Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954–2001

Royal Academy, London

The paintings on show at the RA have an effect that it would have been impossible to anticipate; the grand space of the galleries and the juxtaposition of the paintings achieve resonance which would have been impossible in smaller spaces. The strength of the internal structure of the images and the opulence of the medium act compellingly on the mind. One has to focus on each painting without scanning for common denominators – they are mutually informative at a much deeper less conscious level. It is that level, as well as in more overt ways, that they are joined to the great art of the past.¹

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:

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:

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 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.

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:

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:

1. Michael Podro, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Times Literary Supplement, London, 21 September 2001, p.19.
2. Introduction in Frank Auerbach, Exhibition Catalogue, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, London, Sept-Oct. 1969.
3. Podro, TLS, op. cit., p.18.
4. Catherine Lampert, ‘Auerbach and His Sitters’, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings, 1954-2001, Royal Academy of the Arts, London, 2001, p.20.
5. Quoted by Isabel Carlisle, ‘Early Works: 1954-1970’, ibid, p. 34.
6. Carlisle, ibid., p. 34.
7. Ibid, p. 34.
8. Bomberg quoted by Lampert, op. cit., p. 21.
9. Norman Rosenthal, ‘Auerbach and His History’, ibid., p. 12.
10. Lampert, op. cit., p.21.
11. Quoted ibid, p. 23.
12. Quoted ibid, p.23.
13. Ibid, p.25.
14. Ibid, p. 25.
15. Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 12.
16. Quoted by Carlisle, ‘Drawings’, ibid, p. 124.
17. Ibid, p. 124.

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