Frank Auerbach Read online

  As soon as Auerbach engaged with these built-up street scenes, he yearned for something more organic, telling me in 1978, ‘I’ve done these subjects because I’ve wanted to do them in both cases, but there is a certain limitation in the angularity of the conjunctions. To turn to a new subject isn’t a conscious thing and it isn’t even a thing of ambition because I think my ambition would be to paint some large figures, but the circumstances of my life at the moment make me feel that this would be an artificial image. I don’t know how, but these things are in some sense symbolic. On the other hand I have become tired of these angular geometries which I’ve dealt with and tried to supersede, and so recently I’ve gone to Primrose Hill and I’ve drawn the clouds and there are certain massy, turning, pillowey, featherbeddy convolutions of earth and sky that have seemed to me a stimulus to try and get an image that extends my repertoire.’ 16

  The drawings made each morning are useful for gathering information; one day Auerbach might draw a street, concentrating on all the chimneys, and the next morning focus on the television aerials. ‘Often I find myself looking at the one I’ve done today. The drawing is a mnemonic so one remembers what one saw outside so it is only one step removed from working with a model present. I do sometimes find one drawing is more stimulating or odd.’ Questions about what can be identified – the vehicle, the jogger, the expression flickering across a sitter’s face, whether these belong to a single occasion – will elicit replies along the following lines from Frank: ‘There are all those things, sometimes unrecognizable to other people, but they are certainly recognizable to me. Some things are just brushstrokes and I don’t remember what they are. Courbet when questioned replied, “C’est la peinture”.’

  A hawthorn tree with angled trunk on Primrose Hill became the subject of seven paintings in the years 1985–87, with the branches spanning the upper register of the canvas: ‘a tree that shoulders the cloud ceiling’.17 However, the choice of tree was a sort of accident. ‘I don’t know how or why I was doing that tree, partly for the sake of variety … sometimes Julia came with me – the white coat is Julia. That’s a dog, there are people. That one is striding up the hill, but these facts are not really relevant because it changes. I’ve got a feeling a man was taking off his jogging bottoms, something fairly complicated. As the painting goes on, people come in, sometimes they disappear.’ Auerbach remembers trying to get the feeling of the branch shaking in the wind into the rhythm of the painting.

  Camden Theatre in the Rain, 1977

  Primrose Hill, 1979–80

  The Studios – Spring Morning, 1980–81

  Going out at dawn to draw provides both information and a kind of compost. ‘I never visualize a picture before I start. I have an impulse and I try to find a form for that impulse. The great benefit of manuring the thing with reality is that reality continually belies one’s expectations: where one expects the grand sweep it suddenly starts becoming petty, where one expects it to be hard it becomes soft, the proportions – almost every day one goes out there, one has different sensations about them.’ 18 Actually this is not so different from painting people; the sitters are sometimes simply some kind of anthropomorphic raw material: ‘they’re there to feed this new, independent image that one’s trying to make, that stalks into the world like a new monster’.19 A photograph from 1987 shows two sets of drawings pinned to a board, for the Tree on Primrose Hill (1987) and From the Studios (1987), the latter taking in a large plane tree with an indication of a man in the foreground, the artist. A sketch of The Vendramin Family by Titian and his workshop in the National Gallery is partly visible under one of the From the Studios drawings, perhaps to help resolve one of the compositions.

  When the Mornington Crescent studio was modernized by the architects Long & Kentish in 1990, the inclusion of a small kitchen, a mezzanine level for the bed and an indoor toilet meant he lost space. Auerbach began to find it more convenient to concentrate on one large landscape at a time and to make small versions of the same subject, sometimes beginning one mid-way through working on the large picture. After 2010 this practice has ‘crept up on me again, now it’s almost always that I have one or two, or three, or in some cases four little ones on the go, which are not replicas and are not studies, they are just to keep one’s mind moving, different conceptions of the subject’. I ask him if the smaller landscapes are treated less dramatically, in a different vernacular. ‘I don’t know what they look like to other people; I just do them. But in both cases it is a question of getting something that hangs together formally, and the actual idiom, whether it’s got harsher lines or softer lines, is almost an accident, because the day before it might have had an entirely different look.’

