Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting Read online

  By the early spring of 1943, when Frank was nearly 12, his parents’ twenty-five word, censored letters, forwarded by the Red Cross, stopped coming. At no point in the months that followed did he find himself ‘shocked or overwhelmed; it was gradually leaked to me they were dead, taken to a camp and killed’. Some of the Jewish residents of 49 Güntzelstrasse had been moved temporarily to other addresses; in 1942–43 all were cleared. The eventual deportation of twenty-one residents is now commemorated by Stolpersteine, brass plaques set in the pavement outside the front doors of the last residence of choice of victims of the Holocaust. The birth dates identify them as adults and along with the Auerbachs the names include Elise Bloch, Erika Blum, Leopold Cohn, Emma Friedländer, Carl Stern, Georg Stodola, and couples such as Siegfried and Lucie Zehden, all of whom died in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, or other locations in the east. Charlotte and Max Auerbach were deported in early March 1943 aboard a transport to Auschwitz; the date of Charlotte’s death is given as 30 June 1943, Max’s as simply 1943.10

  Auerbach has never enquired about what happened to his parents in the final year and last months. I think of parallels to Vikram Seth’s intimate and respectful book Two Lives (2005), the story of his Indian Uncle Shanti and his German wife Aunt Henny, whose family, like the Auerbachs, were also assimilated Jews. Henny had escaped to London before the war with help from her fiancé’s father, leaving behind in Berlin her mother and sister.11 Seth takes us through the oppression that goes with the restrictive laws and persecution of Jews as they are banned from public transport, subject to curfew, and more and more confined to the homes that are steadily confiscated. When he seeks material in the archive at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem about Henny’s mother and sister, Gabriele and Lola Caro, he finds evidence the older woman was taken to Theresienstadt. On a list compiled with ‘methodical categorization of special circumstances’ there are also notes of those who, like Max Auerbach, received medals for military service during the First World War, which might have delayed their deportation. Lola, born in 1907, is one of four hundred people sent in May 1943 on an Osttransport (East-transport) straight to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the war, when Henny learnt details about the fate of her mother and sister, she wrote candidly to a friend: ‘you can imagine how sad, how unendingly sorrowful I am, and I will never get over it. Sometimes I am so overcome that I don’t think I can go on.’ 12

  Frank, for his part, concedes: ‘I think I did this thing which psychiatrists frown on: I am in total denial. It’s worked very well for me. To be quite honest I came to England and went to a marvellous school, and it truly was a happy time. There’s just never been a point in my life when I felt I wish I had parents.’ 13

  On the other hand, there were teachers whose high standards and empathy made a lasting impression on Frank, offering guidance and comfort, as they did for other Bunce Court students. For him, the most significant was Wilhelm Marckwald, who had acted, directed and produced plays in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the Stadttheater Koblenz and the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Fleeing Germany in 1933, he went to Barcelona where he made films, but left Spain at the outset of the Civil War in 1936 and had an emigré existence in Sweden and France before arriving at Trench Hall in 1942. There he was employed as the boilerman and gardener and, more significantly, directed the school plays. Pilar, his Spanish wife, was very pretty, short and good humoured, and students remember her in the kitchen needing to stand on a stool to stir the porridge.

  Marckwald worked with the school theatre group in a very thorough way; there were rehearsals every afternoon for months. ‘We did Twelfth Night. But it wasn’t a school play in the usual sense. We worked over each theme and by the time we had finished rehearsing we hadn’t got to the point where Fabian [Frank’s part] enters – so that was that. But the next play was Everyman, which isn’t a long play, and we managed to do the whole thing, and I was Everyman. I remember a rather heady moment. We worked in this man’s painstaking way to get everything right and to understand. Then we came to a point where Everyman finally realizes how wrong his life has been, and says: “I will make my testament Here before you all present.” This speech hadn’t been rehearsed. And I did it, it was only about eight lines, and he [Marckwald] said: “Sometimes one does get it right without the rehearsal.” I think, because of all the training, I had perhaps managed to make some sense of it.’ 14

