Only a scattering of drawings survives but they are of several types. Some when pinned up together on the studio wall might have resembled a storyboard where one can identify men with shovels at the bottom of the pit, dwarfed by the machinery, and follow annotations there to remind the artist of colours. Other drawings are less explicit, the marks conjuring up the vaulted darkness within old master paintings and Piranesi’s imaginary prison drawings, the Carceri series. Auerbach’s Study after Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander (c. 1953), which is a drawing based on a work in the National Gallery, puts emphasis on the grand buildings of Abydos, with spectators lined up on the dock, and on the storm over the Hellespont in which Leander drowned. A gridded building-site sketch on the verso curiously transports the eye into deep space; the ideal architecture and the lightning bolt in Turner’s painting is here a diagonal stroke that we read as a huge beam being cantilevered into position.
Archive photographs of the Shell Buildings under construction and finished, normally empty of people, seem rather dull and inhuman in comparison to Auerbach’s grand re-imagining of what he witnessed. Upon completion in 1962 it would be the largest office complex in Europe, occupying the riverside front from Waterloo Bridge to County Hall as part of the South Bank development. Soon two office blocks loomed over the Royal Festival Hall, one with an unprecedented 26-storey tower, both requiring deep foundations. ‘The Shell site was extraordinary ... It was a vast building site and it looked absolutely superb. It was like the Grand Canyon. I remember going there … it was almost a gift … you could have taken it and put it in a museum being what it is.’ 4 In the two paintings approaching the site from the Thames, the viewer looks down on a golden void, with the lines of a crane, a boom and cables dividing the surface, in the distance Waterloo Station and below the stubby steel supports indicating the foundations for the new building. The oil sketch (opposite below) and a larger painting both subtitled From the Festival Hall describe a more recessional space, with the foreground punctuated by marks indicating steel uprights and in the distance the outlines of the new blocks.
Study after Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander, c. 1953
Study for Shell Building Site from the Festival Hall, c. 1958–59
Shell Building Site from the Festival Hall, 1959
When the fourteen building-site paintings, dating from 1952 to 1962, were gathered together at the Courtauld Gallery in London for an extremely well-received exhibition in 2009, Auerbach reflected on his state of mind in these years in the course of a conversation with the critic Martin Gayford: ‘You know how when one is young everything has a very strong effect and one remembers much more of those years than one does of any other? I’m speaking here for a young man who no longer exists and of whom I’m a rather distant representative. I think there may be some feeling of that turmoil and freedom in those pictures that there was in London after the war. There was a curious feeling of liberty about because everybody who was living there had escaped death in some way. It was sexy in a way, this semi-destroyed London. There was a scavenging feeling of living in a ruined town.’ 5
For artists working in this period, an association with existentialism was inevitable, as the curator Paul Moorhouse put it in his essay in the Courtauld catalogue: ‘The writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir identified a world in which man existed in the absence of any divine plan,’ and consequently artists could immerse themselves in ‘a private quest’ as they progressively restated an image.6 Auerbach sometimes reflects on the mentality of the period. ‘I very much liked the idea that you made your own justification for existence. I don’t think I can exaggerate the degree to which consciously or unconsciously the atom bomb hovered over all our heads. Very few of us thought that we had many years to live. So what are you going to do? You live in the moment and you try to construct your own framework to justify this brief and instinctive existence.’ 7
The emphasis on the personal and the concrete is characteristic; it began with what he saw: ‘A city fully functional is to me a somewhat formally boring collection of cubic rectilinear shapes, but London after the war was a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags, full of drama formally … compost for images all around one.’ 8 The shapes and relationships had to be regurgitated and made into something pictorially fresh and tangible; the surface might mimic earth with ruts and crusts; and the atmosphere was fuliginous. But this build-up was never created with the intention of conveying something primal; the texture was the natural result of the way Auerbach added paint, in these early years working without scraping and able to afford only earth colours. The criterion applied to every painting, then and in the future, was ‘to catch something that is mobile’ so that the marks and colours should ‘reconstitute themselves if they’re any good into a sort of experience that has very little to do with the paint’. 9
At the beginning of the 1960s, Auerbach turned to the demolition of the Maples store on the Euston Road and the rebuilding of the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square. Meanwhile he introduced other very active and dramatic locations, such as the street in front of the Carreras cigarette factory across from Mornington Crescent Underground station and railway arches in Bethnal Green. In order to recall the activity of the porters carrying meat in Smithfield Market, he made a sequence of photographs, ‘almost like a photo-essay’, to progress the vertical painting finished in 1962. ‘One gets involved with a theme and one just wants to do it. It’s almost as though someone had challenged me to a duel with them and I can’t back out!’ His fascination with urban landscape was already matched by a need to go to open spaces with different rhythms; as soon as Frank moved to the studio near Mornington Crescent in 1954 he began painting Primrose Hill, a mound adjacent to Regent’s Park twenty minutes’ walk away. Auerbach said later that the close tones conjured up space for him. The terrain in these first pictures seems churned and dense; the furrows made by the brush relate to trees or paths embedded in the golden-greenish surface.
