Frank Auerbach Page 17

  52 Frank Auerbach, ‘Seven Portraits’, Ark, 23, 1958, p. 28.

  53 Stella West, transcript of interview with Robert Hughes, Malvern, 1 March 1986. MA.

  54 For some time Wilde worked (erratically) at a petrol station that Wauchope ran next to Duloe Mill, a curious building where he was living. This non-functioning windmill faced the Great North Road at Eaton Socon on the border of Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. O. S. Wauchope’s landlord was Dr Patterson, who also rented rooms in the house he owned in The Cut, 22a Lower Marsh, near Waterloo station. A number of artists associated with Camberwell School of Art and the Slade were resident, among them Craigie Aitchison, Myles Murphy and Patrick George, and when Os, as he was called, sometimes stayed there he kept them up all night in philosophical discussion.

  55 FA to Sarah West, 24 May 2011.

  56 Hannah Rothschild, ‘The sitter’s tale’, Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 28 October 2001, p. 35.

  Chapter Two

  1 Gayford 2009, p. 60. A few drawings from St Martin’s survive, but all the building-site pictures Auerbach did there were destroyed.

  2 Barnaby Wright, ‘Creative destruction: Frank Auerbach and the rebuilding of London’, in Wright 2009, p. 15.

  3 Ibid., p. 19.

  4 Ibid., p. 94. Kossoff also tackled the Shell building site before going on to locations north of King’s Cross station, such as the viaduct adjacent to York Way and the train-line-crossed territory near Willesden Junction.

  5 Gayford 2009, p. 59.

  6 Paul Moorhouse, ‘A human universe: Auerbach’s building site paintings and existentialism’, in Wright 2009, p. 67.

  7 Ibid., p. 52.

  8 Wright 2009, pp. 14–15.

  9 Richard Cork in conversation with Frank Auerbach, BBC Radio 3, 18 November 1985.

  10 Tim Adams, ‘Frank’s other half ’, Observer, The New Review, 21 September 2014, p. 18.

  11 The exhibition was the newspaper publisher Lord Beaverbrook’s initiative and the first prize was shared between Geoffrey Banks’s Departure for Cythera (1955) and Bryan Kneale’s Pony in the Snow (1954). Lady Caroline Blackwood, Freud’s second wife, is the blonde woman in Hotel Bedroom.

  12 Leon Kossoff, ‘The paintings of Frank Auerbach’, in Frank Auerbach (Arts Council, London, 1978), p. 9.

  13 Peppiatt 2012, p. 5.

  14 Unedited transcript, Lampert, 1978.

  15 David Sylvester, ‘Young English painting’, Listener, 12 January 1956, vol. 55, p. 64.

  16 Ibid.

  17 According to the catalogue, the Summer Exhibition, 22 July–16 September 1955, had a portrait of Bacon by Lessore, works by Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith, a Kossoff drawing, Weeping Figure, figurative work by Tilson, Cunningham and Whishaw, but nothing by Mike Pope.

  18 Helen Lessore, A Partial Testament: Essays on some Moderns in the Great Tradition (Tate Gallery, London), 1986, p. 55.

  19 Sylvester 1956, p. 64.

  20 Richard Cork, ‘Two old masters’, Times 2, 3 May 2006, p. 4 (revised). A number of the portraits were on canvas but, as Freud remembered, most of the thickly painted works were on board.

  21 Ibid., p. 4.

  22 Forge 1968, p. 5.

  23 David Sylvester, Critic’s Choice (Arthur Tooth & Sons, London), 1958, n.p.

  24 David Sylvester observed the painter Patrick George coming into Tooth’s wearing a scruffy raincoat and asking the man at the desk the price of Coldstream’s Study from Two Models (1953–54), and was told, as if he would be shocked, £300. George bought and lived with this intriguing, beautifully painted work until 2011 when he gave it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

  25 John Berger, ‘A stick in the dark’, New Statesman, 28 November 1959. The Observer critic reviewing the same exhibition felt less moved: ‘he may peer down into the building craters, as Auerbach does, and so bulldoze his thick, glutinous pigment across the canvas as to convey an exact sense of the intractable mound of clay, and the thrust and strain of tackle.’ Anon., Observer, 29 November 1959. Berger argued that those who called these original works ‘muddy, churned-up failures’ were those ‘familiar only with styles as they are filed in the sales-catalogues of modern art’.

