bella Freud interview programme ‘Fashion Neurosis’ on YouTube. It’s very interesting. Freud interviews her special guests in a ‘Freudian’ manner (Bella Freud is Sigmond Freud’s great-granddaughter). Lots of questions about fashion, family, relationships and sex. She sits to the right in a big leather armchair, while her guest is lying on a large cream coloured sofa. There is a camera directly above the guests’ head and shoulders, so a lot of the time I am looking at their face as they speak. The angle makes their faces look good. They look relaxed. Through Freud’s questions and conversation, I realise that they are very familiar with each other, and the people they know. They have lots in common. They name drop with abundance, but that’s okay, I learn things –
Helena Bonham-Carter lived with her parents until she was 30 years old; Nick Cave doesn’t like women in ankle-boots; Courtney Love comes from quite a well-off family, went to boarding school and knows a lot about fashion brands; Kate Moss has sex with heels on; Nick Knight has achieved success from failure…
Bella also tells us about her father Lucien Freud’s painting of her as a young child and later as a teenager; that she worked in the Vivienne Westwood shop, and looked after the horses for Princess Margaret on the island of Mustique. It is a real opening up of their personal lives, both sides of the conversation.
All very interesting, in fact I’ve started to binge the programme, I can’t get enough, really.
All this Freud stimulus has made me remember my brief encounter with Lucien Freud paintings. I was tasked to collect a number of small early Freud paintings for his 1988 exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery. I drove to Drummond Castle near Crieff and met Lady Jane Drummond-Willoughby, who owned the paintings. “Mind the tiger’, she said, as I entered the castle and she showed me the paintings, which were lying on their backs on a large dining table. I packed them up and drove back to the gallery. Freud came to the exhibition but just stayed in the café. I do prefer his early paintings, compared to his later big nude figures, too much paint for me.
Meanwhile, watching more of the ‘Fashion Neurosis’ programmes, I’m becoming conscious of the room they are sitting in. It looks like a spare room in Bella’s house. Behind her are framed images of her ‘Ginsberg is God’ text piece, used on her jumpers and t-shirts, and a colour photo of her with her father. The room is painted an olive-green colour. There are two large brass wall lights, an orange shaded table light, an ottoman in front of the sofa, which is piled with books, and on the wall behind the sofa is what looks like the appropriately titled Francis Bacon ‘Lying Figure’ painting.
But what drew my attention was the large grill below the Bacon painting. What’s it for, and why is the painting hanging above it? I don’t know. I can guess it could be a heater, or a vent where the fireplace has been boarded up. Is it meant to be there for us to question, quietly just lurking there, in the background. Maybe someone is listening to their conversations, through the grill.
Iain Irving 