Over the years he continued to paint Primrose Hill (see p. 54); a city park crossed by paths and lampposts. It provided an ‘antidote’ to the hard, angular forms of buildings. Gradually, the area of sky grows and individual trees are described, the viewer feels the movement of wind in the trees, and takes in the profile of tall buildings in the distance. A connection to one of the artist’s favourite painters, John Constable, another landscape painter, is inevitable. Auerbach says that like his predecessor he also became very familiar with his material and ‘actually tried to convey within the forms how things interlock, even where you can’t see them’. He drew from the work of a variety of artists, relishing, for example, the work of English painters such as Turner, Gainsborough, Constable and Hogarth, while not excluding minor ones such as Benjamin Haydon. ‘I have hardly ever drawn from a modern picture – I know how it’s made. When it is one by an old master, I know they are marvellous, but I can’t see what is the secret that makes them so.’ Interviewed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2014, when they presented ‘Constable: The Making of a Master’, his comment on Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) describes his own work, then and now, as well as the drawings and etchings of this painting by Kossoff, in which the cart, man and three horses are very prominent. Constable ‘always had to have something a little bit industrious in the front, evidence of work, even if it is only cows. It’s like: don’t believe that life is all going to be rainbows and heaven.’ 10
Primrose Hill, 1954–55
Not one without the other: Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff
‘We were like two mountain climbers roped together.’ At the dinner to celebrate an exhibition of Leon Kossoff’s drawings in May 2013, I heard Auerbach borrow Braque’s famous quotation about his relationship with Picasso in the pioneering days of Cubism. It was an analogy he had used before in connection with Kossoff, the implication being that during their student years and beyond as one artist managed to grasp what he saw and transpose �
�the sense of corporeal reality’, however laborious the process, on to paper or canvas, the other was challenged to do something even more extraordinary. They frequently worked in proximity. In 1950, Kossoff had taken over the purpose-built studio with north-facing light near Mornington Crescent from the previous occupant, Gustav Metzger. After Kossoff married and moved to Bethnal Green, the tenancy passed to Auerbach in March 1954.
