Frank Auerbach

by Catherine Lampert

  E.O.W. Nude, 1952

  Summer Building Site, 1952

  The second and parallel act of desperation and epiphany transformed a building site that Auerbach passed regularly on Earl’s Court Road. ‘I went on doing drawings and trying to do this painting all summer, determined not to compromise.’ 43 Arriving at the Royal College of Art in September, his sense of doubt about whether he should have enrolled to do an advanced degree was heightened when the new class was allocated six tubes of colour; it seemed ridiculously inadequate, even then when everything was rationed: ‘I felt so disgusted entering an institution again, becoming a student again, thinking that I would have to conform in some way and compromise again … I went home and in my anger finished the Earl’s Court Road painting. Again, because of a crisis.’ Our eye is led to the ladders, girders and construction workers, but it is the intensified sense of space and movement imparted by Auerbach’s resort to amplifying some things and diminishing others, together with his use of bold, oblique strokes and orange and green blocks, that turn the street scene into a radical painting.

  The Royal College of Art, 1952–55

  The professor of painting at the Royal College was Rodrigo Moynihan, an artist who was part of the objective abstraction group in the 1930s and had returned to figuration when teaching at the Euston Road School. The first-year tutor was John Minton, who came over to Frank and said, ‘You look as though you know what you’re doing, I’ll leave you alone.’ Auerbach recalls him as nice, and a painter who made more authentic work than his ‘neo-romantic’ associates.

  At the Royal College there were departments of illustration, furniture, stained glass and so forth. The fine-art course was not unlike that of the Slade, which was the other highly regarded college and a place Auerbach had thought of attending (he was accepted, but was wary of going to a school where the students seemed rather too sophisticated and genteel).44 The atmosphere was less ‘bohemian’ and intellectual than the Slade, more down to earth, which is not to say that some of the painting students were not daring, extreme and inventive. In both colleges emphasis was put on drawing in the life-room, indeed, William Coldstream, professor at the Slade since the summer of 1949, had known Moynihan since their student days and the two spoke every day. Francis Bacon and David Sylvester were visitors to both institutions and the students met each other in pubs and at exhibitions.

  Minton tolerated Frank’s procedure of drawing from the model in the mornings, then returning home to do his painting. Once or twice in the life-room ‘I told people to keep quiet because it seemed to me to be intolerable that people should talk in the room where one was trying to work.’ One of his contemporaries at the college was Bridget Riley, and she recalls that they were the only students who persisted over the three weeks during which a particular model posed (Frank stood to work; she used a donkey easel to sit and balance her drawing board). The principal, Robin Darwin, suggested that Frank and Kossoff (he arrived at the RCA in 1953), who were known to be close, paint in the studios at the college instead of where they lived. But, after a brief compliance with Darwin’s directive, they carried on as before.

  Prior to 1954, the room Auerbach rented for the longest time was at 69 Anselm Road in West Kensington, near the North End Road. It cost 27s. 6d. a week. The location of Building Site, Earl’s Court Road, Winter (1953) was not far from where he lived, and in retrospect that picture is also associated in Auerbach’s mind with moving beyond a student’s viewpoint and doing something more original. He arranged a saw, pincers and hammer in his room in the hope that shifting from doing drawings to a painting of this still-life grouping would help with the challenge of doing the same when faced with the ever-changing scene of men, angular steel elements and mounds of earth. ‘It seemed to me that certain pictures that I had admired had done this and that the conflict between the slight sheerness and blandness that comes in working from drawings and the awkwardness and oddity that the objects in front of one have might make a more convincing image.’ 45

  In a BBC radio interview in 2001, the journalist John Tusa asked Auerbach what he would say to a young artist starting out from art school and the answer pointed to the winter building-site work. It was important to begin with ‘some experience that is your own and to try and record it in an idiom that is your own, and not to give a damn about what anybody else says to you … I think that the key word there is subject – find out what matters most to you and pursue it.’ 46 He has observed that ‘style’ is a sort of subject, a statement of your interests. This building-site painting seems to him ‘to be a sort of remarkable object, and though nobody else may be aware of it, I am aware of the amount of painting experience that’s buried under those heavy lumps of black and white and ochre.’ 47

