Frank Auerbach Page 18
15 H. R. Fischer to FA, 4 December 1964. MA. Freud had begun painting with a loaded brush, making portraits of less attractive subjects such as John Deakin; moreover, his work was not selling. In 1972, Freud left the Marlborough to be represented by James Kirkman and Anthony d’Offay.
16 FA to John Synge, 7 February 1965. MA.
17 FA to Valerie Beston, April 1967, and FA to James Kirkman, 20 April 1966. MA.
18 FA to H. R. Fischer, 2 August 1966. MA.
19 FA to James Kirkman, Brentford, Monday 10 p.m., no date [August 1966]. MA.
20 Valerie Beston to FA, 11 September 1972. MA. Quite often in future years sales did not cover the artist’s advance, and to compensate pictures were taken into the gallery stock.
21 Valerie Beston to FA, 1 January 1966, and FA to Valerie Beston, 13 April 1966. MA.
22 The father of his first wife, Ellen, the nineteenth-century Liberal politician Richard Cobden.
23 John Russell, ‘Millais: How art avenged success’, Sunday Times, 1 January 1967, review included Richard Diebenkorn at Waddington.
24 Lawrence Alloway, Listener, 10 April 1958, n.p.; Nevile Wallis, ‘Freud and Colquhoun’, Observer, 30 March 1958, n.p.
25 Greig 2009, p. 32, revised by Frank Auerbach, February 2014. Of course, over the years Frank met Lucian’s friends. Lady Jane Willoughby acquired outstanding paintings by Freud, Andrews, Bacon and Auerbach; her constancy and capabilities continuing to be impressive. Auerbach is one of many admirers of Celia Paul’s work and he is curious how her son by Lucian, Frank, also an artist, develops.
26 Feaver 2009, p. 18.
27 Quoted in Robert Hughes, ‘On Lucian Freud’, Lucian Freud: Paintings (British Council, London, 1987), p. 18. This is the catalogue for the touring show that began at the Hirshhorn, Washington, DC, and finished in Berlin, reprinted by Thames & Hudson.
28 Bruce Bernard, ‘Frank Auerbach – painter in the grand manner’, Sunday Times Magazine, 30 April 1978, p. 43.
29 Freud began acquiring Auerbach’s work – by gift, loan and purchase – in the 1980s. Fifteen paintings plus drawings and one print were accepted in lieu of taxes by the UK government in 2014.
30 Lucian Freud, ‘Frank Auerbach’s paintings’, in Wiggins 1995, p. 5. Auerbach and Freud gave each other artist’s proofs of the prints they did (Auerbach donated most of those by Freud to the Courtauld Gallery, London).
31 Billen 2012, p. 49.
32 Ibid.
33 ‘Painting 1961’, London Magazine, new series, 1:4, July 1961.
34 Peppiatt 1987, p. 24.
35 Lampert 1978, p. 16.
36 R. B. Kitaj, Introduction, The Human Clay: An Exhibition Selected by R. B. Kitaj (Arts Council, London, 1976), n.p.
37 He expressed regret for coining the phrase. See R. B. Kitaj in Alistair Hicks (ed.), Art Works: British and German Contemporary Art, 1960–2000 (Deutsche Bank, London, 2000). The show included paintings borrowed from the Arts Council collection and elsewhere. To some extent this return of figurative painting coincided with a broader international trend, as marked by ‘A New Spirit in Painting’, the exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1981.
38 Michael Peppiatt, ‘R. B. Kitaj: The diaspora in London’, Art International, 1, Autumn 1987, p. 34.
39 Undated letter to Katia; her questions were sent in 2008. MA.
40 Ibid.
41 Lawrence Gowing, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Patrick George, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow. Eight Figurative Painters (New Haven and Santa Barbara, 1981), p. 24.
42 Bonaventura 1986, p. 14.
43 Bacon interviewed by Andrew Forge on BBC Radio 3, 4 March 1972.
44 David Wilkie (1921–1992) was a quiet man who worked as a clerk in the City office of an insurance company. His collection, displayed in the rooms of his modest suburban home in Brentwood, Essex, included a painting, a sculpture and two decorated boxes by John Lessore, a couple of paintings each by Winifred Nicholson, Craigie Aitchison and Peter Snow, as well as works by Michael Andrews, John Bratby, Heinz Koppel and his own portrait by Helen Lessore. Wilkie’s solicitor advised him to leave these pictures to Auerbach with instructions that they be presented to the Tate, which they were.
