Bella Freud’s Podcast, “Fashion Neurosis,” Offers a Talking Cure
He can take a life to count with the inheritance of a complicated parent, and Lucian Freud, in addition to being a great artist, was a parent of a prodigious unconventional. Born in 1922 in Berlin, he generated at least fourteen children, mainly out of marriage, over four decades. He has never shared a house with his partners or children for more than a brief period; In 1961, the year of Bella’s birth, he became the father of two other daughters, with two other mothers. (William Feaver, in his biography of Lucian, includes the artist’s explanation for this paternal grouping: “Do not realize that I had a bicycle?”) The first portrait that Lucian made of Bella, “Baby on a Green Sofa” (1961), sleeping asleep, tiny arms back and fists. But his first appearance in his work had occurred the previous year, in “Girl Girl”, a tender portrait of Bella’s mother, Bernardine Coverley, asleep on a sofa, with swollen breasts and a rounded belly.
Coverley was only eighteen when Bella was born. Daughter of an English father and an Irish mother, she worked in the mail hall of a newspaper on Fleet Street during the day and socialized with the artists of Soho at night. Lucian installed Coverley and Bella in an apartment in Camden Road, in northern London. Bella saw her father from time to time during his early childhood; He once based a painting, now lost, on a photograph of himself leaning over her on the towpath of the Régent canal. But shortly after Esther’s birth, in 1963, their parents’ relationship ended.
In the years that followed, Bella said to me: “It was just that our life was in transit all the time.” For years, Coverley has kept the existence of his daughters a secret to his own parents. Lucian’s financial provisions were sporadic and Coverley’s life became improvised. She moved with her daughters to Kent; Then, when Bella was six years old and Esther was four years old, Coverley took them to Marrakech for eighteen months-a period of exotic and painful travel which is later in the chronicle of “Hideous Kinky”, a semi-autobiographical novel, from 1992, told by a younger sister in fear of her pride. Esther told me that, although she always thought of herself as having had a happy childhood, “Bella, as far as I remember, was bristling with total fury.” Esther continued: “I would be, like” wow, look at this house to which we are moving! “And Bella has always been, like, ‘Nightmare. “So being held a dyad with her mother -” I loved him, and I just wanted to lie in her bed, in her arms, “she recalls -Bella had clearly an affinity for her father.” As soon as we saw her, she was, as, as, as, as, asIt is The person I gravitate, “said Esther.
Bella recalled her childhood as missing from borders, adults engaged in experimental lifestyles that claimed to offer freedom but in fact compromised any feeling of security. “It was so much stupid Time, all these 1970s, the notions of idealism, ”she said. She remembers being perpetually hungry, not so much because she was private, but because of life in households engaged in the vegetarian diets of the whole food: “We did not seem to have food that did not take twenty-four hours to cook. While the family was in North Africa, Coverley traveled to Algeria in the pursuit of a spiritual teacher, also taking the Esther, but leaving Bella with Bella to the care of foreigners. The painful episode is a turning point in the clotted adventure of the family.) Bella said to me: “I did not really know where or when my mother came back – or if She was coming back. The experience was so painful that she never discussed it with her mother, who died in 2011.
“It’s always great to bring the old crew together, launch the grill, open cold and remember that if we met today, we would not be friends.”
Cartoon by Adam Sacks
In Morocco, Bella had little clothes, and she chose to dress in childish clothes rather than in the caftans favored by her mother. This self-model, she realizes now, was partly a defense against the shame of poverty. When Coverley and the girls returned to England, in 1969, Lucian arranged so that Bella spends time with aristocratic hippies who traveled in the south of England in caravans. Bella, in her conversation of Podcast with Trinny Woodall, recalled that once, in a village post office, an assistant in store had disdainfully called Hippie. “I thought I was a cool person,” she said. “I was so mortified. I remember what I was wearing – a blue jumper, overwhelmed old cords and a kerchief around my throat, to try to be like Heathcliff of “Wuthering Heights”. “Among the travel group was Penny Cuthbertson, a friend of Lucian and his subject sometimes. The caravan experience called on Bella, not because of wandering but rather because Cuthbertson offered a structure. She was strict about sleeping hours, and Bella said to me: “I realized, I as This. And it was a whole shock, to love something against which you were supposed to rebel. »»
Bella spent the years between eight and sixteen living, in an ill -condemned way, in Sussex. Her mother entered a relationship with a teacher at the home of whom she and the girls were logs. Coverley finally had a baby with him – Freud Noah’s half -brother. The teacher, who has indeed become the Freud’s stepfather for several years, taught English and the theater, and his older students have often dragged home, making Freud uncomfortable. “I hated him,” she told me. Freud’s own education in a Waldorf school, was ostensibly progressive, but it was masked with rules that she despised. “You were not allowed to wear black. They didn’t like corners“She said, referring to the belief held by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf Education, that the rounded forms were the most harmonious. When Freud told me this story, she was sitting in an angular black Lucite armchair dressed in narrow black pants and black sweater, with a pair of bright white platform sandals. taste“She said.” As you can imagine, it was like a red cloth for a bull. »»
