Frank Auerbach

by Catherine Lampert

  Another very independent-minded student of Bomberg’s, also a refugee from Nazi Germany, was Gustav Metzger. Born in 1926, Metzger was conditioned by disturbing images from childhood. ‘My parents lived just off the main road between Furth and Nuremberg. Thousands of people would march along that road to the Nazi rallies. I was frightened.’ 29 In 1948, one of Metzger’s paintings, an oil on metal, was shown with the artist’s collective, the London Group. Auerbach recalls the forms, looking like three eggs, a bit like one of Robert Motherwell’s elegies to the Spanish Republic. Later, Metzger eschewed painting and brought in anti-establishment ideas. In the 1960s, as an advocate of the auto-destructive movement, his application of acid to painted nylon during performances was intended to mirror the arms industry’s obsession with obliteration via nuclear weapons. Themes that surface in Metzger’s later installation work, particularly the materiality of nature and a desire to provoke a visceral experience on the part of the spectator, perhaps relate to what both he and Auerbach took away from Bomberg’s own traumatic experience as a soldier in the trenches in 1914–16, in particular their mentor’s insistence on working from life and rejecting style.

  The rhetorical side of Bomberg’s teaching is associated in most accounts by students and art historians with a particular phrase, ‘the spirit of the mass’, but taken out of context it can be misleading. It was intended to describe the subject as a three-dimensional entity; Bomberg ‘didn’t believe in modelling the thing up artificially to give it weight. Weight was something you felt.’ 30 Such an intuitive, explorative approach made reference to Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy of seeing. Writing in the eighteenth century, Berkeley maintained that sight is connected with the experience of the physical world gained by experimentation with touch and the other senses. Auerbach paraphrases Berkeley’s ideas as follows: ‘If you have a spoon and you look at its back, on the convex side, you get your image. If you look at the front, the concave side, you get your image upside down. Exactly the same thing happens to the retina: on the back of the retina we get a reverse image, so that the newborn infant will reach down for something that’s up and up for something that’s down. It’s only by crawling across the floor, touching things, judging distances haptically, that the child will relate the sight of what he sees to the physical world.’ This process transfers to the artist in the studio who comes to understand the architecture of a building or a person and in a rather mysterious way ingests the whole. Looking back, Auerbach concludes that what Bomberg meant by ‘the spirit of the mass’ was to do with adding to the sense of three-dimensional architecture something very particular and exact. As he puts it: ‘You find yourself making gestures that imply legs and breast and so on; you begin to imply a sense of mass on the paper or on the canvas simply because you felt it.’

  In 1986, when the New York-based critic and historian Robert Hughes was preparing a monograph on Auerbach, the artist extended the comparison of Bomberg and Berkeley to F. R. Leavis, the Cambridge academic who insisted that literature came from an indwelt identification with words and experience rather than from learnt concepts. ‘You can tell a piece of Leavis, with its peculiar grinding cack-handedness and heaviness of syntax, almost anywhere – partly because he was chewing out his own definitions.’ Auerbach went on to say that Bomberg’s conversation naturally seemed ‘fairly impenetrable to outsiders unless they had patience with him or, as in my case, were young enough to have become habituated to it. He spoke on his own terms, and didn’t take anything over from other people without examining and remaking it.’ 31 Frank drew a series of simplified diagrams of birds to illustrate his point. ‘If you have two lines that represent a bird’s mouth, you could do a thousand drawings on a piece of paper and each of these birds would have a different expression. That one is obviously a more jokey bird than the others, and so on. Well, in that sense, this being the simplest possible combination of directions, there’s only one exact and direct expression for yourself of the mass in front of you. There are a million ways of not getting it right … you’re most likely to get it right when you’re least self-conscious, when you’ve given up any hope of producing an acceptable drawing or painting … because then you’re permeated wordlessly by the influence of the thing you’re painting.’ 32