45 Paul Moorhouse, ‘David Wilkie’, in The Wilkie Gift. Contemporary Art from the Collection of David Wilkie, 1921–1992 (Tate Gallery, London, 1994). The Origin of the Great Bear (1968) was about a theme, another myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Titian might have painted. However, no particular work by Titian formed the starting point (he had painted an earlier episode in the story). Auerbach began with drawings done on Hampstead Heath.
46 Richard Wollheim, ‘Titian and Auerbach’, Listener, 4 October 1973, p. 466. Wilkie had a special interest in existentialism and the philosophical potential of art, and accumulated a large library. As a last commission he suggested that Auerbach make a painting based on Bernini’s marble group Saint Teresa in Ecstasy in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, perhaps using a live model. Learning that Auerbach was disinclined to do so, he proposed a portrait of Arthur Rimbaud, and in the end Auerbach, working from photographs, fused these sources, and created four images of the unlikely combination – a large Rimbaud ‘banner’ seems to be enshrined, or perhaps rests, in the chapel before being carried in a procession. See Moorhouse, The Wilkie Gift, 1994.
47 Ibid.
48 Frank Auerbach, ‘The Paintings’, Frank Auerbach, University of Essex, Colchester.
49 Michael Podro, ‘The sense of composure’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1978. The Tate painting just preceded the bright blue and yellow Primrose Hill (1968) that Podro and his wife, Charlotte, owned.
50 FA to Penny Marcus, 16 March 1972. Also discussed in FA to Anne Seymour, 15 March 1971.
51 FA to Norman Reid, 30 December 1972. A summary of these remarks was published in a description of new acquisitions, The Tate Gallery 1970–72, for T1270, pp. 76–77.
52 Colin Wiggins, ‘Rubens: Samson and Delilah’, in Wiggins 1995, p. 20.
53 Although Auerbach began drawing from paintings in the National Gallery while a student, most of these sketches were thrown away. A group, the majority dating from 1981–93, from a larger donation by James Kirkman, was displayed for years in rows on the red walls of the learning-resources centre on the National Gallery’s lower floor.
54 Unedited transcript, Lampert, 1978.
55 JA to CL, 25 January 2014.
56 Enjoying New York, Auerbach checked in with Miss Beston before extending the trip by forty-eight hours, and she reassured him by telegram that Stella approved of the plan, the gallery could change the ticket, and, most importantly, reported that ‘All is well with Studio. Nothing has happened to it’; adding, ‘How does the Exhibition look. Love Beston’. VB to FA, telegram, 19 September 1969. MA.
57 Postcard to CL, 27 March 1982.
58 Bumpus 1986, p. 26. He returned to the Barnes Collection in 1994 with Julia and Jake.
59 Unedited transcript, Lampert, 1978.
60 Ibid.
61 These were nos 34, 78, 87, 118, 143 and 170 in Feaver 2009.
62 FA to CL, 1986.
63 FA to Andrews, 3 January 1984. MA. Auerbach composed a five-page letter to Miss Beston defining the groupings, each picture identified by a stamp-sized sketch, date, collection if known; the information was taken from the black binders filled with black and white photographs kept in the studio. The plan was chronological (covering 1953–84) and by type, sets of three to six works in running order: compositions, heads, nudes, paintings of Primrose Hill, paintings of heads, reclining heads, drawings of different people, paintings of the studios, three paintings of Deborah Ratcliff and, to finish, seated figures. In 2001, for the exhibition at the Royal Academy, the selection was mine with Norman Rosenthal, Isabel Carlisle and Frank making suggestions. To understand what might be there, again the artist broke down the proposed list into large and small landscapes, advocating double the number of
paintings and drawings of people, and pointing out that three of the best images of David Landau were drawings. The first paper plan for the installation seemed rather too spacious: ‘One does want an exhibition to be something of a feast (rather than a slimming diet)’, letter to CL, 2001. Since then Auerbach’s inclination has been to go for more sparse hangs and to emphasize the dissimilarities between works.
64 Tusa 2001, revised by FA. Auerbach regards the contemporary way of valuing art by the gigantic sums some works reach as artificial and most likely unsustainable; once a painting leaves the studio its ownership is of little interest.
65 Bumpus 1986, p. 26.
66 Auerbach went to Essen as well but did not travel to Madrid. The Spanish showing of the Venice exhibition in the spring of 1987 happened in the first year of the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (as it was then called) when Carmen Giménez was the director of the National Center for Exhibitions for the Spanish Ministry of Culture. The painter Antonio Saura wrote ‘Auerbach o el espacio coagulado’, an introduction to the catalogue.