  With hindsight, the story reads like a blueprint for creating something unforeseen that is rigorously true: the repeated study of the script, the striving to get things right and then the moment of abandon. There is a remote analogy with painting one subject for many months and years: as the person moves around during breaks, Auerbach might begin to see other things that wait to be portrayed; as he repeatedly draws outdoors from a fixed position, he gathers information and atmosphere. While painting, all of Auerbach’s energies are engaged with the formal and ‘truthful’ possibilities that have arisen, as he does nothing but observe and paint; for several hours he is immersed in the effort of making a unity of the forms. The analogy to acting goes further. ‘What I have in my mind is, as it were, the lump of the subject, the three-dimensional entity which I somehow try to inhabit and become – in the way that an actor would don a character or become a part – and to make statements about it from inside.’ 15

  Moving to London

  Towards the end of the war Auerbach stayed in London with his much older cousin Gerda from his father’s side and her husband, Gerd Boehm, for part of the holidays, burying himself in books borrowed from the library on Keats Grove in Hampstead; during the rest of the time he remained at Bunce Court. Leaving there in the summer of 1947 with his Higher School Certificate and a document of naturalization, which he received on 16 July 1947 in Faversham, he was absolutely determined not to end up in an office or a bank. Without Latin his choice of university was limited, but no advice or effort was made to place him where he thought he might thrive – in an art or drama school.

  A few surviving relatives were able to offer a bit of support for the 16-year-old orphan. His Uncle Jakob, who had escaped Berlin through the Netherlands and arrived in London after the war, his mother’s brother Uncle Hans Borchardt, who had fled to Buenos Aires, and cousins living in the United States joined together to provide a stipend of £4. 10s. a week for a year or so. Moving into a room in Pond Street in Hampstead, which he shared with Schuelein, who had left Bunce Court at the same time, Auerbach enrolled in art classes at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute. Despite the teaching seeming rather amateur, the instruction in how to handle materials proved quite useful. ‘There was Mr Oliver, a calligrapher. He did the lettering for the Stalingrad Sword, and he not only taught calligraphy but also employed students as calligraphers to do memorial books for churches and chapels – for which, of course, there was a big demand after the war.’ 16 Auerbach proved too clumsy for this task: ‘I think they regarded me as far too rough, foreign, modernistic, incompetent and hopeless.’

  At Bunce Court he had tried out a few ‘modern’ idioms, that of Paul Klee being the easiest to master. Now, he read James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) with the idea of attempting mythological subjects; Frank’s versions imagined a penny on the eyes of a dead man, and sailors who tied knots in sails so they could be let out if becalmed. He made a Crucifixion scene in the style of Edward Burra. In the summer holiday of 1948 Frank returned to Bunce Court and painted a picture a day. A few staff remained and ‘no one had the heart to say to me what right have you got to be here, or told me I couldn’t stay there. It was really home and gave me as much confidence as a family would have done.’ 17

  Apart from wanting to make art, there were opportunities to continue acting. Two school friends, Frank Marcus and Herman Essinger, a nephew of Tante Anna, had joined the International Theatre Group, which was the Kensington branch of the left-wing Unity Theatre based in St Pancras. Writing in the London Magazine in 2000, Patrick O’Connor, a former member of the ITG, placed the company in a historical context,
explaining that Marcus had ‘challenged the dogmatic hierarchy of Unity Theatre and broken away’.18 O’Connor helped to convince the others that it was a good thing that someone with contacts, Marcus, was willing to take on the responsibility of being director. Marcus began by ‘introducing to the company a retiring young painter called Frank Auerbach … He also played Pantalone and used the stage name of Frank Ashley in The Servant of Two Masters by Goldoni. He would do the decor. We would be on a sharing basis, also using serious drama students.’ 19