  Robert Hughes regarded Bomberg as an exemplar for Frank and in his book (published in 1990) he outlined some of the qualities and positions that link Auerbach to his first real teacher: ‘much of the younger man – his empiricism, his scorn for modernist conventions, his impatience with theory and ideology, his reverence for the past and his determination to paint as though there were no breach between it and the present – was there in the older.’ 33 Perhaps the most important conviction they shared was that, in Auerbach’s words, ‘visual art is made with resistant matter and comes up against awkward rebarbative obstacles’.34 Auerbach explained to Hughes that Bomberg’s insistence on never borrowing anything from others without examining it and remaking it for oneself also made a deep impression, but ‘the deep necessity that I have to actually get profoundly involved with the subject is something I certainly didn’t learn from Bomberg. He often painted things that meant a great deal to him. But a large part of the time he was like a tourist painter. He would move from place to place, paint the landscapes where he saw them, and be able to make original and profoundly stated images with a subtext of philosophical enquiry and grandeur.’ 35

  In his interview with Hughes, Auerbach also placed emphasis on the difference between working from a model in a class and doing so on one’s own. ‘There was an idea of quality and lack of fear in those classes, but their actual productions and the mere fact that they were the productions of a life-class, which has always seemed to me to be an artificial situation unless it’s acknowledged in its artificiality, made them, for me, fall short of any sort of ambition that I would have. I think I really only found what I wanted to do when I recorded something that was intimate enough to me to be worth recording,’ and, having in his mind equally impersonal classes at the next two art colleges he attended, he continued, ‘a life-class where one sees a stranger naked and draws her, well, although I think it’s the only training-ground, it doesn’t seem to me to be the situation in which one makes an image’.36

  St Martin’s School of Art, 1948–52

  Auerbach acquired a copy of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s monograph on Picasso soon after it was published in 1946, and it was, and has remained, a stimulating source. While working he kept the page open at various pictures then captioned Head (Femme au nez en quart de Brie), 1907, and the Girl with Dark Hair (Portrait of D.M.), 1939. ‘It seemed to present the artist as an extraordinary fertile conjuror. I think I once thought I was that sort, wanted to be that sort, of artist; it was only in the act of working that I discovered I wasn’t that kind of painter at all.’ 37 But, what seems self-effacing can be misleading. For example, in the exhibition of the wartime works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse that opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in December 1945, one of the paintings there, Picasso’s Woman with Green Dress (Femme en vert), 1943, still looks relevant to Auerbach’s art. The strong rhythmic definition of the seated figure and the quirky spiral patterning within her dress is reminiscent of the bold drawing with liquid paint and the moment of lightness that sometimes guides much later work by Auerbach, as well as the triangular or loopy cipher inserted into a portrait and the skewed posture that is factual.38

  In the summer of 1948, before entering St Martin’s, Auerbach went to Paris for a few days with his cousin Gerda Boehm and he returned there briefly in c. 1951 with three other St Martin’s students. He found himself disappointed on both occasions by the works on display, for example, at the Maison de la pensée française, Picasso’s owls and kitchens, by Matisse’s cutouts at the Musée d’art moderne, which he didn’t rate – then, rather than now – and by weak works from the Ecole de Paris, such as those of André Lhote. In comparison, walking around London galleries was definitely exciting and Auerbach took
a keen, temporary interest in an exhibition of Ivon Hitchens’s paintings at the Leicester Galleries. The National Gallery was in close proximity to St Martin’s and he began making drawings there on a regular basis (and continued to do so until the 1980s when the bus service deteriorated and consulting the old masters no longer seemed relevant).

  Auerbach was supported by a LCC grant of £120 a year, and, as he was only 17, was still entitled to free milk. The St Martin’s course was closely tied to exams, which were linked to prescribed exercises, such as accomplishing a drawing in a day and a life-painting in a week, and at the end the successful students were awarded a National Diploma in Design. The Borough Polytechnic course had given Auerbach limited exposure to illustration, poster design and clay modelling in the courses taught by various instructors other than Bomberg. At St Martin’s in the beginners’ (first) year there was antique drawing, costume, art history and various other related subjects, as well as life drawing, and in the intermediate (or second) year they took life and costume drawing, composition, art history, architecture, perspective and anatomy. Building on those broad foundations, students in the third and fourth years studied life painting, pictorial composition, methods and materials, and submitted a short ‘thesis’. Teachers had some leeway in how they taught; for example, in the first year Clifford Webb took the students to the London Zoo in the mornings to draw and asked them to paint from what they brought back in the afternoons (Frank remembers painting a tiger, a rhinoceros and a fruit bat).

