In their brief introduction to this handsome and enthralling volume, the editors, David Dawson, for many years Freud’s personal assistant, and Martin Gayford, a friend of the artist, begin by insisting that what they have produced is neither a memoir nor a biography, but a collection of letters. This is disingenuous, and does both men an injustice. Love Lucian is unique, a sort of biographical tapestry woven around a set of missives reproduced in facsimile that are at once skimpy, slapdash, funny and, in many cases, idiosyncratically but beautifully illustrated – works of pictorial art.
Freud was not a letter writer in the sense of two cases the editors mention, Van Gogh and Michelangelo. He was not as driven as the former, or as self-absorbed as the latter. He took his work, but not himself, seriously. Which is not to say that he was unaware of his own worth as an artist, or shy about proclaiming it. Dawson and Gayford suggest, and surely they are right, that the flippancy and raucous humour of the letters, like the hectic private and public doings of the man who wrote them, were a release and a relief from the rigours of a life dedicated to the making of art.