Looking back, in 2012, Frank explained how they worked in the years 1954–57: ‘I would sit for an hour and Leon would paint me, and then Leon would sit for an hour and I would paint him, and so we went on all day, turn and turn about. I’ve forgotten how long the process took and I’ve forgotten also how many days a week we did it, it may have been two days a week. It may have taken about two years for Leon to finish two paintings of me, one a half-length and one a head, and for me to finish two paintings of Leon.’ Head of Leon Kossoff (1954), facing right, was finished first; for Auerbach it is the slightly more organic portrait, whereas the other one where the subject faces left he sees as oddly hieratic, with an Easter Island feel about it (see p. 64). ‘Both were shown in the “Daily Express Young Artists’ Exhibition” in 1955 where Lucian [Freud] won the second prize for the portrait of Caroline with her finger in her mouth in the Hotel Louisiana in Paris and Lucian, not a particularly good likeness, standing behind looking extremely troubled. The actual main prize was, I think, won by somebody who’s since disappeared for a painting called the Departure for Cythera.’ 11
Auerbach went on to recall the circumstances of painting three tablet-sized portraits, which despite their scale took a considerable time to realize (see p. 65). This was in 1954–56. ‘I did a few little paintings in Leon’s flat, and I think once again it was turn and turn about. I had left the college and was in a fairly desperate state, not only as regards keeping alive, [but] also as regards affording a quantity of paint and I think that might have been an element at least in doing smaller pictures.’ The works Auerbach made at the end of this exchange, in 1957, back in Mornington Crescent, were three very heavily worked charcoal drawings of Leon looking down, the lines in the surrounding space echoing those that shaped the round cranium and below the sharper lines of jaw and neck. ‘I know Leon finished before me and he very generously went on sitting for the drawings after intervals to do with his own work. There is a sort of superstition that drawings have to be quick and paintings have to be slow but these weren’t particularly quick, they took a number of sittings.’ While posing, Kossoff had observed the way Auerbach rejected images that it was ‘possible to preconceive’, those that ‘lied’: his words in the catalogue preface to Auerbach’s 1978 exhibition suggest Kossoff was speaking for both men: ‘The only true guide in this search is the special relationship the artist has with the person or landscape from which he is working. Finally, in spite of all this activity of absorption and internalization the images emerge in an atmosphere of freedom.’ 12
Frank in the studio with portraits of Leon Kossoff made in 1954, c. 1955
Head of Leon Kossoff, 1954
In 1998, the critic Michael Peppiatt pursued questions about the relationship between Auerbach and Kossoff and was told, ‘We saw each other very frequently, and we saw each other’s work as it was being produced and – I can’t speak for Leon – but I was excited by what he was doing and felt that it was worth emulating the quality, if not the idiom, or the way of painting. We used to go over to each other’s studios right through the fifties and into the sixties … Then I think we became more private, as one does as one gets older and more mature and more ...’ Peppiatt suggested, ‘Oneself ?’ ‘Yes, I think once one has discovered and defined, willy-nilly, the sort of person one is, then the battle becomes almost entirely one’s own. One hopes to be stimulated by quality, but it’s at least as likely to be by pictures in the National Gallery as by something remarkable being done while one lives.’ 13
Helen Lessore and the Beaux Arts Gallery
‘I think that between the years of say 1952 and 1956 I was working at my own frontiers. I mean, I don’t think that there was an ounce of attention, energy, commitment, or courage to spare that wasn’t devoted to my painting.’ 14 Auerbach’s first one-person exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery opened in January 1956 and contained the remarkable results of this intense and experimental period: twenty-four paintings, of which eight were urban landscapes, ten heads and four nudes of E.O.W., two heads of Leon Kossoff, plus eight drawings from life models and a set of five drypoints.
The work made an immediate impression among artists and critics. David Sylvester in the Listener thought the Primrose Hill and Building Site paintings ‘must be the heaviest paintings in existence, for the paint has been put on so thick that they resemble relief maps of mountainous regions’. 15 Critics, then and later, made a comparison to two current movements, Art Brut and Art Informel, as exemplified in the work of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier, but there was nothing ‘naïve’ or process-led about Auerbach’s approach; he went on with each work for a long time until ‘they looked banally true to me’. To Sylvester, gazing at one of the portraits ‘gives a sensation curiously like that of running our fingertips over the contours of a head near us in the dark, reassured by its presence, disturbed by its otherness’. 16
