Biography paints artist Lucian Freud as a boorish brute

Breakfast With Lucian
by Geordie Greig
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2.5 stars

Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon were rivals as well as friends. That scratching sound you hear is Freud clawing at his coffin at last month's news that Bacon's 1969 portrait of him, a triptych titled Three Studies of Lucian Freud, went for US$142.4 million, making it the most expensive work ever sold at auction.

The painting it displaced (sold for US$119.9 million in 2012) is Edvard Munch's The Scream. Which is perfect, because that's the face Freud would have made. He'd have preferred it the other way around, that his 1951 portrait of Bacon smash the record. That's some painting, as well. Robert Hughes compared Bacon's face in it to "a hand grenade on the point of detonation".

Too bad the painting was stolen from a Berlin gallery in 1988 and hasn't been seen since, except on "wanted" posters.

I don't mean to make Freud sound insecure and vile. Geordie Greig does a handy enough job of that in his new book, Breakfast With Lucian: The Astounding Life and Outrageous Times of Britain's Great Modern Painter, a volume of prying and sabotage dressed up to resemble a book of love.

Freud, whose sexually loaded and densely impastoed portraits made him probably the most important British artist of the second half of the 20th century, died in 2011 at 88. He was intensely private. He granted few interviews and fended off at least one potential biographer, Greig reports, with the help of hired goons.

Until we have a proper biography, we have this book, written by the editor of The Mail on Sunday, whom Freud admitted into his circle in the final years of his life, or at least far enough that they had breakfast together more than a handful of times.

Freud was old and feeble: he let his guard down. Bad move, old bean.