Frank Auerbach Read online

  Polaroid photograph of J.Y.M. in pose, c. 1987

  Julia, 1988–89

  Hughes sat in 1986 and described the primitive conditions in the studio, ‘a troglodyte’s den of internalization’, and the agitated artist: ‘Auerbach works on the balls of his feet, balanced like a welterweight boxer, darting in and out … He recites from memory long runs of Yeats, George Barker and Auden … He hisses and puffs. He darts back to consult the reflection of the drawing in a mirror on the wall … Now and again he fumbles out a book from the nearby shelf, opens it to a reproduction – Giacometti’s Woman with her Throat Cut, Cézanne’s Self-portrait with Cap – and lays it on the floor where he can see it, “to have something good to look at,” a purpose not kind to the sitter’s vanity, until one understands that Auerbach is hoping for osmosis.’ 30 From the perspective of the artist, given the constrictions of having a sitter who was a busy writer living in New York, it was a relief to finish on a Monday morning after just fourteen sittings. Auerbach reported to Hughes, what ‘appeared in front of me’ was a ‘rather dark and laborious’ drawing that ‘was of a sort that I hadn’t predicted and which I hope is finished’.31

  Head of Michael Podro, 1981

  Lucian Freud, 1980–81

  During a conversation that was held at the Prince’s Drawing School in 2007, William Feaver asked Auerbach whether the talking with sitters that went on in the first hour posing was a response to the sitter’s interest in chatter or something useful. ‘For many years, for the first twenty-five years, I didn’t talk at all, and it produced a certain sort of painting of which I’m not ashamed. But gradually it seemed to me just a little bit as though one was part of this fancy-dress party of art where people came in one costume. There was stripe man or the splash man or the painting-of-the-greenhouse-in-a-particular-way man. And it seemed to me that there was something about people and their movement, and talk and so on, that perhaps had slightly slipped away in these hieratic heads, and – maybe it’s simply weakness – I gradually found myself talking. But I talk more with you than with anybody else.’ 32

  With the paintings of Jake, Julia and myself, sitters who began in the 1970s, Frank started going from picture to picture without a break until it became accepted that the arrangement might continue indefinitely and thus it became part of one’s whole life. David Landau began sitting in 1982; Ruth Bromberg posed from 1992 until she became too ill in 2008; William Feaver began in 2003; thus Auerbach now works from five people, in all cases these are two-hour sessions except for Julia who poses on an evening and the following morning in Finsbury Park.

  If I try to recall Auerbach at 47, the age he was when I began model-ling for him, I believe he was behaving in an even more zealous, reckless, sort of extemporizing way, not just in the studio, than he does now. When younger I would plunge into daydream scenarios, and there is one painting from 1986 where my tears and scrunched face coincided with the last minutes when the picture emerged. After sixteen years, I volunteered to alter my pose, suggesting that instead of always sitting looking forward, merely changing outfits when a new picture began, I would stand or lie down. Frank thought about this and before I arrived the next week wrote to explain why he rejected the idea. ‘I have got a sort of foam rubber thing: a KARRIMAT (used successfully at 28,000 feet on Everest) and I was going to get a little cushion – but I do not really take to the whole idea. If I put down the Karrimat, and you were to “pose” on it, the whole thing would turn into an activity that would be inimical to everything I am trying to do. All sorts of artists, perhaps most of the good ones, have painted “models” “posing”, but I am interested in recording things, not models posing, but people who come to the studio as it exists. I could quite understand, if after all these years of heroic effort in posing for me, and with everything that you have to do, you simply found coming, and sitting, on Monday evenings too much for you. I would quite understand if you called a halt. I have a photograph of the drawing we finished a week ago on Saturday, and would like more than anything to have another go at another drawing – but you will obviously have to finish sometime.’ 33

  Head of Catherine Lampert, 1986

  As it happened, this was an unusually confusing period for me: as well as my job as director at the Whitechapel Gallery, I was looking after a young daughter, had a new love and was facing a life-threatening disease. These circumstances actually made me, like the other sitters, who are each dealing with their own issues, wish even more eagerly to continue posing.