Auerbach’s association with the Beaux Arts Gallery came about after its director, Helen Lessore, visited an exhibition of five graduating painters at the Royal College in the summer of 1955: Joe Tilson, Anthony Whishaw, Mike Pope, Keith Cunningham and Frank Auerbach. She invited each of them to send a picture to the summer show she planned for her Mayfair gallery; Auerbach contributed two nudes of Stella.17 Soon after, another gallery approached Auerbach, so he wrote to advise her of this. In October, Lessore hurried to the studio to see his new work, ‘and she said, almost tearfully, but I like it’, proving her commitment by immediately buying six pictures for £60 while rightly suggesting the other offer was suspect: ‘No serious gallery will give you a show that quickly.’ Lessore responded especially to the paintings of E.O.W.’s head in profile and those of her extended body; to her it was ‘as if the planes were carved out of a stubbornly resistant rock-face of grey stone’, like a low relief. 18
Sylvester went so far as to judge the inaugural exhibition an event: ‘As to Auerbach, he has given us, at the age of twenty-four, what seems to me the most exciting and impressive one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon’s in 1949 … these paintings reveal the qualities that make for greatness in a painter – fearlessness, a profound originality: a total absorption in what obsesses him; and, above all, a certain authority and originality in his forms and colours. Here at last is a young painter who has extended the power of paint to remake reality.’ 19 Most of all, other artists took note. Francis Bacon encouraged his friend Lucian Freud to come to the opening. Fifty years later, when the V & A staged a joint Auerbach/Freud exhibition, Frank reminisced, ‘I remember Lucian making a very ceremonious bow at the end when he left the gallery.’ 20 Richard Cork turned to Freud to record his initial impressions of Auerbach’s work, ‘I remember thinking what a lot of paint! When you’re an artist yourself, you are always very aware of the technicalities. They were all heaped with paint, and done on board.’ 21
Although Lessore sold only a few small pictures from that exhibition, Auerbach’s relationship with her survived, not least because this dealer was distinct from the others. For a start, she herself had studied art at the Slade in the 1920s and had continued to paint after she found a job at the Beaux Arts Gallery. Lessore had married its proprietor, a much older artist, the sculptor Frederick Lessore, brother of Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse. After he died in 1951 she was obliged to run the gallery to support the family, moving with her two sons, Henry and John, into the separate flat on the ground floor of this collection of small buildings on Bruton Place, near Bond Street.
The Beaux Arts Gallery had a reputation for seriousness, as was conveyed by Andrew Forge in a catalogue introduction written three year
s after it closed for the group exhibition ‘Helen Lessore and the Beaux Arts Gallery’ that Marlborough Fine Art staged in 1968: ‘You came off the street up a dark staircase and straight into the upstairs gallery. It was like entering an attic. The first things you saw were floor-boards and a floor-level view of the pictures. The floor-boards creaked and the place always smelt of the paraffin stoves that were standing around (there was some inadequacy in the wiring). Through the top gallery you came to a balcony hanging out over the large gallery below, just as it might over the squash court which the lower space resembled. On the balcony to the right was Helen Lessore’s desk and she was almost always there, pale, beaked, a melancholy bird. To your left, a precipitous iron staircase took you down into the large gallery. A door opened straight on to the pavement of Bruton Place. Mrs Lessore’s shoes would watch you go. More than anything else it was like a studio, an atelier de peintre spruced up for visitors, and it was this – that the gallery itself seemed nearer to the painting end of pictures than to the merchandising end – that gave it its inimitable, irreplaceable quality.’ 22
Auerbach had annual exhibitions at the gallery – a small display of drawings in 1957, paintings in 1958, with a larger show of paintings and drawings in 1959 – continuing through to 1963, the final show before he moved to Marlborough Fine Art in the spring of 1964. Professional achievements that suggested his reputation was growing were mentioned in the rather basic catalogues: for example, Auerbach’s inclusion in the Pittsburgh International Exhibition, 1958, and the purchase of E.O.W., Nude on Bed (1959) by the Chrysler Art Museum of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Michael Roemer, Frank’s school friend, was the first to buy, and kept doing so; for twelve years he paid in monthly instalments of $5. The poet and civil servant C. H. Sisson purchased a sketch for the Oxford Street Building Site (1960) and Nude on Bed IV (1961). Six works were sold by Lessore to the actor Laurence Harvey, and after Auerbach joined the Marlborough he continued acquiring works; the collection was begun while Harvey was starring in box-office hits such as Room at the Top (1959) and The Alamo (1960). The Tate, Arts Council, Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, and the Contemporary Art Society bought as well. In 1961, after five years of modest sales, Lessore was able to offer Auerbach a contract that promised £1,500 annually so that buying enough quantities of paint and being able to afford brighter colours, reds and vivid greens, became more feasible.
Frank Auerbach Page 5