Frank Auerbach Read online

  However, these art historical distinctions can be too crude. In 2012, Johns began working with a torn photograph c. 1958 of Lucian Freud by John Deakin reproduced in an auction catalogue for the sale of a Bacon painting. In various drawings, paintings and etchings he traced it, inverted the seated figure so that it is conjoined with its mirror image, added colour and translated details from the source into sometimes puzzle-like pieces. In the empty centre something like his own jowly, aged face in a skull-like format presides, an allusion to memories of fraught relationships and ebbing passion, strongest in the large oil realized in muted greys. The series is named Regrets.6 Looking at the catalogue Auerbach responded not just to Johns’s weeks and years of patient preparation, but also to his ability to get to the point where something truthful emerges.

  Chimney in Mornington Crescent – Winter Morning, 1991

  Reclining Head of Julia II, 2007

  Although Auerbach has shunned such hybrid tactics, nonetheless he too has changed the genres within which he works. With respect to portraits, given the practice of working with the same people over long periods, the genre has once again proved capable of a subtle argument about what it is to place yourself and the subject in an environment, where in a way there is a mutual, performative resolution that is momentarily final, while in the artist’s mind the next work is germinating. His urban landscapes respond to the undisciplined reality of life in London, but one also senses that the inhabitants – and Frank is one – have become fond of their refuse-strewn pavements and routines. Cumulatively, they constitute a half century of readings, a kind of weathervane, a suggestion of time-travel.

  In the studio, waving his arm with the gusto of a conductor, he captures on the surface of the painting myriad and precise inflections of this world. The mind taking in the image is entranced, jostled and buffeted, with the eye alighting on streaks and globules. However, on occasion this improvisation has resulted in a kind of gaiety and force that comes close to caricature: the stick figures walking away, rings of pigment around the eyes, a reclining head made of broken brushstrokes. But Auerbach is never trying to mock nor to persuade the viewer of anything and such variety and daring makes his work so thrilling to those on the other side of the footlights, and so universal.

  Lately Frank has mentioned that Delacroix is present in his mind and has said Picasso is always ‘exhorting me to be naughtier’. A reproduction of a head of Dora Maar with a funny headdress is pinned to the wall, not unlike the paintings of her in the 1946 Barr monograph. ‘When I see a Picasso, it feels like an owl blinking, its eyes coming into the light.’ Time and again, ‘he’s made this thing in his imaginative private mind and there it is and it’s captured the world. That’s what people want to see, they don’t want to see something they know about already, they don’t want to have a programme presented to them of something they believe in or approve of, they want this amazing thing they haven’t thought of before.’ 7 Auerbach believes traditional art history misunderstands the way artists think, it is not like the history of science where after one discovery previous theories fall away. Rather than think in a linear way, most artists choose what they want to study and steal from; he mentions Picasso returning to African sculpture, El Greco or Ingres, and Matisse’s interest in Persian or Indian painting. They behave in similar ways: ‘When you read the biographies of painters you discover what they did was no different to the way painters behave now. When Titian writes to someone to say “I’m sorry I haven’t finished this” and then spends a further seven years doing it over and over again until he feels he has got it right, it is very like what I know of painting.’ 8 In his seventies Matisse looked back and reminded his interviewer that artists ‘don’t work for fame and glory, they work to express themselves’ and are aware reputations are in flux: ‘We’ve seen people with great qualities remain obscure for a long time; sometimes they’re forgotten for centuries. Look at El Greco. It needed our epoch to bring him out, to extol him; it needed the advent of Cézanne for El Greco to find his place.’ 9

  Frank remembers that Francis Bacon used to say, ‘if you can think things clearly you can say them clearly’. But, he argues, expository language fails to cover the complex way artists orient themselves and offers a better analogy: ‘Ballet dancers think clearly, carpenters think clearly, and they don’t think in words, they don’t think of saying; they do. They act directly according to their sensations and there’s no interposition of words at all, so it is a wordless zone.’ 10