67 Von Drateln 1987.
68 Cork 1988, p. 15.
69 Bumpus 1986, p. 23.
70 Greig 1998 (revised by Frank Auerbach from ‘three’ to ‘five’ days).
71 JA to CL, 25 January 2014.
Chapter Five
1 Peppiatt 2012, p. 11.
2 James Elkins, What Painting Is (New York and London, 1999), p. 74; statement 11 April 1998.
3 The artist Jenny Saville told me that for a while she used Stokes paint because she so admired Auerbach’s work, but it was too much of a struggle and she changed when she could afford a brand intended for fine art.
4 Peppiatt 2012, p. 9.
5 Cork 1988, p. 20.
6 Andrew Lambirth, ‘Living in the moment’, Spectator, 24 October 2009, p. 52.
7 Michael Peppiatt, ‘Talking to Frank Auerbach’, in Frank Auerbach: Recent Works (Marlborough, New York, 1998), pp. 6–7.
8 Peppiatt 2012, p. 10.
9 Feaver 2009, p. 230.
10 Raw Truth: Auerbach–Rembrandt (London, 2013), p. 24.
11 Bumpus 1986, p. 23.
12 Auerbach letter, dated 4 December 1963, published in Cambridge Opinion (special issue: Modern Art in Britain), 37, January 1964, p. 51. The Last Art Film (2012) was directed by Jake Auerbach.
13 Feaver 2009, p. 230.
14 Wullschlager 2012, p. 3.
15 Tusa 2001.
16 Lampert 1978, p. 11.
17 William Feaver, Introduction, Frank Auerbach, Recent Paintings and Drawings, (Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1987), p. 5.
18 Lambirth 2009, p. 52.
19 Feaver 2009, p. 230.
20 Adams 2014, p. 18.
21 I was the curator and asked for these. However, the Royal Academy budget would not stretch to loans from Montreal and Japan.
22 Rothschild 2013, p. 33.
23 Hughes 1990, p. 89.
24 Ibid.
25 Lampert 1978, p. 17.
26 E-mail exchange, CL with Deborah Ratcliff, April–May 2001.
27 FA to Valerie Beston, 8 June 1984. MA.
28 Hughes 1986.
29 Catherine Lampert, ‘Auerbach and his sitters’, in Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954–2001 (London, 2001), p. 30.
30 Hughes 1990, pp. 15–16.
31 Letter to Robert Hughes, undated. MA.
32 ‘Frank Auerbach in conversation with William Feaver’, in Feaver 2009, p. 231.
33 FA to CL, letter dated 22 December 1994.
34 Peppiatt 2012, pp. 45–46.
35 Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (London and New York, 2010), p. 58.
36 Wullschlager 2012.
37 Feaver 2009, p. 230.
38 Auerbach, draft introduction to Giacometti exhibition, 1986 (unpublished).
39 ‘David Landau & Oliver Barker in conversation, May 2012’, in A Dialogue in Paint: Frank Auerbach’s Portraits of Ruth Bromberg, Sotheby’s, auction 26 June 2012, p. 21. Auerbach was commissioned to paint the first portrait of Ruth Bromberg, and was attracted to the idea of working from a stranger. When the portrait was finished, she urged him to continue letting her sit. They became friends but it might be going too far, as this auction catalogue does, to describe the sequences of pictures of one person as following a trajectory or ‘navigating an evolution’ and reaching a ‘finale’, or as ‘unprecedented and enhanced by the accompanying provenance’.
40 JA to CL, e-mail, 25 January 2014. Being reminded of mutual friends, such as Bruce Bernard, Euan Uglow and Lucian Freud, is part of sitting.
41 Wullschlager 2012.
Conclusion, pp. 206–215
1 Greig 2009, p. 32.
2 Catherine Lampert interview with Auerbach, Connect (British Council staff magazine), 9, March 1986, p. 7.
3 Stephanie D’Alessandro, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010), pp. 238–39.
4 Auerbach, in Simon Grant (ed.), Personal Reflections on Art by Today’s Leading Artists (London, 2012), p. 29.
5 Michael Kimmelman, ‘Recent works by Frank Auerbach in an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery’, New York Times, 4 April 2006.
6 See Christophe Cherix and Ann Temkin, Jasper Johns: Regrets (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014). The photograph was taken in 1958 as Bacon prepared to make portraits of Freud (revised date courtesy Paul Rousseau). It records an intense friendship that ultimately disintegrated, as did Johns’s own relationship with Robert Rauschenberg, to whom he was close from 1954 to 1961. The Auerbach Hayward show in 1978 ended on 2 July but for the last four days overlapped with the Jasper Johns exhibition in the lower galleries – the shows were discussed together in Lynda Morris, ‘Double bill’, Listener, 6 July 1978.