  Auerbach underplays the stamina, mental and physical, required to paint non-stop for hours on his feet, in the course of which his hands and clothes become increasingly covered in paint. To suggest it is frenetic would be misleading, there are times when Frank is standing quietly, fairly close to the easel and then moving back. A good deal of the action is reaching for paint from the tins and tubes; the jar of white spirit is next to a cluster of spatulas on a small trolley where basic colours are laid out in blobs; the brush mixing and sloshing, picking up what is needed – the painting sounds hint at how things are going. Other movements include blotting areas with squares of newspaper, scraping, looking at the picture from different angles, changing the orientation on the easel and seeing what is happening to the painting from its reflection. One of the most impressive things to watch is how Auerbach juggles four or five brushes in his left hand, splayed, each available for immediate use. What might have seemed dramatic to Hughes, is rather more normal and not a method; it belongs to the studio where the atmosphere is somehow sacrosanct.

  Conversation might resume while the painting goes on, with Auerbach perhaps speaking almost involuntarily, the way someone driving a car might initiate topics and then lapse into concentration and silence. In any case, the sitters also prefer to be silent at times, focusing on trying to keep still, even when their thoughts might be fretful or turbulent, or blown away by a few minutes sleep. The relationship with each sitter is different, but we all know by far the greater pressure is on the artist. Jake’s observation is true for all the long-term models: ‘Frank feels very strongly the responsibility of taking someone else’s time. Not just for himself. Part of both of our feelings is about punctuality. He does feel that time is precious, when someone is under the weather, perhaps he pushes himself harder.’ Julia paints, going to Norfolk one week a month to do just this, and especially understands that he is having to hold something visual in his head: ‘it is a thing that’s alive’, he has to go with it, ‘it has to come out of what’s happening to you’.

  At each sitting, the first session lasts nearly an hour, followed by a few minutes break, then another hour. You might be looking across the room at the heap of plastic bags and newspapers in the corner, but as Auerbach has commented, the information he is gaining is more than about a model posed against a static backdrop: ‘Because if you’re drawing anything, even a person, your head goes up and down and swivels. What you’re seeing is in fact lots and lots of different linear perspectives that interpenetrate. So you’ve got to invent … the irrational marks actually seem a better record than the literal ones. They suggest things, and suddenly in a corner of the picture you get a little bit of truth, which might actually expand into a whole truth … What happens is that the painting begins to speak back to one.’ 34

  A narrative about the experience of sitting, even one as sympathetic as Martin Gayford’s Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (2010), could not describe what happens in Mornington Crescent. In later years Freud was inclined to engage his subjects on impulse, prompted by curiosity about how they might look naked or what it was like to be a business tycoon, taking, as Gayford says, ‘a novelist’s attitude to people’.35 His sitters were able to observe paintings gradually realized, even if the pace felt interminable. He kept them on tenterhooks, seeking his approbation. Most were wrapped into his life outside painting, as companions for dinner, as children, as lovers, but then relatively speaking ignored. I have known both artists and watch
ed them work, and from what I have seen nothing that happens in Auerbach’s studio grows organically; the emotional and physical temperature is more desperate. Frank, as he has remarked, feeds on ‘the conflict between reality and its awkward edges’, which drives him ‘to get something sheer and complete – something trapped rather than arranged’.36 But perhaps there is greater underlying trust and normality, certainly since he began to have sitters come on regular days, decade after decade, the friendships and routines each distinct. ‘The way I work with different people who sit for me is the way I work when they’re there. I’m affected by their mood, certainly. I’m aware that sometimes they’re impatient: it affects me. I’m aware that something may have happened to them: that affects me. But it’s all part of the process of keeping a lively activity going. But the living activity is not pure recording. The living activity is something that feeds into an architecturally separate form.’ 37