  Tree on Primrose Hill, 1987

  Chris Steele-Perkins, Drawings for Tree on Primrose Hill and From the Studios, with sketch after Titian, 1987

  Over time Auerbach found that when he was working for more than a year on a picture he might have done over two hundred sketches for a painting and was gradually getting even more dependent on his subject. This exhaustive research has parallels to writers’ methods. For example, Auerbach describes the books by Philip Roth that feature activities such as fishing and cutting through ice as ‘very good novels’ because ‘he feeds in an immense amount of research, which is like doing drawings every day. Graham Greene was the same.’

  The chimney in Mornington Crescent is another local landmark that Auerbach frequently passes. Thinking it rather remarkable, like Cleopatra’s Needle, the Egyptian obelisk on the Embankment in London, he first tried to paint it in 1987. To him, the configurations around this towering form seemed like canyons. In the direction of another new view, south down Hampstead Road, the set of three tower blocks with ‘different coloured head-bands on them’ ended up in one painting.

  In a way the pictures of Mornington Crescent and surroundings are not dissimilar from the early building sites: there are always new street barriers, shops, signs and obstacles, and yet the concrete shapes remain unchanged. Auerbach began painting a pub awning near Mornington Crescent station in 2008. ‘If one feels one sort of mastered it, it loses its appeal perhaps. I have no memory and it may be that I go out there again and start doing it in drawings. I once had the extraordinary experience of doing two paintings of Primrose Hill from exactly the same site and until I had finished the second one I hadn’t even realized it was the same site, because until I had finished with it, all I was thinking about was the identification with the material which I saw in front of me as if for the first time. Age plays a part. There is a sort of jostling and one has to be sort of tough to draw around there… the last few paintings outside have the street that I’m in, or the house that I’m in, so it means less walking about in the morning and one is cosy. It’s surprising how many people see what you are doing, and minicab drivers say, “You’re the man that draws in the street.” Everything feeds into painting if you are receptive. Nothing is planned and

  Mornington Crescent – Early Morning, 1992–93

  nothing needs to be justified. It’s got to do with sensation. It’s all done on one’s nerves.’ He remains dependent on the Mornington Crescent studio, sensing that if he lost it he would be ‘like a snail without a shell’.

  Tower Blocks, Hampstead Road, 2007

  I asked Frank if when responding to what is far away and wishing to connect it to something in proximity it feels metaphorically as if he is gliding through space, then zooming in. ‘Yes, that’s part of the excitement of painting. There is an eloquent piece of rhetoric by Giacometti where he says, “The distance between one side of a nose and the other is like the Sahara, boundless.”’ A passage in the painter Rackstraw Downes’s little book, In Relation to the Whole (2000), begins by discussing the difference in method between Maupassant and Chekhov, then he finds parallels in terms of artists with contrasting approaches, ‘for instance, in the way Rubens shows you around his newly acquired country place, the Chateau de Steen, with exhilarated rapidity and an eye for
the typical, rushing you off into the distance like the pilot of a tiny plane skimming the hedges in an eager take-off; while Constable, who borrowed a lot from Rubens’s compositions, wanders through the landscape of The Hay Wain at a more ruminative pace, allowing himself to be diverted by a gentle, affectionate attention to the individual things around him.’ Nudged to respond to Constable’s Hay Wain (1821), Auerbach answers more broadly: ‘As a painter you use everything, you use your sketches and you use your imagination. He [Constable] cared enormously about detail but it isn’t mimetic realism. You get the same sky in three different paintings.’ He went on to compare the two giants of English art: ‘When Turner paints a frosty morning it somehow seems like an enchanted vision; whatever Constable paints always seems like lived-through reality … But there isn’t a Turner that doesn’t somehow fly and there isn’t a Constable that doesn’t burrow.’ 20