  In the conversation with Auerbach at the Prince’s Drawing School in 2007 William Feaver asked Frank whether lines of poetry or drama ran through his head: ‘Sometimes – occasionally – in the way that other people use Benzedrine, because I’m excited by it. Recently … I had a really intelligent thought to do with a poem. I’d just read some of Tony Harrison’s, and I was struck by the fact that in one of them the scansion was incorrect because he had a simple thing to say plainly, and while I was working I thought that, actually, the geometry doesn’t have to be that coherent, I can break it here because that’s what Tony Harrison did with this poem. If the truth is there, the architectural coherence can be broken or shifted. Sometimes the lines go round in my head as I’m painting because they are so exciting.’ 11

  Head of William Feaver, 2008

  Auerbach used to recite, incant, very long passages of poetry, but now does so less frequently. He knows Keats’s Odes from studying them for his Higher School Certificate. ‘I forget things, but I was very affected by verse and like everybody else I know, I wrote poems, quite a few of them. They are a succinct expression of what is finally an artistic impulse. If you have them in your head, you are affected by their purity and force. They do come into my head.’ I remembered hearing him recite ‘Lapis Lazuli’ by W. B. Yeats. ‘Yes, I absolutely love it, but I didn’t think of it for a subject. I knew ‘The Second Coming’ by heart – “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” It is probably not common to everybody but certainly common to old Cézanne who knew Latin poetry, which I suspect is the basis of all poetry, and quoted great swathes of Virgil. It is one of the things that painters do. Like a telegram, it is shorthand, just for seeing the secret pattern in life and expressing it with specifics. I love that poem by Thomas Hardy when he has lists.’ 12

  This poem, ‘An Ancient to Ancients’, carries something of how Auerbach, and other artists of similar habits and determination, might feel when they reach their eighties. A sense of wanting to justify his existence was there when Auerbach was still a student, and soon was coupled with a desire to leave behind a substantial oeuvre, have exhibitions and maybe to hand ‘on the torch a bit’: ‘Obviously when I was young the glamour of it appealed, and the hedonism and a bit of fame, but as I have got older it is just the doing of it that is the fun.’ And, as in the last verse, after the waning of romance and sport, these older men thinking back across the centuries are upbeat that people will understand what was going through the artists’ minds as they responded to the motifs and their materials, addicted to the ‘best game’ – painting.

  An Ancient to Ancients

  Thomas Hardy

  Where once we danced, where once we sang, Gentlemen, The floors are sunken, cobwebs hang, And cracks creep; worms have fed upon The doors. Yea, sprightlier times were then Than now, with harps and tabrets gone, Gentlemen!

  Where once we rowed, where once we sailed, Gentlemen, And damsels took the tiller, veiled Against too strong a stare (God wot Their fancy, then or anywhen!) Upon that shore we are clean forgot, Gentlemen!

  We have lost somewhat, afar and near, Gentlemen, The thinning of our ranks each year Affords a hint we are nigh undone, That we shall not be ever again, That marked of many, loved of one, Gentlemen.

  In dance the polka hit our wish, Gentlemen, The paced quadrille, the spry schottische, “Sir Roger.” – And in opera spheres The “Girl” (the famed “Bohemian”), And “Trovatore,” held the ears, Gentlemen.


  This season’s paintings do not please, Gentlemen, Like Etty, Mulready, Maclise; Throbbing romance has waned and wanned; No wizard wields the witching pen Of Bulwer, Scott, Dumas, and Sand, Gentlemen.

  The bower we shrined to Tennyson, Gentlemen, Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust, The spider is sole denizen; Even she who read those rhymes is dust, Gentlemen!

  We who met sunrise sanguine-souled, Gentlemen, Are wearing weary. We are old; These younger press; we feel our rout Is imminent to Aïdes’ den, – That evening’s shades are stretching out, Gentlemen!

  And yet, though ours be failing frames, Gentlemen, So were some others’ history names, Who trode their track light-limbed and fast As these youth, and not alien From enterprise, to their long last, Gentlemen.

  Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, Gentlemen, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Homer, – yea, Clement, Augustin, Origen, Burnt brightlier towards their setting-day, Gentlemen.

  And ye, red-lipped and smooth-browed; list, Gentlemen; Much is there waits you we have missed; Much lore we leave you worth the knowing, Much, much has lain outside our ken; Nay, rush not: time serves: we are going, Gentlemen.