  26 Wright 2009, p. 30. The Times, 30 November 1959.

  27 David Sylvester, Sunday Times Colour Magazine, 2 June 1963.

  28 Alan Bowness, ‘At the galleries’, Observer, 11 February 1962.

  29 Andrew Forge, ‘Auerbach and Paolozzi’, New Statesman, 13 September 1963, p. 329. Not all reviews were positive; there was a complaint about the ‘heaped-up paint’ and the repetition of subjects. Discussing Auerbach’s 1961 exhibition on the BBC radio programme ‘The Critics’, Basil Taylor was so negative he provoked a strong objection from Stephen Spender who wrote to the Listener on 27 April 1961: ‘In my ignorance I think that Mr Auerbach is one of the two or three most interesting young painters in England. He is perhaps unique in showing in his work a completely serious, utterly absorbed devotion to the objects he paints, which have tended to be a few square yards or Primrose Hill, or building sites, or one model … The chorus of disapprobation was altogether too pack-like to do credit to this programme, and it must have pained listeners who feel as I do that an exceptionally scrupulous young painter deserves better treatment.’

  30 Auerbach letter, dated 4 December 1963, a reply to ‘A letter from Michael Peppiatt’, was published in Cambridge Opinion (special issue: Modern Art in Britain), 37, January 1964, p. 51.

  31 Lampert 1978, p. 21.

  32 She contacted Auerbach after seeing the Royal Academy exhibition in 2001, letter dated 7 December 2001. MA.

  33 After some of the students graduated, Auerbach told Lampert, ‘Colburn who was sort of a visionary, instead of chucking them out, found an abandoned nursery school, and gave them conditions which they would never have again, each with a studio, only four of them, and a life model.’

  34 Frank Auerbach, ‘Fragments from a conversation’, X: A Quarterly Review, 1:1, November 1959, pp. 32–33.

  35 Geoff Hassell, Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts: Its Students and Teachers, 1943–1960 (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 31.

  36 The foreword Frank contributed for an exhibition of Christopher Couch’s was short: ‘I admire these paintings and find it hard to say anything about them, perhaps because they are so clear. Since I do not care about idiom it must be their spirit I value. There is a desire to celebrate organic experience and there is an inner need for coherence. Here both these impulses seem urgent and precise and neither is betrayed. I wish I could have expressed this more simply, but I believe Christopher has done so in his work.’ MA, undated.

  37 John Wonnacott to Catherine Lampert, e-mail, 9 February 2014.

  38 John Christopher Battye, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Art & Artists, 5:10, January 1971, p. 55.

  39 Paul Bonaventura, ‘Een Benadering van Frank Auerbach’, Metropolis M, 2, Summer 1986, p. 4. Coldstream, along with Sylvester, Robert Melville, Kitaj and Hamilton had taken part in a conversation with Duchamp the day after the show opened. Duchamp had claimed to have abandoned making art even though he confessed he liked manual execution; he would no longer designate readymades nor paint in oil as it required ‘the selfsame process and material’, ‘the mark is a personal problem’. Duchamp papers, 3:2, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  40 Greig 2009, p. 32.

  41 Tusa 2001.

  42 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki (London and Princeton, 2001), pp. 14–15. Auerbach thinks ‘distinguished’ is a more accurate description of the neighbourhood than ‘aristocratic’. The story of Jakob continues, ‘the family who had kindly received me, the son of a bankrupt businessman from a small Polish town, did not live in the fashionable west of Berlin, or in Dahlem or Grünewald, but on Roonstrasse, immediately next to the Reichstag.’ Long-term Marcel was the host of ‘The Literary Quartet’ television programme, which became a popular pastime, and until his nineties he was a contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.


  43 Ibid., p. 15. Jakob hid in Holland during the war and after moving to London became a tenant in one of the flats at 35 Belsize Avenue, Hampstead, built by Fritz Hess, a Jewish businessman and building contractor who employed Ernst Freud, Lucian’s father, to convert a garage into a dwelling. Fritz Hess was something of a tycoon, and with his second wife, Ann, began collecting German Expressionist pictures and then works by Freud, as well as three paintings by Auerbach, one of which was the beautiful black-and-white Head of E.O.W. III (1961).

  44 Ibid., pp. 29 and 63.

  45 Ibid., pp. 63–64. Andrew Ranicki knew his father was familiar with Stolpersteine but he did not suggest that one should be put in place for his parents, Helene and David Reich, whose last address of choice was

  53 Güntzelstrasse. On 12 September 2014 one was installed: ‘I am fairly sure that he [Marcel] would have had the same attitude as he had some twenty years ago, at the time of the discussion regarding plans for the Holocaust memorial here in Berlin: “I am neither for nor against it. I do not need it, and my father, my mother, my brother and the many other members of my family who were murdered do not need it either. I have not uttered even one word in this matter.”’ From Ranicki’s speech, entitled ‘Here in Berlin, which he loved so much, against all the odds’, at the dedication. Information from AR to CL, e-mail, 24 September 2014.