  Seated Nude, 1955

  Building Site, Earl’s Court Road, Winter, 1953

  Francis Bacon, without a secure studio, had occupied one at the RCA in 1950, then returned in 1952 when Moynihan lent him his own, which was the professor’s room at the college. In his first year Auerbach became aware of this figure in a stylish French mariner’s shirt, like those worn by sailors. By eleven o’clock the shirt was covered in paint stains. Bacon would sometimes briefly visit the students’ sketching club and comment on what he saw. Born in 1909, he had only become established as a painter with the triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944), shown in 1948, and through the remarkable exhibitions of his work at the Hanover Gallery. At the opening in December 1951, Auerbach thought the Pope paintings looked impressive because they were more painterly than the somewhat graphic run of English contemporary art, which he regarded as illustrative. Looking back in c. 1990, Michael Andrews, a Slade student who in the mid-1950s became a friend of Auerbach and Bacon, wrote: ‘The supremely significant thing as far as I was concerned about Francis’s pictures, when I first became familiar with them as a Slade student in 1949–53, was that they were of mature adults, responsible, culpable, corruptible, vulnerable men, and occasionally women – not boys and girls. And that together with the fact that if they had no clothes on, what was remarkable was nakedness rather than nudity – contemporary adults undressed. That’s what struck me first and foremost, immediately, and still does.’ 48 The critic John Berger put it another way in 1953, ‘Bacon paints crime … as though he were an accomplice.’ 49

  The London art scene at this time was small and the relationship to modernism in flux. The West End galleries were full, as the artist and critic Andrew Forge put it, with ‘the last dregs of neo-romanticism, decorative painting that exploited the nature imagery of [Graham] Sutherland, and every imaginable variant of a decadent synthetic cubism’.50 A respected artist, Victor Pasmore, had moved from beautiful life paintings of his wife, Wendy, and a close relationship with other Euston Road School tutors, to abstraction, via a painting of a snow scene as a spiral in monochrome, shown at the 1951 Festival of Britain, before exhibiting his first abstract reliefs in 1953. When Bomberg’s contract with the Borough Polytechnic ended in 1953 he asked Coldstream whether there were any vacancies at the Slade, reminding him that his own approach to drawing aimed at ‘a fuller and more expansive delineation in the representation which is structural, taking no account of appearances’, and thus closer to Cézanne and Michelangelo, who were ‘builders of form’, in opposition to the more usual representational art that was imitative and superficial.51 One hears an echo in Auerbach’s words of 1958: ‘My attitude to form is conditioned, often, by an interest in the exact distribution of weight rather than in an exactitude of shape, in the true inflections of the masses in space rather than in the associations of particular colours or arrangements.’ 52

  E.O.W. in Earl’s Court, 1948–60

  From the beginning of his time as a student, Auerbach was involved with Stella West (1916–2014), who he had met when they were both in Ustinov’s House of Regrets. Stella described the much younger man she met in 1948 as a driven person looking more mature than his years. ‘Frank always knew
best, knew more.’ Auerbach has said similar things in connection with his ambition as a painter: ‘I was born old and I wanted to make a great dignified perverse image, a formal image.’ After talking to Stella for more than an hour at her home in Malvern in 1986, Robert Hughes coaxed some deeper recollections from her: ‘I haven’t stressed enough that Frank was the most marvellous person at explaining things, as long as he wasn’t personally involved. He would have made a wonderful teacher. He always knew the answers. He always had an explanation which was unexpected, surprising, bizarre, but he hit the nail on the head, always. Sometimes, when I was young, even though I was so much older, I regarded him as a sort of father-figure.’ 53