  One venue they had an opportunity to use was the Torch Theatre on Wilton Place in Knightsbridge. Although it seated less than one hundred, it was a fully professional theatre and was known as a ‘shop window’ to the West End. A small bar at the top of the stairs served as a club; Auerbach remembers seeing the actors Michael Wilding and Laurence Harvey around. In the evening various groups performed their plays, some featuring members of the cast of the wildly popular BBC radio programme ‘Dick Barton – Special Agent’. In 1948, most likely in September as O’Connor remembers coming there at the end of a summer-long heatwave, they began rehearsing Peter Ustinov’s play House of Regrets (1940). Frank’s role as Strukhov, the elderly batman to the even older General Andrei Cherevenko, was rather testing. In spite of having only a few lines, he was required to be on stage a lot of the time, waiting to say, ‘Dostoievsky writes very clearly … I find that he frequently makes people speak who live so clearly that I often feel that they might walk in through the door.’ 20 The rehearsals went on so long Frank sometimes slept in the theatre at night, under the seats. Most significantly, this was where he met Estella West, another member of the cast, who was to become a vital part of his life.

  Auerbach also acted in plays at the 20th Century Theatre in Westbourne Grove and at the New Lindsey in Notting Hill. These were proper fringe theatres, and although the activity for this young student was an evening one, he remembers that ‘the people I worked with were almost all trained actors’. He joined the Tavistock Theatre in Islington for a short while and had a couple of minor parts, one in Beggar on Horseback by George F. Kaufman and Marc Connelly: ‘I think that was because when I filled in the form, I said I could do an American accent – which was stretching it a bit.’ On another occasion, Auerbach answered an ad in the Stage and went to Ireland for a week to work for a stock company until he was sent back on account of having a foreign accent and resisting the advances of the actor-manager.

  The subsequent plays Marcus directed with the ITG cast notable actors, and attracted sought-after critics, including Beverley Baxter, who was in the audience when they were playing at the Chepstow Theatre in Notting Hill. O’Connor recalled that Baxter’s ‘presence was due mainly to the machinations of Jacqueline Sylvester [who later married Marcus], sister of [the aspiring art critic] David. She had erupted into one of our readings, a wild gamine look about her, hilarious after a party, dressed like a gypsy, her black hair disarranged, delivering bon mots to right and to left. Deflating the more pompous members, she was the Anna Magnani we lacked, winning all our hearts. We cast her as the vociferous hoyden in The Broken Jug.’ 21

  The example of David Bomberg

  At the beginning of 1948, the artist Archibald Ziegler, whose wife had been a teacher at Bunce Court in the 1930s, arranged for Auerbach to have an interview with the principal of St Martin’s School of Art. He was accepted for September, but impatient to begin studying art at a place more challenging than the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute, Frank walked around other London art schools with his portfolio under his arm. Arriving at the Borough Polytechnic Institute located on Southwark Bridge Road, he met Mr Patrick, the principal of the art school, a cake designer and a kind man, who agreed to admit him immediately. Founded in 1892, the college had a mixture of part-time and full-time students who crossed generations and classes; many had been in the Forces and were, as Auerbach put it, ‘actually serious about life’. In keeping with the postwar mood of egalitarianism, here and elsewhere, there was a feeling that everyone had the right to an education. As well as its mainstay trade courses, the Borough Polytechnic had a good reputation for art and employed, for example, the designer Tom Eckersley and the painter David Bomberg as teachers.

  Bomberg had established his reputation as an artist associated with the Vorticists (who in turn were close in their modernist idiom to the Cubists and Futurists). One of Bomberg’s early masterpieces, The Mud Bath (1914), was a painting based on what he remembered of Schevzik’s Steam Baths in the East End of London, in which the figures were reduced to blue and white angular forms apparently climbing in and out of a red basin. Bomberg was, for Auerbach, ‘by far the most talented of people who worked in that neo-Cubist idiom’. Nonetheless, he later became ‘an extremely adept landscape painter of very, very topographical landscapes – marvellously done in Palestine in the twenties. So this wasn’t a man who had some sort of single mission.’ 22

  Mr Patrick put together a timetable for Frank. ‘I think I’ll put you in for a day with David Bomberg’, as if to say, ‘Well, Bomberg’s a bit dicey, but you never know – you might get on with him.’ 23 Bomberg had caused controversy while he was still a student at the Slade in 1911–13. Although proud to have made a copy from a Holbein early on, he eventually reacted against both what was taught there and the emphasis on winning prizes for draughtsmanship. He was thrown out for his rebelliousness; the Slade was perhaps worried that his attitude would spread. While Frank concedes that Bomberg was ‘difficult’, and that ‘what he taught wouldn’t have equipped any of us to pass any exam, and there used to be art exams … He had this sort of idiom that allowed one to go for the essence at the very beginning … it was an experimental journey and this was not what was taught in art schools.’ 24

