{"id":475900,"date":"2026-05-31T08:54:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T08:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/475900\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T08:54:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T08:54:13","slug":"kate-moss-and-lucian-freud-the-strange-beautiful-story-of-arts-most-unlikely-partnership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/475900\/","title":{"rendered":"Kate Moss and Lucian Freud: The strange, beautiful story of art\u2019s most unlikely partnership"},"content":{"rendered":"

At first it didn\u2019t make a lick of sense. Kate Moss<\/a>, all fag ash, fashion, and glamorous, airbrushed artifice<\/a>, colliding with Lucian Freud<\/a>, who was concerned with anything but. The paparazzi photos caused a right old stir: the Croydon model and the cantankerous German-born painter<\/a>, her hidden behind black shades, him looking for the nearest escape hatch from prying eyes. <\/p>\n

Were they friends? Lovers? A secret third thing? Then, finally, the outcome: Naked Portrait 2002, painted over the course of nine months; the gorgeous, grotesque, eternally divisive result of one of the art world\u2019s most unlikely partnerships.<\/p>\n

A film has now been made about the pair, simply titled Moss & Freud. It stars Ellie Bamber and Derek Jacobi, and dutifully recreates many of the conversations shared between artist and muse, to the best of Moss\u2019s recollection (the memories she\u2019s most comfortable sharing publicly, I suppose.) Moss is a producer on the film, though she skipped its London premiere earlier this week, perhaps because it would have been too exposing. <\/p>\n

Like Freud in his lifetime, Moss is notoriously press-shy, particularly whenever she\u2019s asked to be just Kate Moss, rather than Kate Moss: Superstar Supermodel. \u201cI find it difficult to be myself in front of the camera,\u201d she said a few years ago. \u201cI find it much easier being someone else.\u201d No wonder Freud found her so compelling, and that the resulting portrait he painted \u2013 dimpled, fleshy, real \u2013 proved so jarring for her.<\/p>\n

It was Bella, Freud\u2019s fashion-designer daughter, who introduced them. Moss had talked about her love for Freud in the pages of Dazed & Confused magazine. She dreamt of sitting for him, she said, despite the unlikelihood of Freud drawing professional models, or even stars. He\u2019d long resisted them \u2013 turning down the Pope, Princess Diana, and endless requests from Andrew Lloyd Webber to paint his wife, Madeleine (\u201cHe even threatened me with theatre tickets,\u201d Freud witheringly told a friend). <\/p>\n

\"\u2018She\u2018She was late only in the way that girls are\u2019: Kate Moss and Lucian Freud in 2003 (Stephen Butler\/Shutterstock)<\/p>\n

He was once so appalled by Jerry Hall\u2019s cancellation of three sittings (she merely had the flu) that he quite literally scrubbed her out of a portrait he was drawing of her breastfeeding her newborn son. Hilariously, what remains is Hall\u2019s nude lower body, with her head and breasts replaced by the upper body of David Dawson, Freud\u2019s studio assistant. Fabulous, wasn\u2019t he?<\/p>\n

In 2001, Moss and Freud embarked on a series of clandestine meetings in galleries and at restaurants before painting began, getting along famously. They were more alike than one might assume. Moss was rebellious and unvarnished, her success in the fashion world of the early Nineties a direct juxtaposition to the big hair, long limbs and out-of-this-world spectacle of your Cindy Crawfords or Claudia Schiffers. She was comparatively short and grungy, a troublemaker and occasional self-saboteur, and so stick-thin that you were worried about her (\u201cheroin chic\u201d and all that). She swore like a truck driver. <\/p>\n

Freud, meanwhile, was often dark and brooding, a gambler and a lothario. He was also mischievous, funny, and a gossip, and so naturally charismatic that many were able to forgive his foibles. When it came to his subjects, he needed substance, truth, and something that personally interested him. (Like Sue Tilley, who worked at an unemployment office when she was asked to begin modelling for Freud \u2013 one of their works together went up for auction this week, and could fetch \u00a335m<\/a>.) <\/p>\n

On occasion he\u2019d start drawing an individual, then call time on them on the second or third sitting \u2013 he realised he didn\u2019t actually like them very much. But Moss, he liked. \u201cHe talked about foxes in the same way that he talked about [Kate],\u201d restaurateur Jeremy King told The Independent\u2019s editor-in-chief Geordie Greig, for his book Breakfast with Lucian. \u201cHe liked the free spirit. He liked the bite of danger.\u201d<\/p>\n

For their sessions, Moss was due at Freud\u2019s studio on London\u2019s Kensington Church Street at 7pm on the dot, seven days a week, with their days concluding at 2am. Freud abhorred lateness, which proved somewhat difficult for a model who found punctuality challenging. \u201cShe was late only in the way that girls are,\u201d Freud would tell Greig. \u201cSort of 18 minutes late. I was cross, but tried to ignore it. I used other means to get her [there] on time, like sending someone to fetch her.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wish I hadn\u2019t posed like that. It\u2019s not like modelling, where you can change it. I had a dead arm<\/p>\n

