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The retrospective exhibition Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings
1954—2001 at the Royal Academy of the Arts is the most exhilarating
and brilliant exhibition I have seen for years. The extensive literature
on Auerbach and the catalogue essays for this excellent show by
Catherine Lampert, Norman Rosenthal and Isabel Carlisle enable the
process that begins in front on the works themselves to continue
beyond the initial visit. There is something extraordinary in the
process of viewing that comes from the comprehensive nature of the
show and the sheer scale of the exhibition. Michael Podro first
wrote about Auerbach in 19692 and his review of this show for the
Times Literary Supplement is one of the best. He describes
the experience of the Royal Academy Retrospective:
There is a sense of momentum as one walks through the Frank Auerbach
exhibition at the Royal Academy. Auerbach’s work has a constantly
self-revising dynamic which never allows the subject to disengage
from the distinctive properties of the painter’s medium,
nor does it allow the relation between medium and subject to be
taken for granted. This is a recurrent issue in modern painting.
Kandinsky reflected anxiously in 1912 that, in depicting objects,
one could never retain the vividness of their physiognomy; painting
always weakened the resonance of things. Kandinsky’s response
had been to diminish the represented subject in favour of what
he conceived to be the expressive properties of the medium —
the move to abstraction. Auerbach’s, on the other hand, has
been to bring the physiognomic reality on the one to bear on that
of the other. If complex abstract forms appear increasingly in
the internal armature of the painting, they are never disengaged
from the turn of the head, the posture of the body, the masses
of a building, or the branching of a tree.3
Frank Auerbach arrived in England aged eight in 1939 from Berlin.
In her discussion of the effect of Auerbach’s life on his approach
to work Catherine Lampert writes:
Those who watch Auerbach from close to see him acting by instinct
and conviction, definite about some things while guarding the
reason. Although such autonomy contributes to his energy, it may
be due in part to ill fortune. In the tragic circumstances of
the Nazi era, his parents, urged on by friends and a promised
patron, placed their son, nearly eight, on a boat in Hamburg bound
for Southampton. Miraculously he arrived in a country and at a
school that nurtured his temperament. Bunce Court, the Quaker-Jewish
boarding school founded by Anna Essinger, located in Kent in 1939
and then removed to safety in Shropshire, was both a nearly self-sufficient
community and a place for individuals. Many students and teachers
there had had testing experiences — separation, loss of career,
divorce, a change of language, bohemian neglect. An unusually
high proportion of alumni excelled in inventive professions, from
structural engineering to film-making and music’.4
Auerbach moved to London after completing school, in 1947 and became
a temporary student at the Borough Polytechnic Institute where he
was taught by David Bomberg. He in fact continued to attend Bomberg’s
classes at St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College
of Art. Like the other artists of his generation and slightly older
(Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff) Auerbach spent a
great deal of time drawing from the collection at the National Gallery.
Of his lifelong dialogue with the old masters there he says, ‘To
remind myself of what quality is and what’s actually demanded
of paintings’.5 Of Bomberg’s role in his development he
says: ‘actually to apprehend the weight, the twist, the stance,
of a human being anchored by gravity: to produce a souvenir of that’.6
In his early work Auerbach chose the landscape of war-torn London
and his friends. From the early work there is the development of
a tragic air in a number of his portraits, an exploration of what
the inner self was concerned with. In Head of Leon Kossoff
(1954) the skull-like head pushes to the edge of the picture frame
creating a great tension. The reduced palette is applied in thick
and vigorous strokes; a Rembrantian gloom is achieved ‘The
averted gaze, a feature of most of Auerbach’s heads, suggests
an inner world of thought brought to the surface by long hours of
sitting. The thickness of the impasto is testament to the efforts
exerted by the artist.’7
David Bomberg was an important influence as well as Auerbach’s
teacher. His views on art in relation to the development of self
were particularly apt in the post-war art scene. For example, the
gallery system was not considered by Bomberg to be the only way
an artist could become established; there was the removal of an
élitism in that he encouraged his students to exhibit alongside
amateur artists at the Embankment Gardens in 1947 when the London
County Council had its first open-air exhibition. Against Auerbach’s
personal loss of family during the war, Bomberg’s words must
have had a real poignancy for him at the outset of his career: ‘It
is the example the artist gives of fulfilling himself in his work
that is of social use to others; for the man who solves his problems
thereby involuntarily helps everyone else’.8 Rosenthal believes
that in ‘conveying a kind of existential fear, Auerbach’s
paintings act as a therapeutic release’.9 Together with Leon
Kossoff, he decided to paint the rebuilding of London and drew in
situ every day, ‘In his paintings of building sites, he
counteracted the abundance of mud and deep holes by deploying cranes
and girders, as if they were pictorial lightning rods and ‘lances’.10
In response to the work of other artists he came into contact with
in the immediate post-war years, Auerbach was dissatisfied. He stated:
‘I felt there was an area of experience — the haptic,
the tangible, what you feel when you touch somebody next to you
in the dark — that hadn’t perhaps been recorded in painting
before’.11 Catherine Lampert, herself a sitter of Auerbach
for many years, in her catalogue essay Auerbach and His Sitters,
describes his work following four years of drawing classes as ‘bodies
ferociously pinned down by drawn strokes, but emotionally remote,
like primates. In the summer of 1952 he underwent a crisis that
provoked the working practice of a lifetime’.
The person posing for me was someone I was involved with, not
a professional model, so the whole situation was obviously more
tense and fraught. There was always the feeling that she might
get fed up, that there might be a quarrel or something. I also
had a much greater sense of what specifically she was like, so
that the question of getting a likeness was like walking a tightrope.
