Frank Auerbach

by Catherine Lampert

  David Sylvester was invited to select Arthur Tooth & Sons’ fourth Critic’s Choice exhibition for the summer of 1958. He began by defining what was British. ‘The sensible formula seemed to be the one adopted when Rothko and de Kooning are claimed as American artists while Lipchitz and Gabo are not: artists from abroad were considered ineligible if their artistic formation had preceded their settling here, and eligible if it had not.’ Taking an age limit of 50, in the first room he hung works by William Coldstream, Francis Bacon and Victor Pasmore, the trio described collectively as ‘profoundly individualistic, idiosyncratic – in a way that is peculiarly English. I do not mean by this that these artists are in the tradition of English eccentric painters: on the contrary, whereas eccentrics are innocent about problems of style, these painters have a highly self-conscious, fastidious, sense of style. Neither does the fact that they are “originals” make them isolated figures: each has numerous followers and imitators.’ 23 At one point Sylvester considered inviting another recent graduate, Michael Andrews, to show work. However, settled into a residency at the Digswell Arts Trust and engaged on painting a local gardener, he was unable to deliver in time. Auerbach was the alternative. In the second room, four paintings, Primrose Hill (1954–55), the ochre ground Primrose Hill (1958) and two heads of E.O.W. from 1957–58, hung adjacent to sculpture by Kenneth Armitage and Eduardo Paolozzi.24

  Many viewers at these early exhibitions found it hard to locate features in the thickly painted works and were troubled by the churned impasto. In ‘A stick in the dark’, a review in the New Statesman of Auerbach’s Beaux Arts exhibition in 1959, the critic John Berger recognized that the ‘thick, uneven, turgid’ paint would always seem inadequate given ‘the richness of life and the poorness of art’. However, he detected a thrilling new achievement, not least because Auerbach had avoided the perils of imitation and subjectivity. ‘The inert deadness of the mud in Auerbach’s earlier paintings becomes eloquent now about the weather and the depth dug in the building sites, just as in the nudes it becomes eloquent about the substance of flesh.’ 25 One painting, Shell Building Site: Workmen under Hungerford Bridge (1958–61), ‘with its almost purple bloom upon it’, was commended by the Times critic for its extended range of colour. Nevertheless, after the exhibition closed this painting was returned to Auerbach’s studio because he realized it needed to be reworked: ‘I must have had some brandy because I remember drinking and repainting the whole thing in black and white from top to bottom.’ 26

  Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, 1962

  In 1962, works by the Swedish painter Evert Lundquist, Kossoff and Auerbach were hung together in a Beaux Arts summer exhibition. In the Sunday Times Sylvester, who loved to rate everything – artists, works of art, carpets, food, women – made another claim: ‘Today we make heroes of painters still at art school, but there’s only one postwar painter in this country, Frank Auerbach, who in my view has gone as far as Bacon and Coldstream before reaching 25.’ 27 One critic identified a ‘head-on clash between American-influenced abstraction and a Bomberg-inspired realism’; the author of this opinion, Alan Bowness, art historian and later director of the Tate, compared Auerbach with Soutine, both were ‘expressionist painters’, while regarding the artist’s new interest in the ‘spatial setting’, and the black and white pictures in this exhibition, as a positive sign.28 Andrew Forge, writing in September 1963, insisted the commentary about Auerbach should go beyond the repetition of subject matter and the thickness of the paint, which he considered just a ‘conversational handle’, to look harder at the real and ‘extreme demands he places on the paint’ as surface and as image. ‘The closer the circle tightens round him and his model, the smaller the field within which spontaneity is possible – and the more desperately necessary spontaneity becomes … He insists that “distant” does not feel the same as “near”, that things are changed by their position in space, that his pictures include the eye’s swoop across a yawning excavation or into the hollow of an eye. He rejects the Cubist conventions. He wants the movements into his pictures to be swift and deep and ample, as they are in Rembrandt.’ The ‘object-character of the picture’, against what it represents, is an extreme position to take and is used ‘to smash the familiar features and replace them with raw material … sometimes one feels that they [these pictures] are like the most rigorous demonstrations of the mysteries of the painted surface.’ 29

  Teaching and surviving

  Whereas a number of artists leaving college had help from their parents, or perhaps income from a building society account, Auerbach after he left the Royal College in June 1955 was on his own. Initially he survived by doing odd jobs, including working part-time packing in a frame moulders and for a year helping on Sundays in the branch of the Kossoff bakery shops in Brick Lane. (He served bread while Leon handled the cakes, manned the till and phoned the head bakery if they were running short of bread.) His first part-time teaching appointments in the autumn of 1955 were as a supply teacher at a boys’ school on the City Road and a day a week at a girls’ school, Langford Grove, at Barcombe Mills, near Lewes in Sussex. There he replaced the painter Edward Middleditch (and before him Denis Wirth-Miller and earlier Helen Lessore). The headmistress, Miss Curtis, an eccentric lady, regularly invited him to share a lunch of scallops and gin, and at the end of the day threw down the stairs a cheque for three pounds. In 1957, Auerbach began teaching three evenings a week at Ealing School of Art.