  Bomberg’s life class occupied a former engineering workshop, which Auerbach vividly recalls: ‘It had vastly high ceilings, tiled walls, and a curious metal structure holding up various skylights and angles in the roof; and a door that, when you opened it, kept on swinging like a bar door in a Western saloon for about five minutes after you’d entered.’ 25 Bomberg taught one day and two evening classes. Auerbach remembers that in the day session there was a Polish girl who painted waves for months on end and scraped off what she did with a circular tool. There were two other Polish girls who were very giggly and three former GIs who focused on picking up girls. A more serious student was Richard Negri, who was studying stage design and went on to a distinguished career at the Royal Court and in Manchester, as well as becoming a teacher at Wimbledon School of Art.

  In the first term, Auerbach was asked to square up a part of a drawing and to enlarge that area. His offended expression (now he regards the exercise as a very intelligent one) led Bomberg to ask, ‘“Oh, so you think I’m a silly old idiot don’t you’, or something like that, and I said, in my 17-year-old arrogance, “Yes, I do”. He was delighted and I didn’t realize that I had met with probably the most original, stubborn, radical intelligence that was to be found in art school … For me, very few works that could be described as works of art were produced there, but anything that seemed artificial or concocted or sort of false sauce or gravy on an insufficiently vital fact would be rejected by Bomberg. On the other hand, something which contained simply the tiniest hint of a personal distinction, it might be accepted. The result was that people would produce these anonymous cloudy pieces of paper which had absolutely nothing cheap or nasty about them and which would, to the sympathetic eye, have an adumbration of something rather grand and organic and particular. But, in competition with the great paintings of the world, which also have a vitality of a cutting image like superb posters, these drawings would seem like defenceless molluscs’.26

  Frank at the LCC ‘Open-Air Exhibition’, Embankment Gardens, London, July 1948

  Rather than instruct young people as if they were mere students, part of Bomberg’s message was that if ‘what you’re doing is to have any validity at all; it’s going to be on the level of these Masters th
at we admire’. Auerbach remembers looking at a reproduction of El Greco’s View of Toledo (1629) and Bomberg explaining how the scene was inaccurate compared to what Auerbach regards as his teacher’s equally thrilling, more descriptive approach to depicting the same town.

  It never occurred to Bomberg to suggest a subject as he assumed everyone had one. For him, it was necessary for artists whatever their age to be determined and ambitious. Students tended to draw in charcoal on large sheets and paint with large brushes; the same model continued to pose for an entire day or evening (contrary to the practice of short poses in other classes). Bomberg’s ability to demonstrate something to a student by painting or drawing rapidly and with great facility on the work in progress was breathtaking and formidable. ‘He came up behind you and said, look at the model, it’s doing this, it’s doing that – I suggest this and so on. So it was a practical course of instruction which actually took up most of the time.’ 27

  At the London County Council (LCC) ‘Open-Air Exhibition’ in the summer of 1948, Auerbach decided to try selling works by hanging his own pictures on the railings of Victoria Embankment Gardens, not far from where the much more mature Borough Group’s were showing. The impetus for that group, which included Cliff Holden, Peter (also known as Miles) Richmond, Len Missen, Dennis Creffield and Dorothy Mead, derived from these older students. They formulated manifestos and showed together, so there was a certain doctrinaire tendency within the art school. As Frank observed later: ‘Like every religious order, I suppose, like every innovative movement in art and ideas, what was actually an improvised, energetic, fresh leap into the unknown has been turned into orthodoxy by followers.’ 28 Neither Auerbach nor Leon Kossoff, who from 1949 attended Bomberg’s evening classes, became members of the Borough Group, or any movement; it was the contact with Bomberg and the freedom to work from the model outside the conventions of art school life-rooms that brought them to south London.