  Head of David Landau, 1995–96

  Studio interior, May 1985

  Ruth Bromberg Seated, 2002–03

  A beacon of integrity

  Viewed over a lifetime, Auerbach’s intentions compare less to his contemporaries and more to Giacometti’s paintings and sculptures of Diego, Annette, Caroline and others who came routinely to his Parisian studio in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron. It could be, as Auerbach puts it, ‘because one recognizes an individual likeness by the deviation from a norm. The deeper the portraiture, the deeper the deviation. This can be sensed as an absolute quality but I also, briefly, met Annette and was confirmed in my feeling that the likenesses are totally convincing.’ 38

  David Landau flies to London specially in order to sit, to discuss art, to know he is understood. In his view, Frank is ‘a beacon of integrity, generosity, humility and a constant source of joy and fun’.39 Landau’s wife thinks no one knows this businessman and art historian as well as Auerbach does. Jake has observed that Frank loves company when he (increasingly rarely) encounters it: ‘When I sit there is usually a bit of discussion or chat in the first half which then gutters and dies as momentum decreases and the work takes over. My partner, Lizzy, sometimes collects me from the studio at which point Frank’s talk will burst back into flame as the oxygen of a new person enters the room … Lizzy is an actress which helps, Frank is still in love and awe of all actors.’ 40 Each of his sitters feeds in information about art and artists, different generations, their current preoccupations. Frank is curious about the tribulations and adventures of his small group of friends and their families. There are drawings of escapades and machines by Landau’s 9-year-old twins pinned to the wall above the desk in the studio, and Frank remarked recently, ‘I’m sorry I won’t be around to see what Max and Mia Landau do.’

  From today’s perspective it is unthinkable that one of the five remaining sitters should stop. When Frank says things like, ‘one’s trying to get some work done before one dies’ (that was in 1998), we take it as another way of suggesting that mortality is just something so obvious, so linked with sentimentality for those remaining (not an Auerbach weakness) that time is wasted by public mourning or by worrying continuously about ill health. When I ask Frank why he keeps the same sitters, he answers, ‘Because I’m interested in them, and I know that includes you, and because it takes so long, by the time I’ve finished a picture, the person has changed and also there is a certain security in knowing that they are able to sit, and …’. I add, ‘And they are so keen to sit!’ Over time he gets more engaged, as the models grow older and change: ‘You’ve done certain things, and you hope to do something else, and you hope it will go out further in some direction. I know it’s only a factor but it gives one some sort of gauge, one’s done that, so one’s not going to do these things again, so I’m going to go into new territory.’

  I wondered about the self-portraits, done on occasion in the early years: two drawings (1958–59) and one painting (1961–65), and a later picture in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery made over seven years, 1994– 2001. Now they happen regularly. He told Jackie Wullschlager, writing in the Financial Times in 2012: ‘When I was young, my head seemed bland: I never had the narcissism of Courbet or Dürer, who obviously thought themselves marvellous-looking chaps. As I got more wrinkly, with bags under the eyes, the whole landscape became more interesting. But I also partly started doing them because people were talking more when I painted them, and there’s something refreshing about going back to silence.’ 41

  If you stare at or pass by one of Auerbach’s pictures day after day, the image changes with the angle of approach and the light, as most paintings do, but more so. Many have a comic aspect, top-knots and bird-like eyes, heads on stalks, features that are more readable and naturalistic if you squint. Sometimes the effect is animalistic, the scale jumping from telescopic to amplified, picture to picture, the thin line of the lips both characteristic and nuanced to catch a split-second’s expression.