  Stella thought of her childhood as difficult. She was the daughter of a ‘gypsy’ mother and the philosopher O. S. Wauchope, noted for his book Deviation into Sense: The Nature of Explanation, published by Faber and Faber in 1948. The book, indirectly imbued with an existential lack of emotionality, is still read; its language is plain and its focus on ‘saying that is so’. His theories strangely accorded with work from observation and measurement and other ideas current in the visual arts, including those held by several artist friends he made. Among these were painters Auerbach admired, such as the talented, instinctive Gerald Wilde, a regular at the Fitzroy, a bohemian pub in Charlotte Street.54

  In January 1947, Stella’s husband, Dr Michael West, who had recently begun work at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, drowned in a tragic accident in the Serpentine when he was walking home one night after a black-tie dinner. The 30-year-old Stella was left mother to two small daughters, Sarah and Julia, and pregnant with her son, Michael, born that October. Stella’s beauty is evident in photographs; her broad forehead and slightly slanted mouth transfers to Auerbach’s first drawings of her made in the early 1950s. Her friends urged her to get out a bit, so she joined a drama group, and this is how she came to be playing Madame Barinova, the frail Russian landlady in the 1948 production of Ustinov’s play, set in West Kensington. As Stella told it, she became aware of Frank’s attention soon after this, during an evening gathering of friends at her house. She was sitting on the sofa, wearing a fashionable off-the-shoulder blouse and a billowing bell skirt with a pattern of brown and green rings. Frank moved over and began removing hairpins until her abundant hair cascaded down.

  Stella lived in a rather tall, thin, elegant house at 81 Earl’s Court Road and as a widow was obliged to rent out rooms. Frank became a lodger in her basement and their relationship began a week later; soon he also became part of the family, an unusual role to fall into for someone only 17. Stella remembered him as being very poor: ‘he used to walk around with bread in his pocket, with sixpenny lunch tickets [or vouchers], and a rail pass.’ Nonetheless, he bought a black dog and hamsters for the children, and over a week in August 1949 he painted a long mural for the nursery: a fairground composition with the tent and acts described in cones and cylinders. ‘As time passes I realize that in a way – a formal way – everything I have done stems from that.’ The treatment of volumes and space is remarkably like that of the paintings he started making at St Martin’s in 1950.55 Frank and Stella attended variety theatres – the Metropolitan, the Chelsea Palace, the Hackney Empire – together in the last years of these dying institutions and saw not only George Robey and Max Miller, but also upcoming stars such as Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine. Her children were amused by Frank’s own very good impersonations.

  Study for fairground mural, summer 1949, for the children’s nursery in Earl’s Court Road

  In the years c. 1949–51, Stella sat for a few casual studies, one a head-and-shoulders portrait when she wore a favourite dark red corduroy house-coat. Using the room in the basement had its problems; some of the lodgers were always coming down and asking for things. Perhaps the most troublesome was the writer Len Deighton who helped himself to coal without asking and cooked smelly eels on the stove. In late 1950, Auerbach moved out and began the custom of spending Friday, Saturday and Monday nights with Stella, working from her three evenings a week. The routine was for Stella to return from her job as a social worker in the East End, put food in the oven, persuade the children to be quiet for a bit, and to start posing. They began first with an hour, with a five-minute break to see how the meal was coming on, followed by another hour. The sitting over, they would eat.

  After she began posing nude, Stella became aware of the seriousness and the effort required. In the full-length ‘breakthrough’ painting of 1952, discussed earlier, which hung in her house for many years, she was comfortable with a Rubens-like quality in the body, but embarrassed by her legs. Auerbach, thinking back in 2012, recalled the circumstances of painting Stella for many years: ‘Every single one of the paintings of Stella, totally without exception, was done with me on my knees, with the painting resting on a very, very paint-y chair, and with Stella sitting for a very long period of time.’ In Earl’s Court Road, Stella would either sit in an easy chair on one side of the fireplace or lie on a bed, with the pots of paint around Frank (after he moved out the paint had to be ‘lugged’ over from where he lived). Newspaper was spread on the floor to stop the paint getting all over, ‘but it was still a pretty messy procedure and she was very tolerant for it to be allowed. After I had been drawing Stella in charcoal she put an embargo on charcoal because the whole house was covered in charcoal dust.’