7 Jay Elwes, ‘Interview: Frank Auerbach’, Prospect, 197, August 2012, pp. 75–76.
8 Adams 2014, p. 18.
9 Ninth Conversation, Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse with Pierre Courthion, ed. by Serge Guilbaut (Los Angeles and London, 2013), p. 134.
10 Elwes 2012, p. 74.
11 Feaver 2009, p. 232.
12 Thomas Hardy, ‘An Ancient to Ancients’, Late Lyrics and Earlier (London, 1922), pp. 282–84.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Monographs
Feaver, William, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009
Hughes, Robert, Frank Auerbach, Thames & Hudson, London and New York, 1990
Exhibition catalogues
1969 Frank Auerbach, Introduction by Michael Podro, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, September–October
1976 Frank Auerbach, Paintings and Drawings 1954–1976, Introduction by William Feaver, Marlborough Galerie, Zurich, May
1978 Frank Auerbach, Foreword by Leon Kossoff, Hayward Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, May–July; Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, July–August
1982 Frank Auerbach, Recents Paintings and Drawings, Introduction by Stephen Spender, Marlborough Gallery, New York, April
1986 Frank Auerbach, Foreword by Catherine Lampert, XLII Venice Biennale, June– September, British Council, London; with additional texts by Karl-Egon Vester and Paul Bonaventura, Kunstverein, Hamburg, October–November, and Museum Folkwang, Essen, January–March 1987; and by Antonio Saura and Paul Bonaventura, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, April– May 1987
1987 Frank Auerbach, Recent Paintings and Drawings, Introduction by William Feaver, Marlborough Fine Art, London, January– February
1989 Frank Auerbach, Recent Work, Introduction by Mel Gooding, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam, September–December
1990 Frank Auerbach, Recent Work, Introduction by Mel Gooding, Marlborough Fine Art, London, September–October
1990 Frank Auerbach. The Complete Etchings 1954–1990, Introduction by Michael Podro, Marlborough Graphics, London
1994 Frank Auerbach, Recent Works, Introduction by Peter Ackroyd, Marlborough Gallery, New York, Apri
l
1995 Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters, Colin Wiggins (ed.), National Gallery, July–September
1995 Frank Auerbach, Foreword by Richard Wollheim, Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, November–December
1998 Frank Auerbach: Recent Works, ‘Talking to Frank Auerbach’ by Michael Peppiatt, Marlborough Gallery, New York, September–October
2001 Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954–2001, Essays by Catherine Lampert, Norman Rosenthal and Isabel Carlisle, Royal Academy of Arts, September– December
2009–10 Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952–62, Barnaby Wright (ed.), Essays by Margaret Garlake, Paul Moorhouse and Barnaby Wright, Courtauld Gallery, London, October–January
2012 Frank Auerbach: Next Door, Foreword by John Wonnacott, Marlborough Fine Art, London, October–November
2012 Frank Auerbach, Early Works 1954–1978, Introduction by Paul Moorhouse, Offer Waterman & Co., London, November– December
2013 Raw Truth: Auerbach–Rembrandt, Pilar Ordovas (ed.), Conversation between Frank Auerbach, Taco Dibbits, Geoffrey Parton and Pilar Ordovas, Ordovas, London, October–December; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, December 2013–March 2014
Interviews, writings and statements by the artist
Adams, Tim, ‘Frank’s other half ’, Observer, The New Review, 21 September 2014
Auerbach, Frank, ‘Seven Portraits’, ARK, 23, 1958
—, ‘Fragments from a conversation’, X: A Quarterly Review, 1:1, November 1959
—, Letter dated 4 December 1963, a reply to ‘A letter from Michael Peppiatt’, Cambridge Opinion (special issue: Modern Art in Britain), 37, January 1964
—, ‘Homage to Sickert’, Listener, 89:2307, 14 June 1973
—, Foreword, Late Sickert: Paintings 1927 to 1942, exh. cat., Arts Council, London, 1981
—, Statement dated June 1975, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954–1976, exh. cat., Marlborough Galerie, Zurich, 1976
—, ‘The Golden Lion and other stories’, Bamboo, 13, Summer 1987
Battye, John Christopher, ‘Frank Auerbach talks to John Christopher Battye’, Art & Artists, 5:10, January 1971
Billen, Andrew, ‘Portrait of an artist at 81’, The Times Magazine, 6 October 2012