  NOTES

  Quotations in the text without a reference number are taken from conversations with the author in the period 2008–13. The word ‘revised’ indicates where Frank Auerbach has slightly changed quotations cited in published interviews. MA = Marlborough Fine Art, London, Archives.

  Chapter One

  1 The apartment block is ‘Berlin’ before 1914 when most of Wilmersdorf was built. The front was redone in the 1930s. The so-called ‘Bauakten’ survived the war in most cases (information from Juergen Kraue and Tanja Pirsig-Marshall).

  2 John Tusa, The John Tusa Interviews, ‘Frank Auerbach,’ BBC Radio 3, 7 October 2001, revised by Frank Auerbach.

  3 William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York, 2009, p. 8.

  4 Early on in the war, the Origos took in twenty refugee children fleeing the bombing of Genoa, and for the next five years protected partisans and escaped Allied prisoners of war hiding in the grounds of their estate, even while the house was occupied by German soldiers, as recounted in War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943–1944 (London, 1947). Other books include The Merchant of Prato, a biography of Byron and A Need to Testify (four short biographies).

  5 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s family lived in the Landschulheim buildings in Herrlingen during the war and that is where he was detained in 1944. See Harold Jackson’s article http://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/jul/18/schools.uk1.

  6 Auerbach’s arrival in England was not part of the Kindertransport as mistakenly reported elsewhere.

  7 Leslie Bellew, ‘Watched over by angel’, www.kentonline.co.uk, 9 August 2013. Badsworth died in 2014.

  8 Tusa 2001.

  9 Dr Fridolin Friedmann became the headmaster for a brief period. See Leslie Baruch Brent’s book, Sunday’s Child, A Memoir (New Romney, 2009), and Anthea Gerrie, ‘Revealed: the wartime school that saved lives’, Jewish Chronicle, 11 August 2011. Other alumni include Martin Lubowski, the documentary filmmaker; director Martin Sarne who had a hit with ‘Come Outside’ and directed among other films Myra Breckinridge (1970); Peter Morley (formerly Meyer), documentary filmmaker, whose Women of Courage (1948) is a story from the Nazi era; and David Edwards, writer of (and actor in) the first TV soap, ‘The Appleyards’ (1952–57).

  10 The Stolpersteine commemorative brass plaques placed at the last address of choice are a project of the artist Gunter Demnig. The first one was installed in Kreuzberg, Berlin, in 1997: http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/. In their records Charlotte was deported 3 March and Max 1 March.

  11 Vikram Seth, Two Lives (New York and London, 2005), p. 200.

  12 Ibid., p. 253. W. G. Sebald created a fictional character who had a close resemblance to what he knew about Auerbach’s past, which he combined with features of his Mancunian landlord. Auerbach felt the story was invasive and misleading and conveyed his objections to the British publisher. In the English edition of The Emigrants (1996) the character’s name was changed from Max Aurach to Max Ferber and an illustration of one of his drawings was removed.

  13 Geordie Greig, ‘The constant painter’, London Evening Standard, 10 September 2009, p. 32, revised by Frank Auerbach, February 2014.

  14 Michael Peppiatt, ‘Frank Auerbach. Camden Town London 1998’ and ‘Frank Auerbach. Camden Town London 1999’, in Interviews with Artists 1966–2012 (New Haven and London, 2012), pp. 39–40. Everyman is a late fifteenth-century English morality play, author unknown.

  15 Richard Cork, ‘Frank Auerbach: An interview by Richard Cork’, Art & Design, 4:9/10, 1988, p. 16. During the war, Marckwald took Auerbach to London to see a production of King Lear starring the famous actor-manager Donald Wolfit. The former teacher and pupil last met in 1955 for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, by which time Marckwald had moved to Hull as county drama director, where he also taught at the university. He was in London to see Joan Plowright (whom he had launched in Hull, as he did John Hurt). She was playing Pip in Orson Welles’s Moby Dick – Rehearsed.

  16 Robert Hughes, transcript of interview with artist, March 1986. MA. The Sword of Stalingrad was a gift to the ‘steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad’ from King George VI ‘in token of the homage of the British people’. It was presented to Stalin by Churchill at the Tehran conference in 1943. 17 Geordie Greig, ‘Hidden talent’, The Times, 12 December 1998, p. 38.