  Frank’s imagination operates like Rubens, Turner, Jacob van Ruisdael, Constable and many others in his exploration of a city park and various intersections, which for him are as thrilling to explore as an ‘estate’. Does he know what part of Camden Town will be next, though he has said he never thinks in terms of sequences? ‘Sometimes when I finish a picture, I just wander around with a sketchbook and ideas and some of them I don’t like. Then I find something that seems attractive’, he replies. ‘It was very different at the beginning. I was looking for compositions, I know I was. The drawings I did for early paintings seem to me to have a composition, and now, I am thinking of ones of the Pillar Box [2010–11] and … The Bridge [2006]; I very much look for things that are not compositions at all, that don’t seem like art. I see whether I can try and paint them, something that for some reason or other is not a fitting material for any particular sort of picture but a piece of undigested reality. I try to find a way of making something of it.’

  Subjects: Painting women in rooms

  Honoré Daumier, one of the artists Auerbach responds to, found it impossible to work directly from life, whether in the streets or in the studio. His pictures depended on memory and empathy and yet they seem not just anatomically convincing, they are also really lively. Auerbach commented that the only work he missed in the Daumier show at the Royal Academy of Arts (2013–14) was one of the ‘sweaty’ nudes. There are only a few, all intended as paintings that might be accepted by the Salon jury or as subjects for a few ill-fated commissions Daumier began in the post-1848 period; for example, a kneeling, loose-haired woman supposed to be The Magdalen in the Desert I (1849–50) and two buxom, swaying Women Pursued by Satyrs (1850).21 The subjects from his neighbourhood on the Ile Saint-Louis – the laundresses, the man on the rope, the clown – solid and believable as they are, are not there to play a role; there is no literary, metaphorical or naturalistic backstory. As with Auerbach’s work, there is the same intense and precise atmosphere conveyed by the way the paint is laid on (and removed) that convinces the viewer it is both true and very human. ‘If something looks like a painting it does not look like an experience; if something looks like a portrait it doesn’t really look like a person.’ 22

  Robert Hughes tried to establish a line between Sickert’s nudes and Auerbach’s, specifically the older artist’s ‘two-figure interiors of 1903–10’, which he saw as deriving from Degas’s brothel scenes: ‘a man dressed, a woman naked … In their dense ribbed paint, these Sickerts describe a sexual world of Edwardian England: the curt randiness of a middle-class using the lower class as its brothel.’ 23 When he was a student Auerbach distanced himself from the admirers of Sickert’s Camden Town interiors, but he has an inborn sympathy with the milieu. ‘Helen Lessore wrote somewhere that [Sickert’s locales] are grubby miserable bedrooms: well, those bedrooms with girls in them, where the sheets smell of human congress, they don’t look in the least depressing to me – they seem to be really very jolly places. I recognize my life in those streets and in those bedrooms! I felt at home in Sickert’s world … Those Mornington Crescent bedrooms, with plump sweaty nudes in beds, seem to me extremely desirable places to be in.’ 24

  The Pillar Box, 2010–11

  One of the flats Sickert rented, 6 Mornington Crescent, is around the corner from Auerbach’s studio. However, in Frank’s pictures no one is leaning on a dresser, or reaching for their clothes, almost never do a man and woman share a space. Back in 1978 I wanted to know whether this was deliberate. Frank claimed he would not exclude such daily acts on principle, ‘But I wouldn’t put a model into a situation of pretending to be combing her hair or in fact having a bath – although God knows, Degas did enough good paintings of people presumably pretending to have baths for hours on end – simply because it seems to be a false situation and I think I should feel to some extent uncomfortable.’ 25

  The direction in which Auerbach’s art might go with respect to painting naked figures was tested in the 1960s through the use he made of J.Y.M. Her availability was ‘a piece of blind luck’ and specific to her. ‘She was brought into the world to be a model, she came and sat and it was not quite like anything else. It wasn’t like painting Stella or painting Julia, because it was just that … She took poses that were natural to her, and then I sometimes suggested things and one would go on. It became like a central spine of what one was doing.’

