Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting Read online

  About the author

  Catherine Lampert is an independent curator and art historian. She has curated numerous exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Whitechapel Gallery, where she was director from 1988 to 2001. The subjects of these exhibitions have ranged from old to contemporary masters, including Auguste Rodin, Honoré Daumier, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Peter Doig and Michael Andrews. She has also been responsible for exhibitions at European museums, and in 2014 she co-curated ‘Bare Life’, an exhibition of postwar British figurative painting at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster. Her publications include various exhibition catalogues as well as Francis Alÿs: The Prophet and the Fly and Euan Uglow: The Complete Paintings.

  Other titles of interest published by

  Thames & Hudson include:

  Man With a Blue Scarf

  On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

  A Bigger Message

  Conversations with David Hockney

  Looking back at Francis Bacon

  The Books that Shaped Art History

  From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss

  www.thamesandhudson.com

  www.thamesandhudsonusa.com

  Contents

  Preface

  1.

  Finding a Home in England

  2.

  Forging a Reputation

  3.

  ‘Painting is My Form of Action’

  4.

  The Best Game

  5.

  Idiom and Subject

  Conclusion

  Notes • Selected Bibliography

  Chronology • List of Illustrations

  Permissions • Acknowledgments • Index

  Preface

  For the first few years I was sitting for Frank Auerbach it was hard to reconcile listening to someone so knowledgeable, so gifted in expressing his thoughts and memories, with the person who spent nearly all his time concentrating his whole being on a very messy, physically as well as mentally arduous process that took place in a cramped room. This painter not only resisted public obligations or any appointments, but also rarely socialized and almost never travelled, and then for only a handful of days.

  When I was a student at University College London and the Slade, the paintings I saw in the Auerbach exhibition at the Marlborough in January 1967 made an indelible impression on me: the channels and skeins of paint marked a radical departure from representation, but the human subjects suggested complicity and the human imprint on the landscape was made visible, airlifting the viewer back to the life pulse of places and people. We met some ten years later when I was assigned as the exhibition organizer for the Hayward Gallery retrospective of the artist’s work that opened in London in May 1978, and I began sitting for him that month. Recording and editing a conversation for the catalogue, it was then that I began to see how Auerbach’s candid and uncompromising statements and his use of analogies provide a guide to the way he thinks, especially as he has never wanted to demystify art. For example, ‘There’s a phrase by Robert Frost about his own verse, I don’t know what it means about verse, and I really barely comprehend what it suggests about painting, but it seems to me to be absolutely true. He said, “I want the poem to be like ice on a stove – riding on its own melting.” Well, a great painting is like ice on a stove. It is a shape riding on its own melting into matter and space; it never stops moving backwards and forwards.’

  Frank famously resists any invasion of his private life. Apart from several pages in the catalogue of the Royal Academy of Arts retrospective of his work in 2001, the published chronologies of his life and career in various publications consist only of bare facts. The usual terse second line, ‘1939: Arrived in England’, is no doubt a result of his defence against insistent curiosity during interviews about the experience of being a Jewish child dispatched from Berlin in the company of strangers, and who lost his parents in the Holocaust. One reason for trying not to impute the significance of relationships and feelings is that, as he says about his own recollections, ‘it is impossible to be certain of what goes on when people forget themselves’.

  MARC TRIVIER, Frank Auerbach seated in his studio, 1982

  Head of Catherine Lampert, 1985

  In writing about Auerbach, a biographical approach is not really appropriate, apart from in chapter 1, where I discuss his early years. Another consideration (besides his studio-bound life) is that the subjects of his paintings have been virtually unvarying – urban landscapes or portraits. Since he does not make plans or work in series, even discussion of ‘development’ is fairly artificial. Every painting is meant to be as different as possible from the last. If you ask him about his intentions and approach you are likely to get an answer such as this: ‘I can’t talk a great deal about the look of my paintings because they are really on the other side of the footlights. I find it somehow fruitless and it makes me self-conscious. Painting for me is a set of connections, a set of sensations of conflicting movements and experiences, which somehow, one hopes, has congealed or cohered or risen out of the battle into being an image that stands up for itself. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at my own painting.’