I had a far more poignant sense of it slipping away, of it being
hard to get. I had done the painting in some sittings in a relatively
timid way, that is I’d tried to do one part and then another
part, and save a bit. Then I suddenly found in myself enough courage
to repaint the whole thing, from top to bottom, irrationally and
instinctively, and I found I got a picture of her. And when I
went into the College on the first day, I felt so disturbed at
entering an institution that I went home at eleven o’clock
and, provoked by this crisis, repainted the painting of the building
site that I’d been working on at home.12
The painting E.O.W. Nude, 1952 is Stella West, his long-term
companion, a widow fifteen years his senior with three young children.
According to Lambert, the paintings of Stella, between 1961 and
1973 ‘move through a process of what psychologists (and art
historians) call displacement. The liquidity of the paint is at
the centre of something almost alchemical in its ability to express
feeling; a process that Auerbach takes, by himself, into virgin
territory during the 1980s. The brushstrokes, in contrast to mass,
manage to convert us, almost like a stigmatism, to truth. Rembrandt
and Titian’s late tonal paintings guided him, yet he began
to act in a modern idiom, open to pungent attacks on our nerves
as well as our acceptance of ‘disorder’.13 Auerbach’s
painting is characterised by experimentation, astonishing dedication
— he works for 364 days each and every year- and a courage
that takes him into darkness, and the unknown. Through looking at
his paintings an overwhelming emotion is survival and truth, the
solitary path to acceptance. Auerbach makes struggle seem normal
without in any way glorifying it or belittling the pain. His insights
are like moments of truth. Using a paint that sometimes resembles
‘a strange ceramic or worm-eaten carving’,14 lines that
are jagged and inexplicable in themselves, he works tirelessly to
evoke human pain and suffering through pigment and mass. No other
contemporary artist does it so well. It is a celebration of the
creative act, the sanctity of life, survival through adversity.
Rosenthal points out that Auerbach describes the feeling of survival
after his experiences as ‘not joy, but sadness, but wrath and
anger. I looked up once more and saw that a dark and menacing cloud
had appeared in the sky. I felt that this cloud above us would never
disappear, it would stay there all our lives’. Rosenthal continues
‘Auerbach’s paintings are expressions of love and attachment
to their subjects, and yet there is always something slightly threatening
about the atmosphere they convey’.15
Auerbach’s remarkable paintings; his decisive compositional
devices, and his ability to pierce the object with a formidable
investigative talent, are constantly informed by his drawing.
I go out each morning and draw. I can’t really start a painting
in the morning until I’ve done a drawing….I feel dissatisfied
with what I’m doing, so I go out and try to notice some fact
I haven’t seen before, and once I’ve been provided with
a reason for changing my picture, I can come back to the studio
and change it…usually it is a new sensation of proportion
or connection, often revealed by the light.16
Drawing is an essential part of his working method as well as an
end in itself. He sketches in the landscape and in front of old
and modern masters; in turn the drawings are taken back to the studio
where they are used to solve compositional problems. A landscape
painting may require as many as 200 sketches; paintings and finished
drawings of people, however do not require any direct, preliminary
sketches. In the studio, the landscape sketches recall ‘what
it was actually like to draw there that morning…what I see
is what I was looking at when I did the drawing and it reminds me
of it. That’s what it was for. I see the sunlight and the trees
and the hill so I paint from these by looking at the drawing…
I’m looking at black-and-white drawings and the lines signal
colour to me’.17 Isabel Carlisle writes:
The finished charcoal or pencil drawings that Auerbach has made
of his sitters testify to the daily crises in his art. In some,
such as Head of Julia (1960), the paper has been erased
so often that it has completely given way and had to be patched.
In almost all, the dust of the charcoal or graphite has sunk in
too far to be eliminated, softening the light from white to silver,
while the faint criss-crossing of unwanted lines brings a vibrant
energy to the heads. More visibly than in the paintings, the final
image is the summation of the many rejected attempts that make
it possible. It is as if the crisis has to be provoked daily to
move the art forward so that a new and previously unexpressed
meaning can be forced from the subject.18
Auerbach is, as Rosenthal has observed, both modern and part of
the classical tradition of portraiture and landscape painting. ‘In
spite of his surface wildness and the thickness of his paint (or
in the case of thinner canvases paint that has been scraped off
where it has previously covered the surface), there is a sense of
rightness that gives each mark, each stroke, an emotionally laden
meaning that strives towards a truthful representation of the subject,
an aim which Walter Sickert — another of Auerbach’s English
heroes — called ‘the interpretation of ready-made life’.’19
Frank Auerbach is a truly inspiring artist and this exhibition at
the Royal Academy does his journey and his genius absolute justice.
Footnotes:
- Michael Podro, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Times Literary
Supplement, London, 21 September 2001, p.19.
- Introduction in Frank Auerbach, Exhibition Catalogue, Marlborough-Gerson
Gallery, London, Sept-Oct. 1969.
- Podro, TLS, op. cit., p.18.
- Catherine Lampert, ‘Auerbach and His Sitters’, Frank
Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings, 1954-2001, Royal
Academy of the Arts, London, 2001, p.20.
- Quoted by Isabel Carlisle, ‘Early Works: 1954-1970’,
ibid, p. 34.
- Carlisle, ibid., p. 34.
- Ibid, p. 34.
- Bomberg quoted by Lampert, op. cit., p. 21.
- Norman Rosenthal, ‘Auerbach and His History’, ibid.,
p. 12.
- Lampert, op. cit., p.21.
- Quoted ibid, p. 23.
- Quoted ibid, p.23.
- Ibid, p.25.
- Ibid, p. 25.
- Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 12.
- Quoted by Carlisle, ‘Drawings’, ibid, p. 124.
- Ibid, p. 124.
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