Bella Freud’s podcast “Fashion Neurosis” offers a treatment for speaking

A life may require a complex parental legacy, and Lucian Freud is also a huge, unconventional parent in addition to being a great artist. He was born in Berlin in 1922 and has at least 14 children, mainly at weddings, and has been forty years. He never shared a house with his partner or kids, and it wasn’t just short-lived. In 1961, the year Bella was born, he and two other mothers became the father of two other daughters. (William Feaver in his Lucian biography includes the artist’s explanation of this father’s cluster: “Don’t you know I have a bike?”) Lucian’s first portrait of Bella, “Baby on Bella, “Baby on the Green Sofa” (1961), depicts her sleep, forearms, flung feet, fls, fists clamped. But her earliest appearance in his work was “Pregnant Girl” last year, a gentle portrait of Bella’s mother, Bernardine Coverley, who fell asleep on the sofa, with her breasts swollen and her belly swollen.

Coverley was only 18 when Bella was born. She is the daughter of an English father and an Irish mother, who works in the mailing room of a newspaper on Fleet Street during the day and socializes with Soho’s artists at night. Lucian installed Coverley and Bella in an apartment on Camden Road in north London. Bella occasionally met her father during her childhood. He used to build on a picture of himself now, a picture of himself, as he bent down sharply on the tow path of the Regent Canal. But shortly after Esther was born, their parents’ relationship ended.

In the following years, Bella told me: “It feels like our lives are always transiting.” Coverley has left his daughter’s presence to his parents for years. Lucian’s financial terms were sporadic, and Coverley’s life became improvised. She moved to Kent with her daughter. Then, when Bella was six and Esther was four, Coverley took them to Marrakech for eighteen months, a period of exotic and displaced silence, later recorded in 1992 in the 1992 semi-autobiographical novel The Ugly Weird , published in 1992 in 1992, narrated by a sister, her fierce siblings. Esther told me that even though she always thought she had a happy childhood, “Bella, as far as I remember, Bella was angry.” Esther continued, “I would say, ‘Wow, look at the house we were going to!’ Bella was always like,’nightmare. ‘ “Esther formed a binary with her mother-“I worshiped her, I just wanted to lie in her bed, in her arms,” ​​she recalled, and Bella apparently had an affinity for her father.That’s it I’m leaning towards the people'” Esther said.

Bella recalls the lack of boundaries in her childhood, where adults engage in experimental lifestyles that are supposedly providing freedom but actually undermine any sense of security. “It’s really a Stupid She said. She remembers being hungry forever, not because she was deprived, but because she lived in a whole-eat vegetarian family: “We don’t seem to have 24 hours of cooking food.” In a family in North Africa, Coverley heads to Algeria to pursue a spiritual teacher, but joins Esther in Marrakech to keep Marrakech going, bringing Bella to the care of strangers. The painful plot is the turning point in the family’s coagulation adventure. ) Bella told me: “I really don’t know where my mother is back or when she will come back if She is back. “The experience was so painful that she had never discussed it with her mother, who died in 2011.

In Morocco, Bella had little clothes and chose to wear boyish clothes instead of her mother’s favorite Mrs. Ka. She now realizes that this self-shaping is part of the defense of poverty shame. When Coverley and the girls returned to England in 1969, Lucian arranged for Bella to spend time with some noble hippies who traveled in caravans in southern England. In a podcast conversation with Trinny Woodall, Bella recalls that in a rural post office, a store assistant called her a hippie innocently. “I thought I was a cool guy,” she said. “I was so tossed. I remember the clothes I wore – blue jumpers, some sc-wrapped old ropes and the hillside around my throat, trying to be like Heathcliffe in “wuthering Heights.” In the travel group, there were friends from Lucian’s and their sometimes themes Penny Cuthbertson. The experience of the caravan attracted Bella, not because of wandering, but because Cuthbertson provided the structure. She strictly about sleep time, Bella told me, “I realized, I’m going to be there. like this. It’s really shocking, love what you should have rebelled against. ”

Bella spent her eight to sixteen years in Sussex. Her mother has a romantic relationship with her and a teacher in the girls’ home. Coverley ended up having a baby with him – Freud’s half-brother Noah. The teacher effectively became Freud’s stepfather for several years, teaching English and drama, and his older students often hang out around the house, disturbing Freud. “I hate him,” she told me. Freud’s own education at Waldorf schools was apparently progressive, but the rules she despises were hidden. “You don’t allow black. They don’t like it. cornerShe said he hints at the belief of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf Education, in the most harmonious form. When Freud told me the story, she sat in a sloping Black Lucite armchair in narrow black pants and a black sweater, along with a pair of shiny white platforms, and a pair of shiny white platform sandpapers that don’t allow yourself. tasteShe said. “It’s like a red rag to a bull, as you can imagine.”