  For these reasons, this is a book arranged by topic and theme, with the chronology of the sections sometimes overlapping. The emphasis, as indicated by the book’s subtitle, Speaking and Painting, is on Auerbach’s professional life, working methods and views, as conveyed by, or implicit in, his own words. In this endeavour, I have been fortunate in being able to draw not only on my own notes and unpublished recordings of conversations with Frank, augmented by his vivid recall, but also his turns of phrase and observations in a rich assortment of interviews, some now difficult to access, as well as material in the archives of his gallery, Marlborough Fine Art. Clearly the book is underscored by intense admiration for his great achievement as an artist and is meant to complement, instead of being a substitute for, the experience of standing in front of one of his paintings.

  Frank drawing, Berlin, c. 1935

  Chapter One

  Finding a Home in England

  Berlin childhood

  Born on 29 April 1931, Frank Helmut Auerbach, an only child of older parents, recalls being coddled in a way that even at a young age felt suffocating. This stemmed not only from the memory of being dressed in a blue velvet suit but also from the fact that his daily life was rather isolated from other children, with little freedom to play unwatched. The flat where he lived with his parents, Max Auerbach (b. 1890) and Charlotte Nora Borchardt Auerbach (b. 1902), was in a tall building with a large courtyard at 49 Güntzelstrasse in Wilmersdorf, a middle-class area of Berlin.1 A brass plate at the entrance announced his father’s name and credentials: he was a patent lawyer specializing in engineering and had his office at home. He had served in the army during the Great War and been awarded a medal of distinction. Pudgy and blond with glasses, Max Auerbach was descended from a long line of rabbis, including his father, Mannheim. Frank’s mother’s family, also Jewish, came from Lithuania; she was a dark-haired woman with a fine figure, although her jaw, like that of other Borchardts, protruded somewhat. Charlotte had studied art as a young woman and had been married before.

  The family lived in comfortable circumstances, milk and fresh rolls were delivered daily to the door. Frank’s parents seemed to get on, although his father was more relaxed and indulgent than his mother. ‘One of the few sort of tags of memories is of him buying a particular sort of bun for me and sitting opposite and seeming to take pleasure in the fact that I was greedily eating it.’ Objects on his large desk, especially a blotter and paper punch, amused his son. Other recol
lections are telling, such as the gift of a paint-box. ‘I remember vividly putting a wet brush for the first time onto a cake of watercolour and I think one of my tricks, like you get a dog to roll over, was that I did little drawings, and in my case they were of Red Indians on scooters, which I was asked to draw. I can’t have been more than three or four.’ 2 Among his books, Kai aus der Kiste (1926) by Wolf Durian was a favourite. It was ‘about a German boy who stowed away, in a wooden box, for America. He had a great success in the States by devising ever more amazing advertising stunts.’ 3 In conversation, memories still occasionally surface, as when I described going to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2013 to watch Kraftwerk perform. Mentioning their nostalgic song of 1974, ‘Autobahn’, Auerbach commented that when one of the first sections of the Berlin ring road opened in 1936, taking a drive was a popular diversion. The family stopped at the observatory just off the motorway, and the five-year-old impressed the grown-ups by coming out with the word ‘meteor’.

  Frank with his mother, Charlotte, Berlin, c. 1931

  Max Auerbach, the artist’s father, Berlin, c. 1932

  The rise of the Nazi party and the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in January 1933 were a cause of anxiety and, already nervous by nature, Frank’s mother was fearful of the mounting anti-Semitism. On one occasion, when the nanny took Frank to the park, he was given a sweet in the street and, hearing of this and alarmed that someone had been trying to poison her son, his mother put him to bed so she could watch for tell-tale signs. As time went on, the restrictions on Jews increased, particularly after the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 that defined who was Jewish, and when the licences of Jewish lawyers were revoked, the plate at the entrance had to be changed to ‘Max Auerbach, Engineering Graduate’.