  The loss of time to paint meant these interruptions were dispiriting. At the Royal College he disdained to write a clever thesis, and he has insisted that words exist around the periphery, protesting when questioned too deeply that ‘painting is a dumb activity’ and pictures embrace ‘many elements not to be comprehended in any coherent verbal theory’. Nonetheless, Auerbach’s growing ability to articulate his experience, to offer ‘loose ends which lead back to the central activity’, happened in tandem with the early years of talking about drawing and painting as a visiting tutor.30 ‘I think it would now probably seem limited, but this [verbal] invention actually sustained me in my work and there were phrases that I found myself saying to students because I found it intolerable to be in a room with unambitious or insensitive work.’ 31

  Former students remember how he spoke to them as if future artists. Early on, this assumption created problems when he began a part-time job at Sidcup School of Art in 1957. The college is known for its connections with the music scene. The rather rough R&B band Pretty Things was formed there in 1963 and played at a club nearby, Chislehurst Caves. It was a school of commercial art and Auerbach recalls that the students were supposed to be inferior because they had not passed GCEs, but in his view ‘they were far from inferior, they were lively, and they started wanting to paint’. One, Rosemary Bridger Leith, remembered that Auerbach was always encouraging and endlessly patient, impressing upon the students ‘that a painting must “come forward” and be strong and bold in the foreground!’ 32 Very soon the growing taste for painting in the students supposed to be entering design studios alarmed the administration and he was sacked. Keith Colburn, principal of the affiliated Bromley College of Art, heard from a student about this effective teacher and decided to hire him straightaway. As Frank recalls, ‘there was an element of sort of slightly gleeful politics’ about his being re-employed.

  Bromley College of Art, before the merger of three schools and renaming as Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in 1962, was housed in a Victorian building on Tweedy Road in the centre of Bromley, Kent. Over the three years Auerbach taught there two days a week, 1958–61, several students left a lasting impression on him. One, Joe Keys, came from a very poor background; when he went home in December his father said he would have to pay for his share of the Christmas dinner. On the basis of a self-portrait, he was admitted to the Slade where Frank observed that he rather fell under the influence of Art and Language, the collaborative practice that began in 1968 with the intention of challenging both the fashi
onable and too often doctrinaire espousal of conceptual art and modernism, although their own ideas and texts were sometimes as impenetrable. Keys eventually moved to Ireland and made a life as a painter. Another interesting student for Auerbach was Raymond Atkins who went on to make large, rugged scenes of Cornish quarries and scrapyards, working in the open air.33

  In an article published in 1959, Auerbach detailed something of what he could hand on without suggesting there were shortcuts and secure ways of moving forward. For him, the impulse to paint begins with an extreme situation: ‘One’s got to make a new problem, to make it one’s own – the identity is new, that is one of the points about it. All important discoveries are made in the course of autobiographies.’ He insisted original painting has to be relevant to the moment and that reworking brings unforeseen solutions: ‘One tries to do what one can’t do – painting is a very specific thing, even the painting I’ve done in the past is impossible to do. In the act of trying – the new look – it sometimes happens by opposites ... bright colours suddenly look brittle, so one tries to push it further – strongly divided in black and white ... suddenly turned the brown to yellow … destroy it, and so on. But it happens in specific ways – by a hair’s breadth (these are windy running words), but I think one should never try to do anything new. Big words – all they can do is stir one’s conscience.’ Painting is an artificial activity, which he later compares to scientific experimentation, then finishing this passage by reminding himself and others that, ‘Without discipline, rigours, rules, the discovery wouldn’t mean anything at all’.’ 34

  Teaching naturally offered contact with other up-and-coming artists working in various idioms. In 1958, Auerbach took on a part-time job at Camberwell where Robert Medley ran the painting department. There he made lifelong friends with the painter R. B. Kitaj and the art historian Michael Podro. Two other artists, Euan Uglow and Patrick Symons, who also taught on Wednesday evenings, went with Frank after class to various well-known restaurants, such as Overton’s opposite Victoria station, or Rules in Covent Garden, or sometimes to cheap cafés. Many of the students were inclined to attempt William Coldstream’s ‘objective drawing’ procedures as if it were a safe idiom, but without really looking at the forms. Auerbach pushed them to look longer and harder and to try to make a form that encapsulated their own experience.35 George Rowlett, who had come down from Grimsby School of Art, is known today for his landscapes done in the open air. Many of his locations are around his home in Rotherhithe near the Thames; working with spatula and fingers, the facture of his paintings brings back the light and chaos of the scene. John Kiki and Tom Phillips were two other interesting Camberwell students who have stayed in touch.

  In 1961, Auerbach suggested to Coldstream that he might have something to offer the students at the Slade and was invited to address the sketch club; in October 1963, he took up a part-time post, a day a week in charge of a life-room and tutor to around eighteen students (this continued until June 1968 when he felt able to survive without this income). Several members of the painting staff and visiting tutors at the Slade in the mid-1960s worked from concrete subjects, among them Michael Andrews, Patrick George, Euan Uglow and Jeffrey Camp, but there were also artists with opposite positions. For example, Harold Cohen pursued a cerebral abstraction and after moving to California in 1968 invented AARON, a computer program designed to produce art autonomously.