  46 Ibid., p. 66.

  47 Greig 1998, p. 38.

  48 A second, square version Study after Rembrandt I (1961) was destroyed, a decision he later regretted. In fact, the surviving painting was made ‘after’ this version rather than directly from the Rembrandt.

  49 Auerbach speaking to Wiggins. Colin Wiggins, ‘Rembrandt: The Lamentation over the Dead Christ’, in Colin Wiggins (ed.), Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters (London, 1995), p. 28.

  50 Ibid, p. 29.

  51 Ibid., p. 28. The big painting was then titled After Rembrandt’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ II (1961).

  Chapter Three

  1 Forge 1968, p. 9. Forge wrote, ‘He must work unprotected in any way by the general milieu’ (the protagonist is always male, although Sheila Fell was one of the Beaux Arts Gallery artists referred to). Auerbach identified with the ‘absoluteness’ and ‘puritanical thoroughness’ of these artists but he and the others felt uncomfortable with Lessore’s preoccupation with what she called ‘The Great Tradition’. Her thesis claimed a two-thousand-year lineage in Western art connected to the ‘imitation of natural appearances’, and in her book A Partial Testament: Essays on Some Moderns in the Great Tradition (London, 1986) she described ‘a huge chasm’ between the last great age and the situation now: ‘It was the void left by the vanishing of belief.’

  2 The ‘Situation’ exhibition was held at the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA) gallery, London, in September 1960. An exhibition addressing this movement at Tate Liverpool in 2003, ‘Formal Situations: Abstraction in Britain 1960–1970’, described the premises: ‘The powerful influence exercised by the American painters is manifest in two common threads, which the organisers expressed as conditions for inclusion in the Situation exhibition. The first condition was that the work shown should be abstract. This rejected the literal representation of recognisable subjects and also abstraction from nature – a stipulation that pointedly excluded the earlier generation of St Ives painters whose work was rooted in observation. Situation emphasized the importance of working with purely pictorial elements without explicit reference to outside phenomena. The second criterion for inclusion was that the paintings should be large in scale: no work was to be less than thirty square feet.’ http:// www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/formal-situations-abstraction-britain-1960-1970. As to the possibility of these individuals being regarded as a group or movement (or, by the late 1970s, mistakenly elided with the invented ‘School of London’), Auerbach has cautioned, ‘Francis had a show there [the Beaux Arts Gallery], Lucian almost did, and they used to visit the gallery. I think the situation of people who are, as it were, in the same ambience is very much like that of a political party, where the tensions between them are greater than they are with those in another party. If people have a programme here, they tend to keep it to themselves.’

  3 Battye 1971, p. 55.

  4 After 1977 Freud began working in Holland Park in a flat with more comfort, and after the early 1990s had an assistant to help. The other artists remained in the same studios, unaided except by their galleries.

  5 Doris von Drateln, ‘Malen ist nicht wie Husten oder Spucken’ (‘Painting is not like coughing or spitting’), Kunstforum, 87, January/February 1987, kindly translated by Tanja Pirsig-Marshall and rephrased in English by Frank Auerbach.

  6 David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti (London, 1994), reprinted re-edited versions of earlier texts, such as ‘Perpetuating the Transient’, the catalogue introduction for the Arts Council Giacometti exhibition, 1955. The Swiss artist’s direct connections with London flourished through those who got to know him in Paris: Isabel Rawsthorne, then Freud, Raymond Mason, David Sylvester, Euan Uglow and William Turnbull. This was a different group from those he knew in the 1930s, such as Winifred and Ben Nicholson and F. E. McWilliam.

  7 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Introduction, The New American Painting (Tate Gallery, London, 1959), pp. 10–11.

  8 Feaver 2009, p. 233. David Sylvester confessed to a ‘Damascene conversion’ to American painting after seeing the exhibition ‘Modern Art in the United States’ at the Tate in 1956. ‘Hommage à Nicolas de Staël’ was held 6–31 March 1956 at Arthur Tooth & Sons.