  Stella remembered that ‘he was very violent and quite in a world of his own, and it was quite frightening in the beginning. But I got used to it after a time.’ 56 Frank’s recollections focus on the struggle to achieve an image, referring to the years 1952–58 when he could only afford earth colours and black and white, and was reluctant to scrape off expensive pigment and loose passages that worked: ‘It may be that the reiteration of the effort and the fact that I could afford so little material played some small part in the look … the thickness of the paint.’

  E.O.W., Half-length Nude, 1958

  Head of E.O.W., 1955

  Auerbach left the Royal College in the summer of 1955 with its degree, Associate of the Royal College of Art, with first-class honours, and a silver medal for painting. In the last term, a younger student from Yorkshire, Julia Wolstenholme, who had seen his drawings and thought them marvellous, asked if she could buy one. She went along to where he lived to have a look. She later recalled ‘it was pretty clear that would be all right and he’d give it to me, and he did’. The two became involved and married not long before their son Jacob was born in March 1958 in Sheffield. Mother and son lived on Vincent Terrace in Islington, and working there one night a week Frank finished two drawings of Julia in 1960 (see p. 88). However, shortly after that they were no longer in regular contact, until they got together again in 1976.

  Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning, 1968

  Chapter Two

  Forging a Reputation

  ‘A secret internal geometry’: Building sites, 1952–62

  In an odd way being adrift in London after Auerbach left Bunce Court was preparation for the remarkable paintings he did of the city’s postwar landscape in the 1950s and early 1960s. ‘Being a solitary teenager in London, as I didn’t have family or anything, at first I shared a room, then I had various rooms. But they weren’t rooms that anyone would want to sit in. So my life was very much of the streets. I went around London, I took bus rides. This became one’s physical and mental terrain, which stimulated me to try and paint it, slightly impelled by the feeling that gradually it would be tidied up and disappear.’ 1 Recording the blitz-ravaged city had appealed to older artists; David Bomberg and William Coldstream in the period 1944–47 each made several panoramic paintings and drawings that featured the shells of famous churches surrounded by razed buildings in the City of London, with the features on the skyline relatively easy to identify.

  Auerbach’s paintings, on the other hand, began with the earth displaced during the excavation of the sites and engaged with the first stages of the new buildings. The earliest that survived, the
‘breakthrough’ painting of 1952 with the ladders and girders in Earl’s Court was important, he explained, because he had cut through habits and reached a conclusion that remains an imperative, ‘a clear expression – something that seems to lock like a theorem.’ Auerbach and Leon Kossoff drew together around London and several of their paintings are of locations that were symbols of the city’s resilience and renewal, such as the area adjacent to St Paul’s Cathedral that had been razed during air raids in 1940 and 1941 and a new office block in Victoria Street, near Westminster, as well as the transformation of the South Bank. Frank had no head for heights and remembers inching along planks where workers passed with wheelbarrows, trying to get a better view but scared to stand while drawing.2 As Barnaby Wright, curator at the Courtauld Gallery, has written, ‘He would visit a site perhaps five or six times over a relatively short period, usually at an early stage in the construction, capturing what he needed before the works moved on and the scene had changed completely. Throughout the process of painting selections of the numerous sketches remained pinned up on his studio wall and were a constant reference point … Legibility was subject to sacrifice if it brought Auerbach closer to achieving what he describes as “formal grandeur” or “a secret internal geometry” which gradually emerged after months of labour and struggle.’ 3