  Approaching a student, Auerbach would ask, ‘Do you want me to talk with you or do you want to be left alone?’ Only Matthew Spender, attending a life-drawing class, replied ‘Yes, I do want to be left alone.’ In subsequent years Auerbach kept in touch, mainly by letter, with several former students from the Slade and other colleges, among them Mike Knowles, Peter Prendergast, John Wonnacott, Christopher Stein, Ray Atkins, Christopher Couch and John Virtue.36 Auerbach associates each with their strong points; Peter Saunders, for example, was admired for the real subjects he found, like the tea dancers in Covent Garden and South Bank skateboarders.

  John Wonnacott describes Auerbach coming into the Slade life-room armed with catalogues and books. Paradoxically, ‘part of the importance of Frank’s teaching was that he not only opened our eyes to the rich complexity of the visual world, but at the same time convinced us that the intrinsic value of the images he most admired had little to do with their historical or cultural provenance.’ 37 There was no need to feel under an obligation to be avant-garde, nor to revere artists, although the great painters such as Rembrandt and Velázquez set standards. Auerbach would say something along the following lines to the students, as given in a 1971 interview: ‘You have the greatest painting in the world in a room and look around you ... at the chairs, the tables, and the people moving about ... in some way they always seem more alive, more exciting, more extraordinary and more odd than the picture – than the greatest painting in the world – Las Meninas or a great Rembrandt or a great Matisse, or anything. There would be no motive for painting if the painting did not somehow conquer the existing world. So one tries to catch hold of the world of fact and experience at some point at which it hasn’t been caught hold of before, so that one remakes it in a sense which speaks to oneself directly – so that every mark, proportion and weight in some way conforms to one’s deepest desires without betraying it’s essence or identity – so that the stress of the real world and the stress on the newness of the painting are really a stress on the same thing … not the sort of painting which simply evolves from painting which already exists.’ 38

  The exceptionally open atmosphere at the Slade emanated from Coldstream, an artist Auerbach regards as one of the most remarkable English painters of the last century (L. S. Lowry, Gwen John and William Nicholson are other slightly unfashionable artists whom he rates). Coldstream’s tense, careful, delicate, underrated work emerged from the man’s strong response to his subjects. As Frank remembers it, Coldstream drank half a bottle of whisky daily, the first shot to calm his nerves, and meanwhile managed to handle the Slade administration with a singular clarity. Auerbach was exempted from going to meetings.

  Sometimes conversations that he and ‘Bill’ Coldstream shared come to Frank’s mind. One day in the autumn of 1966, when they were having lunch in the University College refectory, they both expressed their admiration for Marcel Duchamp. An extensive selection of Duchamp’s works had been shown a few months earlier at the Tate, culminating in The Large Glass, which Richard Hamilton had re-made for the occasion. Auerbach then and now regards the idea of the readymade and the actual objects and drawings Duchamp selected and created as ‘so exquisite and specific’. Frank said to Coldstream that having ideas might for him function like beginning a painting with pictorial scaffolding; when the ‘house’ is built, you can take it down. The sculptor Reg Butler passed by and overheard the name Duchamp. As Auerbach remembers, Butler interjected, ‘“Charlatan was a great man,” and bounced out. After he left, bemused, Bill said, “Reg always has a good reason for what he does. In winter, because his life takes place in dark enclosed spaces, he sculpts metal boxes – one cannot look into them, but he says that they contain secret objects [pause] … his seems a democratic art … I think I could make quite a good box!”’ Implicit in such memories of conversations with artists is Auerbach’s horror of art becoming democratic, therapeutic or indeed respectable; to him, art should be ‘distrusted by all sensible orthodoxies and moralities for who knows where it will lead?’ 39

  A famous cousin and some family history

  It has never been easy for Auerbach to shake off interest in his life story, but his determination is no doubt linked to a parallel refusal to be obliged by domestic commitments, property or anything that represents distraction from painting. The basic nature of the Mornington Crescent studio is consistent in a paradoxical way with his manner of dealing with the Auerbach relations in the years when he was becoming recognized and some were putting down roots in London. ‘I don’t keep anything. It may be due to my background. I absolutely believe that yo
u keep forging on, forwards, and that if you look back you turn into a pillar of salt.’ 40

  For a start, Frank reminds us these family members were encountered afresh. ‘I didn’t see for many years anybody I’d seen before so it was like being picked up and transported into a different world and if there are no attachments, if there are no associations, then one doesn’t remember.’ 41 Nevertheless contact began in the late 1940s and, as it happened, by the mid-1960s one of his older cousins, Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013), was becoming well known. His fame rose after 1973 as a controversial literary critic writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and as a regular broadcaster on radio. His autobiography, Mein Leben (1999), number one on the German bestseller list for fifty-three weeks, deals with family history in a minimal amount of space, but it is telling, and as Marcel describes the Auerbach family, one gets a sense of sophisticated, assimilated Jewish professionals attuned to the arts and literature.