  9 Conversation between Frank Auerbach, Taco Dibbits, Geoffrey Parton and Pilar Ordovas, Raw Truth: Auerbach–Rembrandt (London, 2013), p. 25, catalogue for exhibition at Ordovas London and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

  10 David Sylvester, About Modern Art (London, 1997), p. 338.

  11 de Kooning: A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011), p. 271.

  12 Ibid., p. 278.

  13 John Elderfield, ‘Woman and landscape’, in de Kooning: A Retrospective, 2011, p. 282.

  14 Two pictures from 1970 of Renée Fedden, an assistant to the cookery writer Elizabeth David, were commissions made at the request of her friend the Hon. Rosemary Peto, who collected works by Auerbach.

  15 Hughes 1990, p. 166.

  16 Wright, who was stone deaf, wrote his poems in absolutely regular meters; Swift, in Auerbach’s view, was a much better writer than painter, writing in this issue a good polemical article about the state of painting at the time, which Wright thought completely dire. It was published under the pseudonym James Mahon, ‘Official art and the modern painter’, X: A Quarterly Review, 1:1, November 1959.

  17 Auerbach 1959, p. 32.

  18 Bumpus 1986, p. 25.

  19 Auerbach 1959, p. 34.

  20 Jackie Wullschlager, ‘Lunch with the FT: Frank Auerbach’, Financial Times, 6–7 October 2012, p. 3.

  21 Nevile Wallis, ‘The arts’, Spectator, 13 September 1965, p. 318.

  22 Lawrence H. Bradshaw, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Arts Review, 17, 20 February–6 March 1965, p. 17, quoted in The Tate Gallery 1984–86: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London, 1988, pp. 91–92.

  23 Sarah West to CL, 7 November 2013.

  43 Unedited transcript, Lampert, 1978.

  25 Lampert 1978, p. 17.

  26 Unedited transcript, Lampert, 1978.

  27 John O’Mahony, ‘Surfaces and depths’, Guardian, 15 September 2001, p. 7.

  28 Hughes interview with E.O.W., 1986. MA.

  29 In Stella’s last home in Malvern visitors recognized objects from the Brentford sitting room: a three-tiered table, the lamp and the pictures on the wall. During the making of the 2001 film, Frank Auerbach: To the Studio, the director Hannah Rothschild asked Stella, ‘Why did you put up with this?’ She replied: ‘Why did I put up with it? Well, that’s puzzled me. I loved him, I suppose. I used to think, “Well, why am I doing this? I’ve got three children, I
’ve got a demanding job and I’m doing this.” What was the answer? I just loved him, and I did it for him.’ Rothschild 2001, p. 35. The producer was Jake Auerbach and the film was made by the company Rothschild Auerbach.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Hughes interview with E.O.W., 1986. MA.

  Chapter Four

  1 Hannah Rothschild, ‘Man of many layers,’ Telegraph Magazine, 28 September 2013, p. 33.

  2 Gayford 2009, p. 61.

  3 Support for making the film came from the BFI Experimental Film Fund. Mazzetti’s professor, Coldstream, was then chairman of the BFI. The film was shot in 1954 and completed in January 1956 shortly before the screening; it won acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival that year.

  4 Michael Peppiatt, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Tate, 14, Spring 1998, p. 15, revised by Frank Auerbach, February 2014.

  5 David Sylvester commented on the relationship in Looking at Giacometti (London, 1994), pp. 157–58, and it is also described by Pilar Ordovas in Crossing the Channel: Friendships and Connections in Paris and London, 1946–1965 (Gagosian Gallery, London, 2010).

  6 When Bacon saw this work, now in the Scottish National Gallery of Art, at Auerbach’s Hayward exhibition in 1978, he regretted he had not kept the painting. 11 November 2008. FA to Valerie Beston, MA.

  7 Andrew Billen, ‘Portrait of an artist at 81’, The Times Magazine, 6 October 2012, p. 49.

  8 Francis Bacon, in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London, 1989), p. 105.

  9 Martin Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon, (London, 2005), p. 76. See also Martin Hammer, ‘“Mainly Nourishment”, Echoes of Sickert in the work of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud’, Visual Culture in Britain, 14:1, 2013.

  10 Frank Auerbach, Foreword, Late Sickert: Paintings 1927 to 1942 (Arts Council, London, 1981), p. 7.

  11 Valerie Beston to Richard Cork, 27 October 1977. MA.

  12 Michael Peppiatt, ‘Frank Auerbach. Going against the grain’, Art International, 1, 1987, pp. 24–26.

  13 H. R. Fischer to FA, 2 May 1964. MA.

  14 FA to John Synge, 1 January 1965. MA.