  John Wheatley, a Royal Academician who trained at the Slade, gave a lecture on Walter Sickert every year as part of his methods and materials course. Auerbach reflects that ‘I was not particularly interested then, but in retrospect, the account by Wheatley, who had been his student, of Sickert’s routine is intriguing. He worked on his paintings in sequence (perhaps thirty), all numbered on the back, over perhaps many months, drawing in the evenings. When a painting was finished, he started another from his stock of squared-up drawings. Of course, Sickert was volatile and often changed his ideas and his way of working.’

  Frank resisted the idea of painting genre scenes or narratives: ‘When I was a student many of the students around me were doing paintings of nudes on iron bedsteads [à la Sickert], and I thought of that as a cosy, domestic let-out. My vision of painting, the picture I had in my head, was of some clearly formal statement; an explosion; and I thought there was something too domestic and whimsical and Impressionistic about Sickert. I remember reacting with considerable scepticism when Helen [Lessore] said he was the best.’ 39 More than his painting, Sickert’s critical essays, published as A Free House! (1947), and later the collected writings, became and have remained a great stimulus. ‘I read his writings when I was a student. They worried me; I didn’t think it proper to be reading them … perhaps one should be reading Apollinaire instead? But his energy and wit, and the optimism, and the considerable profundity in odd places just got through to me. I loved the book and I still do. When I find myself very tired of an afternoon I sometimes pick that book up and go to a page and read it, and I find it works for me – I just want to go on working. It’s a matter of the man’s all-round worth.’ 40

  Pablo Picasso, Girl with Dark Hair (Portrait of Dora Maar), 1939, in Frank’s copy of Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (1946) by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Portrait of Leon Kossoff, 1950

  The 1948 intake at St Martin’s was comprised of an unusually large number of students who became well-known artists: among others, Joe Tilson, Donald Hamilton Fraser, Jack Smith, Peter Kinley, Bernard Cohen, Peter Coker, Michael Fussell, Anthony Hill and Sheila Fell. Again, their backgrounds were diverse. Tilson, for example, had come up from the suburbs, trained as a carpenter, worked in the building trade and had done his National Service in the RAF. He arrived for classes at St Martin’s on a motor scooter with a blonde girlfriend and knew about Soho life. Auerbach’s relationship with Leon Kossoff began when they met at St Martin’s. Leon, Phil Holmes and Frank went around as a kind of trio. When feeling a bit flush, they ate upstairs at Shearns, a vegetarian restaurant and health-food shop in Tottenham Court Road. On occasion they watched T. S. Eliot, a poet they much admired, poke a camembert before buying it.

  Kossoff, who was to become one of the important painters of his generation, was born in London in December 1926. He had attended St Martin’s during the war, then spent the years 1945–48 in the Royal Fusiliers attached to 2nd Battalion Jewish Brigade before re-enrolling at St Martin’s in 1949. One day, Kossoff expressed his admiration for a drawing Auerbach was doing in the antique room and not long afterwards the younger student suggested that Bomberg’s class, which he was still attending in the evenings, might suit him. Kossoff came along and the two became close, having in common a resistance to compromise and a more rebellious temperament than the other students; Kossoff found it impossible to conform to the exam requirements. Looking back, Auerbach explains that compared to him Kossoff had a much clearer sense of who he was and what he wanted to achieve in his work. In 1949, Kossoff made a painting of a coal man, in the days when they still used horses. It stays in Auerbach’s mind as being exceptionally raw and large-scaled; when the intermediate-year compositions ‘were meant to be 15 × 22 in., this was 20 × 30’. They began to pose for each other over the Christmas holidays in 1950–51, initially in a room Auerbach took in Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington. There are two finished charcoal drawings by Auerbach from this period. In the summer holidays they went to draw on Hampstead Heath.

