Tim Behrens
Painter who abandoned the 1960s London art scene after falling out with his mentor Lucian Freud
TIM BEHRENS, who has died aged 79, was a painter and writer who in his youth promised to be as much a star of the London art world as his friends and drinking companions Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon; but he later rejected the British way of life and, hobbled at times by personal tragedy, lived from his thirties in obscurity abroad.
In 1963, John Deakin took a nowcelebrated photograph of the group of painters later dubbed by RB Kitaj the “School of London”. Behrens sits beside his mentor Freud in it, the others lunching being Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews. Taken at Wheelers oyster bar in Soho, the image was posed – the cork is in the bottle and the glasses empty – and Behrens came to deny their having been a group with aims in common.
Yet the friendship was real, particularly with Freud, whom he saw every day for nine years. A decade older than Behrens, he came to be a substitute father figure – the younger painter hating his own parent – and Freud’s abrupt dissolution of their association in late 1964 shattered Behrens’s world.
They had met when Freud taught Behrens at the Slade. Thereafter they shared a flat for a time, caroused together in Soho – for Behrens a place that was “a school of ideas” – and played frenetic games of pinball. The red-headed Behrens was fierily competitive and never lost.
Once when they were together they bumped into a man who cheerily saluted Lucian. “Run!” Freud shouted, having head-butted the acquaintance. When Behrens had got his breath back, he asked how much Freud owed the man. “Fourteen,” came the reply. “Pounds?” asked Behrens. “Grand,” said Freud.
From the Mephistophelean Freud, Behrens acknowledged, he learned to fill every centimetre of canvas with emotional energy. He said that Freud admitted that he lacked natural talent and compensated for it with intensity of effort. The painters gave each other pictures and Behrens sat for Freud in several portraits during the period in which Freud’s art was evolving into the more vigorous, free-flowing style that would characterise his maturity. In 2005, by which time Freud had become arguably Britain’s most famous living artist, one of his portraits of Behrens sold for a nearrecord £4.1 million.
So close were they that some assumed they must be in a relationship. As it was, they often went out with the same girls. Freud also shared his contacts in the art world. In 1959, Behrens had the first of three one-man shows at the avant-garde Beaux Arts gallery in London, where Bacon, Auerbach and Andrews had had exhibitions.
Behrens always termed himself a figurative painter. His pictures at the time had a detached, dream-like quality much influenced by Balthus, whose painting The Card Game was owned by his father. Yet in the midSixties his life suddenly altered its seemingly pre-ordained direction.
To Freud’s biographer, Geordie Greig, he said that the cause of his rift with Freud was his attraction to someone who looked like his first wife, shortly after she had died in an accident, although the evidence for this is debatable. He himself never revealed to friends why Freud had broken with him, who overstepped what mark, albeit Freud was to repeat the pattern with others.
The Beaux Arts having closed, Behrens let a lucrative contract with the Marlborough Gallery fall through, moved his family to rural Italy, and swapped painting in oil for acrylic. He later confessed that he did not much like the results, though the change was cathartic. While he remained ambitious for recognition, that was rather harder away from the selfregarding gaze of the London art market and without an entrée to his former circle of friends. “I was a deserter,” he mused in 2003, “and deserters don’t get easily forgiven.”
Timothy John Behrens was born in London on June 2 1937. His father Michael was a City financier who later co-owned The Ionian Bank. He was also a collector of beautiful things, among them art and women; his affair in the late Forties with Elizabeth Jane Howard led her to use him as the model for the protagonist of her novel The Long View (1956).
Although Tim was close to his mother Felicity – his two brothers were much younger – he came to hold a violent dislike for his unbending father. His parents’ London home was in a Nash terrace by Regent’s Park. In 1949, however, they bought Culham Court, an imposing Georgian house and estate bordering the Thames near Henley (now owned by the Swiss billionaire Urs Schwarzenbach).
There Michael entertained artistic friends including Hugh Casson and Edward Ardizzone. Seeing some youthful paintings of Tim’s, Matthew Smith said that he should be encouraged, while Tim took as his model for a bohemian life another visitor, the artist Bateson Mason.
Although good at games and at Latin, Tim did not find Eton– or at least its ambience – sympathetic, and though Michael Behrens had even bought the influential Hanover Gallery from Arthur Jeffress he opposed his son’s artistic intentions.
Suffering from anxiety, Tim began to be sent once a week from school to London to see a psychologist. Naturally, he bunked off and explored the city, learning to smoke Woodbines on the journey back. On one trip, he took his drawings to the Slade and, at 17, was the youngest student admitted.
His contemporaries included Paula Rego and Euan Uglow, while he became lifelong friends there with Craigie Aitchison. With the cartoonist Nicholas Garland he shared a flat rented from the former tutor to Tsar Nicholas II’s children. Nicholas Gibbes had been with them almost until their murders and, having become a Greek Orthodox priest in their memory, kept the house as a shrine to them.
Behrens first married a fellow student, Janet Rheinberg. Their parents had refused them permission to wed and, when they ran away to Gretna Green, they found the police waiting. Craigie Aitchison drove the getaway car.
Although the couple had twin daughters, the marriage did not endure long. Some years after they had split up, Jan had a fatal reaction to a wasp sting while holidaying in Turkey. By then, in 1963, Behrens had married Harriet Hill, daughter of the bookseller Heywood Hill.
While staying in Tuscany with friends – Matthew Spender, the sculptor, and his painter wife Maro – they saw a ruined farmhouse near Siena and decided on the spur of the moment to buy it. They raised the twins and their first two children there (Behrens enjoying sojourns in the hills where he drank and played ping-pong in rustic dives) but they divorced in 1979 and returned to London. Then Behrens was hit by two further blows: the suicides of his youngest brother, Justin, and his twin daughter, Soph. He wrote a book about his brother’s death, The Monument (1988), and for much of the Eighties he stopped painting.
He had done some commissions, however, for the well-connected Spanish decorator Jaime Parladé and, having explored the country with his third wife Diana – a painter and niece of Craigie Aitchison – whom he married in 1983, settled in Galicia.
He and the people of La Coruña took each other to heart and he even began to compose poetry in Spanish. When he returned to painting in the Nineties, once again in oil, his shows sold out quickly. He had retrospectives both in La Coruña and Madrid – the city whose Thyssen collection houses his portrait by Mike Andrews.
By turns rambunctious and intellectual, shocking and conventional, Behrens was an enriching, mischievous, seductive and often tumultuous presence in the lives of those who knew and held him dear. He worked at his painting tirelessly, lunging at his canvas like a bullfighter, although latterly he was handicapped by a piratical eyepatch.
He was irritated by the supposed link between talent and price in the art market and thought that paintings should be an everyday commodity like food. Every so often, someone would ask whether he was not the painter who had belonged to the School of London.
“No,” he would say. “I haven’t lived in London for a long time. I prefer to belong to the School of La Coruña.”
He is survived by a daughter of his first marriage, a daughter and two sons of the second, and by his third wife and their son.