  Across forty years, 1957–97, J.Y.M. grows older. Drawn in charcoal and pastel, sitting on the chair in 1960, her body is spectral, her legs thin and tapering (see p. 90). By 1963, when the focus is often on her head and neck, she is identified as J.Y.M., and can just about be recognized by a curious defiance that is actually a sense of complicity. Lying on the bed in the studio, with the paraffin stove in the foreground, her body is both graphic and curvaceous; during the 1980s five or even eight small paintings might be done in succession. In the same period, when Auerbach begins isolating J.Y.M.’s head, especially lying down or in profile, dark sweeps of the brush convey tenacity and a person who is clearly older and less steady. ‘At some time I thought it wasn’t relevant to ask her to pose nude.’

  After J.Y.M. the women Auerbach engaged were younger, and for them modelling was a temporary job. The experience of Deborah Ratcliff, an Australian who was earning money in the life-room at the Slade in 1983, suggests the incompatibility of Frank’s need to shed inhibitions with the presence of strangers. When she arrived, Auerbach seemed shy and impatient to get started, asking her to undress and lie on the bed in a relaxed position. ‘The only way I could cope with this was to lie facing away from him. For the next forty minutes or so I listened to the canvas being attacked. There was grunting, groaning and rattling and lunging. Paint was obviously being sloshed about, then scraped and blotted with paper. All this energy was disconcerting. I couldn’t see it but I could feel it and there was something quite sexual about it. At the end of the two-hour session, Frank thanked me and gestured at the money, my earnings, underneath one of three clocks on a table against a paint-splattered wall … My next session with Frank was on the Thursday, same time at 5 p.m. This time Frank asked me if I didn’t mind keeping my clothes on. Didn’t mind? I was thrilled. The studio was far from warm and I was to sit on a chair facing him.’ 26 Three austere, unusually vertical portraits of this future writer resulted, her name in the titles, all shown in Venice in 1986.

  Auerbach continued to contact art colleges to find models, telephoning those on a list, until one answered. ‘It is a bit like roulette … ’ 27 There was an Israeli woman, and one with lots of make-up who came two weeks and not the third. Frank told Hughes, ‘I feel uncomfortable painting people nude with whom I haven’t had physical relations.’ 28 One might identify as a mini-series the several half-length pictures of Julia, all begun in 1987, that describe her naked upper body. Writing in 2001, I saw them as terrifying and protective: ‘Each image has the totality of a shrine filled with ex-voto tokens. Descriptive parts sometimes seem to be applied rather savagely, like handfuls, scooped up and thrust onto the surface, forced into new disharmonies by the thinner skin and acidity of acryl
ic, with its resistance to tonal palpability.’ 29

  Subjects: Sitters

  During the decade c. 1971–81, some eighteen sitters came to the studio to sit for one or two pictures. There was no logic in the choice of people; Auerbach insists he acted then, as always, more by instinct. For example, he met the artist Stephen Finer in the French Pub and thought he would like to paint him; his ex-student Christopher Couch was stopped when he passed by on a bicycle; Francesca Brewer and Shane Dunworth were friends of David Landau. Several sitters had Marlborough connections, such as Christopher Dark, James Kirkman and Geoffrey Parton; others were long-standing friends, Michael and Charlotte Podro, Margaret Schuelein, Ken Garland, Sandra Fisher and Bruce Bernard; as well as a few who asked to pose, such as Jill and Tom Phillips, or did so to have an opportunity to talk, as was the case with Robert Hughes. In most instances he began with drawings, which normally take dozens of sittings and as many months as paintings. They might begin in charcoal and be realized by adding ink and chalk marks. On one occasion, in 1980, on a visit to Joe Tilson’s studio in Somerset he tried a new technique, drawing a portrait of the artist on a plate that was made into an etching. In London he continued with five more heads of other artist friends (Kitaj, Kossoff and Freud) or relatives (Julia and Gerda Boehm), using a dart as his implement, and experimented with different acids and inks at the Palm Tree Studios. The etching of Freud was printed from four plates, with the tonal effect coming from mixed blacks and greys.

  Figure on Bed, 1968

  Head of J.Y.M. – Profile II, 1987