  18 Patrick O’Connor, ‘Frank Marcus and the ITG in the 50s’, London Magazine, April/May 2000, p. 84.

  19 Ibid., p. 86.

  20 Peter Ustinov, House of Regrets (London, 1943), pp. 65–66. The date of the production has been given elsewhere inaccurately as 1947. In Stella West’s copy of the play, she added in pencil the first names of the twelve actors, apparently Frank as the General and someone called ‘Sydney’ as Strukhov.

  21 O’Connor 2000, p. 87. The Broken Jug is by Heinrich von Kleist.

  22 Tusa, 2001. The myths around Bomberg continue to be related in an especially dramatic fashion; the undeniable hostility and neglect he suffered is transferred to stories. For example, Auerbach points out that Bomberg did destroy the drawings he did at the Slade. Those shown in the 2011 BBC series ‘British Masters’ were done after the war. He was stroppy and hit someone at art school, which is why he was asked to leave, not because his work was too avant-garde. 23 Hughes 1986.

  24 Tusa 2001.

  25 Hughes 1986.

  26 Unedited transcript of interview with Catherine Lampert, 1978.

  27 Tusa 2001.

  28 Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London and New York, 1990), p. 28.

  29 Stuart Jeffries, ‘Gustav Metzger: “Destroy, and you create”’, Guardian, 26 November 2012.

  30 Hughes 1990, p. 31.

  31 Ibid. Bomberg left the Borough Polytechnic in 1953 and Metzger asked his fellow students and staff to give money so they could buy Bomberg the multi-volume set of Bishop Berkeley’s theories as a leaving present. Leavis and his ideas were discussed at Bunce Court although the teaching of English literature was fairly erratic.

  32 Hughes 1986.

  33 Hughes 1990, pp. 26–27.

  34 Martin Gayford, ‘Auerbach’s London’, Apollo, October 2009, p. 59.

  35 Hughes 1986.

  36 Catherine Lampert, ‘A conversation with Frank Auerbach’, in Frank Auerbach (Arts Council, London, 1978), pp. 20–21.

  37 Hughes 1986. FA explained to CL, September 2014, that he became attached to the black-and-white reproduction of the 1907 Head and although the picture was in London in the collection of E. S. T. Mesens he did not see the original.

  38 There were other opportunities to see Picasso’s work in postwar London, including Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which was shown in the ‘40 Years of Modern Art’ exhibition in 1948 (at the Academy Hall) that was put together by Roland Penrose on behalf of the new ICA before it had its own premises.

>   39 Hughes 1990, p. 87.

  40 Ibid., p. 88.

  41 Ibid., p. 33.

  42 Judith Bumpus, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Art & Artists, June 1986, p. 24.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Coldstream was associated with the Euston Road School, the studios that took in students wishing to study drawing and painting. Its structure resembled the French atelier system where practising artists could visit to draw and paint from the model. Claude Rogers, Victor Pasmore and Coldstream were the principal teachers, first at 12 Fitzroy Street and then 214 Euston Road, in the period 1937–39. Before the war Moynihan had experimented with Objective Abstraction, a short-lived group of artists who exhibited at the Zwemmer Gallery and attempted to record ‘the artist’s response to the motif by a sequence of brushstrokes devoid of conceptual or idealistic style,’ and for whom ‘the painting is simply an object’. Lawrence Gowing, Rodrigo Moynihan: A Retrospective Exhibition (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1978), n.p.

  45 Barnaby Wright (ed.), Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952–62 (Courtauld Gallery, London, 2009), p. 80.

  46 Tusa 2001.

  47 Ibid.

  48 Unpublished text sent by Andrews to Bruce Bernard. Courtesy of Virginia Verran.

  49 Andrew Forge, ‘Helen Lessore and the Beaux Arts Gallery’, in Helen Lessore and the Beaux Arts Gallery (Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1968), p. 6.

  50 Ibid., p. 9.

  51 Undated letter, TGA 8922/4/50. Reply from Coldstream 7 October 1953 explaining there were no vacancies but suggesting Bomberg come to the Slade later in the month for lunch with him and Claude Rogers, TGA 8922/4/8.