  Self-Portrait II, 2013

  Reclining Head of Julia II, 1996

  Head of Julia II, 1999

  In the Studio, 2013–14

  The large landscapes are too awkward to move off the easel and turn to the wall, so the sitters watch them progress, week by week, which is thrilling and a privilege. In 2013–14, the ‘landscape’ is a corner of the studio, in which the focus is on what is on the easel, but the view takes in the pots of paint, brushes and the blue plastic that protects the wall. The creator hovers on the right, a large head reflected in the mirror. Judging by one of the small versions (see opposite) of the larger In the Studio (2013–14), there might, unusually, be vivid bright cylinders and cubes – the materials on the workbench. By the end, however, the palette was cool and the detail reduced. ‘It’s never recording, it’s never topography, and it’s always using the material in order to make an image that has a character of its own … All good painting is abstract in a sense that good painting is abstraction, the better you are painting, the more it feels like dealing with nameless formal things, but non-figurative painting is only for people who believe there is a secret reality beneath, a human will, as Philip Larkin wrote, “To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower/Of being here”.’

  DAVID DAWSON, Frank outside the studio, 2009

  Conclusion

  The book of life

  ‘There’s a phrase of Sickert’s where he speaks somewhere about something succeeding in that it is like a page torn from the book of life. I’d like what I do not to be Art with a capital A, although it may or may not be incorporated into that concept. What I’d like it to be is a page torn from that book of life, even though it’s an abstracted image.’ 1

  Auerbach has said he hopes his art will reach ‘the misfit in the backroom’, and as far as audience goes, in his experience, ‘people who are responsive to painting are a particular set of people who respond to painting. I don’t think there’s any other classifying equality about them.’ 2 An extreme example of how Frank’s pictures strike unexpected chords happened during the retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy in 2001, beginning with the opening reception on 11 September. I remember viewers looking at the crusted images of postwar bomb sites, the Camden Town scenes where rough, burnt-black ‘girders’ indicate the hard man-made matter on the streets, the artist’s extreme response to pointed chimneys, metal gates and tower blocks and to buildings tapering upwards in window-filled storeys. Some were clearly thinking of what had happened to the Twin Towers and their occupants that morning. For visitors over the next three months, Auerbach’s portraits also spoke to ‘Rembrandt’s Women’, the other exhibition in the RA’s main galleries that autumn; after all, even the title conjures up women who still seem alive, especially Hendrickje Stoffels, bathing in a stream, wrapped in fur, or, perhaps, as Bathsheba at her toilet. Frank’s pictures of Stella and, stretching now for four decades, of Julia, are similarly sensuous, particular to the person and to the fragility of life.

  A postcard always visible in Frank’s studio is of Matisse’s Head,
White and Rose (1914–15), a portrait of his daughter, Marguerite. It began, as an X-radiograph confirms, naturalistically, with her rounded jaw lines and the neck ribbon with pendant, though according to Marguerite, Matisse said during a working session: ‘This painting wants to take me somewhere else. Do you feel up to it?’ 3 Striped bands describe her dress, and a black angular armature is imposed across the face and neck that locks the pink tones of her skin into the whole scheme. The result is nominally geometric, with the nod to Cubism, yet it is also so dependent on the relationship and ultimately so believable – as Auerbach put it, she ‘looks back at us with a gaze as direct and human as Rembrandt in his self-portraits’. 4

  Art historians and critics discussing Auerbach’s work often exhort their audience not to be ‘parochial’ and place the artist only in a British context. Michael Kimmelman, reviewing Frank’s New York exhibition in 2006, designated Auerbach as one of the ‘best painters around’. He described charcoal drawings where the faces made of ‘hooks, crotchets and scrawls’ were pushed even further than Giacometti’s to ‘the edge of coherence while still registering as characters’, and he suggested that many of his fellow Americans were ‘natively uneasy with any art that’s so frankly self-serious and indifferent to novelty’.5

  Relatively few parallels or contrasts have been drawn between Auerbach and outstanding painters of the same age working in other countries, such as Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Gerhard Richter (b. 1932). Those two artists are commonly associated with signs specific to their times and culture: Johns’s bronze tins of Ballantine Ale or his paintings of the American flag, and Richter’s work based on blurred photographs of terrorists or family snapshots. In the 1960s and today they are commended by curators for their brilliance in defining strategies and inventing a process to return painting to relevance in an age of lens-based images, to accommodate paradox, irony and art history.