  Uncle Jakob, his father’s older brother, was also a lawyer. His partner, Dr Altenberg, retired to Italy in 1938. There he met the wealthy Anglo-American writer Iris Origo, who was to provide a lifeline for Frank. Iris, who had grown up in Fiesole, had married a minor Italian aristocrat, Antonio Origo, in 1924 and the couple then devoted their lives to improving the poverty-stricken estate of La Foce that they bought in the Val d’Orcia in southeast Tuscany. Origo had started a school for the children of local peasants, most of whom were illiterate.4 This led her to correspond with Anna Essinger, a German Jewish educator who had opened her own school, Landschulheim Herrlingen, near Ulm in south Germany in 1926. The teaching was informed by Essinger’s studies at American universities, and especially by her identification with Quaker principles. She embraced the educational philosophy known as Reformpädagogik whereby pupils and staff were considered equal and everyone was responsible for the common good of the school.5 By 1933, the pupils in Ulm were exclusively Jewish and, concerned about the Nazi threat, Essinger transferred the school to England. She rented, and later bought, a Georgian house, Bunce Court, near the village of Lenham and not far from the town of Faversham in the North Downs of Kent, where existing and new students were offered places. Unsurprisingly, the demand from Jewish families rapidly escalated as the Nazis’ racial laws tightened. Origo arranged with Essinger to sponsor six children to attend Bunce Court; those selected included Dr Altenberg’s nephew and niece, as well as Frank.

  Auerbach’s parents had hoped the persecution of Jews would get no worse, but facing the reality of the situation, they had acceded to Dr Altenberg’s plan. Shortly before Frank’s eighth birthday they took him to Hamburg, where on 4 April 1939 he boarded the SS Washington in the company of three people he had never met before: the Altenberg children, Heinz and Ilse, and their nanny. The four shared a second-class cabin. This temporary home offered a rather special playroom on their deck with a rocking horse; Frank remembers this and the stale odour on the ship. When it docked first at Le Havre, he saw, with horror, carcasses of meat covered in black flies hanging in the butchers’ shops. Arriving in Southampton, the group boarded a train to London and were met at Victoria station by someone from Bunce Court, who took the children down to Kent; the nanny returned to Germany. Frank’s suitcase contained his clothes and on the larger garments his mother had stitched a red cross to indicate they were for later use; on items such as tablecloths and sheets intended for when he was grown up, two red crosses had been sewn in a corner.

  Bunce Court

  The atmosphere at Bunce Court was unlike anything Frank had encountered in his previous life, yet instead of feeling abandoned he felt curiously at home, in the sense of liberated. Frank remembers being locked in a shed by two boys on his first afternoon, yet the experience ‘somehow didn’t depress me’. Later he got into a fight with another boy, and turned to a bystander to say, ‘I think I might get on a bit better if you cheered for me.’ His supporter, Michael Roemer, three years older, became a friend and the two are still close. In the nine months from December 1938 to when the war started in September 1939 a number of the other pupils at the school arrived in Britain unaccompanied on the Kindertransport organized by the Refugee Children’s Movement and World Jewish Relief. 6 The student body was not exclusively Jewish, however. Bunce Court advertised in the New Statesman and other left-wing papers, and English couples, perhaps going through a divorce and finding it awkward to look after their children, might send them there. Bruce Bernard, later a friend and a remarkable photo editor, together with his brother Jeffrey, a famous journalist, attended the school in 1936–37.