Kate Moss<\/p>\n

Moss & Freud attempts to psychoanalyse the pair\u2019s dynamic somewhat. To Bamber\u2019s Moss, Freud is an avuncular, nurturing figure, and a safe respite from a hurtful, disreputable fashion industry. We see Moss, in flashback, expressing discomfort at being asked to sit astride a male model for a Calvin Klein campaign, and witness her smile drop during her famous beach shoot for The Face that turned her into a star. She was just 16, and being photographed topless \u2013 against her will \u2013 by the late photographer Corinne Day, with whom she\u2019s admitted to having had a complex, tricky dynamic. <\/p>\n

Her time with Freud also seems to push her into more quiet domesticity and maturity \u2013 at the start of their nine months together, she is gatecrashing Berlin sex clubs and driving erratically down country lanes; by the end, she is romantically involved with the media publisher Jefferson Hack, and pregnant with her first child. (Of course, the years of dating Pete Doherty and \u201cCocaine Kate\u201d being splashed across the tabloids were still to come.) Jacobi\u2019s Freud, meanwhile, is haunted by memories of his second wife, the socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood, whose flamboyant, bohemian insouciance the film parallels with Moss\u2019s unruliness. It suggests that Freud was so drawn to Moss because she reminded him of his lost love.<\/p>\n

How close all this is to reality will only be known to Moss \u2013 Freud, of course, having died aged 88 in 2011. Moss has spoken glowingly, if sparingly, about her nine months with him. \u201cHe was quite chatty, but he couldn\u2019t paint and talk at the same time,\u201d she told Radio 4\u2019s Desert Island Discs in 2022. \u201cSo when he got going, telling me an amazing story, I would still be sitting in position but he wouldn\u2019t be painting any more. I was like, \u2018Please put the paintbrush on the canvas!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AA Christies auctioneer stands near the finished \u2018Naked Portrait 2002\u2019 in 2004 (Getty)<\/p>\n

Moss\u2019s pregnancy provided an unexpected deadline for Freud\u2019s portrait to be completed, and he ultimately presented it to her at the end of 2002. It\u2019s very Lucian Freud \u2013 thick globs of paint, ungainly shadow, skin blotchy, crude, earthy. Moss reclines nude, her hair lank, her arm limp. There is a slight swelling to her belly, reflecting the early stages of her pregnancy. She seems physically disproportionate, a body all out of joint. Or perhaps that\u2019s because it\u2019s so unlike any of the hundreds of thousands of images of Kate Moss we\u2019re so used to seeing. It is beautiful, strange, beguiling. Moss & Freud depicts her as being horrified by it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a distinction between fact and truth,\u201d Jacobi\u2019s Freud tells her. \u201cTruth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as being so. You are extraordinary because you are ordinary, and I mean this in the best possible way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moss discussed the painting in 2012. \u201cI wish I hadn\u2019t posed like that,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s just the first thing I did \u2013 I fell on the side of the sofa and he said, \u2018That\u2019s fine,\u2019 and started painting. It\u2019s not like modelling, where you can change it. I had a dead arm.\u201d Freud, too, had misgivings. \u201cThe picture didn\u2019t really work,\u201d he told Greig. Pressed further, he declined to elaborate. \u201cThat is like asking a footballer after the match why he didn\u2019t score.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moss didn\u2019t buy the portrait, despite expressing interest (or at least, that\u2019s what she told a magazine in 2003). Instead it was bought by a private collector, before being sold once again in 2004 \u2013 that was when the public got their first look at it. \u201cMoss is almost unrecognisable,\u201d The Independent wrote that year. At auction in 2005, it was sold to a private bidder for \u00a33.5m, the highest price for a Freud at the time.<\/p>\n

Whatever her private misgivings about the painting itself, Moss has only ever spoken highly of Freud. In 2010, the year before he died, the pair were photographed by David Dawson while Moss visited Freud, who was unwell after (believe it or not) being knocked over by a zebra during the making of a young filmmaker\u2019s short film. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d let Kate into the house, brought her upstairs to Lucian, and said, \u2018Oh, Kate, I just want to have a photo of the two of you together\u2019,\u201d Dawson told The Guardian. \u201cThen she spontaneously jumped into bed and had a cuddle with him.\u201d The resulting photograph is lovely. Freud has enormous affection in his eyes as he cradles his former muse, while Moss \u2013 eyes closed, an expression of total tranquillity on her face \u2013 hugs him back.<\/p>\n

\"EllieEllie Bamber as Kate Moss and Derek Jacobi as Lucian Freud in \u2018Moss & Freud\u2019 (Vertigo Releasing)<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also discussed the tattoo Freud gave her \u2013 not the two swallows on her lower back, as has been speculated, but a flock of birds on her thigh. \u201cHe said, \u2018Do you like the creatures of the animal kingdom?\u2019 and I said, \u2018Yeah, I like birds,\u2019\u201d Moss recalled during her Desert Island Discs episode. He offered to give her a tattoo of a chicken upside down in a bucket, which she kindly declined. \u201cI was thinking more like [a] swallow,\u201d she continued. \u201cAnd he gave me a bottle of really good Rothschild wine, and he got out his etching needle and scraped into my thigh a flock of birds \u2013 which now look like varicose veins.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s one of the most photographed people in the world. But there\u2019s no photo of the tattoo to be found, as if it\u2019s a secret shared only between two of the world\u2019s most famous cultivators of pure, irresistible mystique.<\/p>\n

\u2018Moss & Freud\u2019 is in cinemas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At first it didn\u2019t make a lick of sense. Kate Moss, all fag ash, fashion, and glamorous, airbrushed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-475900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}