  Three Blind Men, 1951

  Auerbach found he was doing one sort of drawing at St Martin’s and another in Bomberg’s classes. However, this is now hard to judge since most paintings and drawings made while he was student were destroyed and those that survive are undated. Auerbach points out that for Birth, Marriage, Death (1949), a triptych 4 × 6 feet made while at St Martin’s, he used his own body for some of the figures, as well as drawing a girlfriend called Lesley. Other group scenes still exist: All Night Party 1 (1950) and Three Blind Men (1951).

  Drawings and paintings done in Bomberg’s evening class, as Auerbach once recalled, were ‘quite remarkably like some of those pictures produced in New York at about the same time, also by painters working in total obscurity. Nobody at the Borough Polytechnic knew about the American painters.’ In preparation for this book, I asked Frank what might have happened if he had emigrated to the United States and his first contact with professional artists had been at Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Art at 52 W. 8th Street in New York. His reply was, ‘It would have definitely made a difference. There is a certain sympathy between the way Hofmann’s students painted – that is, of finding the very lively formal essence of the material – and the way Bomberg’s students thought. It is true Bomberg’s teaching was closer to Hofmann’s than, for instance, what Albers taught, which might suit some people.’ From Auerbach’s perspective, Josef Albers, another native of Germany, who taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, from 1933, and later at Yale University, operated in a rather different area, abiding by a consistent ‘schema’, which from 1951 was his homage to a square, and this kind of established system reassured his followers.

  Frank went on to say, using as comparison his own experience as a visiting tutor, ‘Painting can’t really be taught. All you can do is get people to where they jump in and swim. Hofmann had his own language, push and pull, which meant something specific to those in his classes. Bomberg had his own language which meant something specific to the people in his class. People hope to get students to the point where they can involve themselves in the painting, which is what people at the beginning can’t do, and so they find more extreme and recondite ways of entering the formal content of the painting.’

  A breakthrough, summer, 1952

  ‘I remember the breakthrough, the point at which it seemed to me that I started making my own pictures. It’s very vivid, very specific, in the summer of 1952.’ These paintings that Auerbach claims are true to
the subject were provoked by a feeling of crisis. ‘I’d been in institutions for five years, which seemed a century to me. I felt I would be doomed if I went into the army. I also felt I would be doomed if I went to the Royal College and just became an art student for another three years.’ 41 That summer, to his relief, he managed to fail the army medical, which meant he was excused from doing National Service. Meanwhile, he had a good job helping a girlfriend of Phil Holmes’s who ran a bagatelle stall at Battersea funfair, where he was paid 30 shillings a day by the boss and 30 shillings by her out of the fiddling. Frank was copying drawings of bicycles from a British catalogue, placing three to a page, so that his employer, a Nigerian, could duplicate them and offer the bikes to clients in his home country. He did this from four to six in the morning in order to have the rest of the time free for painting.

  It was then that ‘two things happened’. He was working from Stella (Estella Olive West, or E.O.W.) and she was someone he was involved with, not a professional model, ‘so the whole situation was obviously more tense and fraught. There was always the feeling that she might get fed up, that there might be a quarrel or something. I also had a much greater sense of what specifically she was like, so that the question of getting a likeness was like walking a tightrope. I had a far more poignant sense of it slipping away, of it being hard to get. I’d done the painting for some sittings in a relatively timid way; that is, I’d tried to do one part and then another part, and save a bit. Then I suddenly found in myself enough courage to repaint the whole thing, from top to bottom, irrationally and instinctively, and I found I’d got a picture of her.’ 42 The nude of E.O.W. does not appear conventionally resolved, one of her legs is tiny and the other big. ‘It only seems an authentic invention when I know that, however nutty it might look to someone else, that it is actually true, for me.’