  The staff, who were all devoted to the students, consisted mostly of refugees. Joined by British conscientious objectors once war broke out, they ranged from the unqualified to the overqualified. Essinger, known as Tante Anna, frightened many students, although a few, such as Roemer, were unruffled by her manner. After Frank had been at the school for about three weeks, the younger children were moved to the junior house, called Dane Court, a half-timbered Tudor building at Chilham, some ten miles from Bunce Court. The house-teacher was Gwynne Badsworth (later Angell), an attractive, sympathetic woman, who was 28 when Auerbach arrived. ‘She didn’t have any of this nonsense about not speaking English, so within three or four weeks we all were able to communicate in English. We were enrolled as Wolf Cubs or Brownies and did country dancing in the hall. And so, without any conscious effort we were anglicized.’ In an interview with a Kent newspaper shortly before her death in 2014, Badsworth recalled that ‘Every night I would read the little ones bedtime stories. I became a mother to them,’ and she remembered Frank as shy. 7 Auerbach agrees: ‘I was a rather quiet and nervous child … my respect for the way she dealt with the uprooted children has grown over the years.’ One of the memories of the school that Frank shared with Bruce Bernard was of being given baths by the lovely Badsworth.

  Bunce Court mirrored a kind of ‘real’, grown-up life, albeit in a place ‘a bit like a closed religious community’. There were ‘duties’ for all, such as scrubbing the kitchen floor or gardening, and the older boys were asked to sift the coal to find big lumps that would stoke the boiler. Occasionally they worked on neighbouring farms, digging up potatoes, and so forth. The deprivations of wartime rationing underpinned the austerity. The cook, Gretl Heidt, called Heidtsche, was an amazingly competent German woman, briefly interned as an enemy alien, who invariably provided nourishing and attractive meals. The students were fed six times a day, which for the older children included a snack of dried fruit and cocoa before bedtime.

  Frank at Bunce Court, 1939

  Art was taught by the mathematics master and later by a pipe-smoking lady who worked with batik. Frank remembers ‘being stirred’ by a reproduction of J. M. W. Turner’s Fighting Temeraire in Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia and a poem on the opposite page. Later, when he was a bit older and ill in bed, he pored over R. H. Wilenski’s Modern French Painters (1939); the book served as a window to what Frank called ‘such a variety of styles’. Tante Anna had a Michelangelo print on the wall of her office and there were Brueghel reproductions over the dining tables, yet, as Auerbach recalls, the ambience was not art o
riented: ‘You know, there are arty schools where children are encouraged to express themselves – we weren’t encouraged to express ourselves, we were encouraged to be part of a community and to have community spirit.’ 8

  In June 1940, as the threat of German invasion increased with the fall of France, the army requisitioned Bunce Court and many Germans over the age of 16 living in Britain were interned. Tante Anna had to find replacement premises, and after a three-day search secured Trench Hall in Wem, Shropshire. This house where Frank lived for five years has stayed in his memory; it was grand enough to have a circular drive and a ha-ha, and inside a green baize door divided the living area from the servants’ quarters where bells once summoned staff to the various rooms. When he became an ‘older’ boy, Auerbach slept in the stables, which were fitted out with five bunk beds in two rows with a stove between. He and his lively Polish girlfriend, Peppi Unger, contrived to meet at night in adjacent barns; after they received their School Certificates in the summer of 1945, she left for London. Later Peppi emigrated to Israel and married, but for many years she kept in touch.

  Once the war was over, the school returned to its former premises in Kent. However, the situation was different and, with its refugee function finished and Tante Anna almost blind, Bunce Court closed in 1948. She died in 1960 and the building was sold, but over time the school’s founder, teachers and students have become something of a legend. The memories of alumni, many returning for reunions (although not Auerbach), have fed articles that tend to focus on the nurturing effects of the teaching and on pupils who achieved public recognition. They include Leslie Baruch Brent, a distinguished immunologist; Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a foreign-policy expert known as Henry Kissinger’s Kissinger (his fixer); Harold Jackson, the Guardian journalist and White House correspondent; and the musician and humorist Gerard Hoffnung.9 Just three students remained friends of Frank’s. Frank Marcus, the theatre director known for his play The Killing of Sister George (1964), Michael Roemer, who went to America after leaving school and became a filmmaker – his Nothing But a Man (1964) was unusual at the time for having a cast of largely black actors – and the flautist Rainer Schuelein.