Marcel’s mother, Helene, an older sister of Frank’s father, Max, was one of seven children of Rabbi Mannheim Auerbach, who died in 1937 at the age of 88. She married David Reich, a Polish businessman with an affinity for music, who brought her to the city of Poznan where their three children were born, Gerda in 1907, Herbert in 1911 and Marcel in 1920. When Reich went bankrupt in 1929, the family was obliged to move to Berlin to live with Rabbi Mannheim, by then a widower, and to seek help from Uncle Jakob, the lawyer whose partner arranged for Frank to be sponsored by Iris Origo and sent to England. He was ‘a sought-after, almost a prominent, attorney and notary, and proud of his very remarkable success. His brothers, too, were well off, living in an affluent style, but he alone was anxious to demonstrate his social rise.’ Jakob owned horses: ‘Every morning he would go riding with his wife in the nearby Tiergarten, as was the done thing. The neighbourhood in which he had settled was, at least in his opinion, aristocratic.’ 42 Reich-Ranicki focuses on the music room in Uncle Jakob’s spacious apartment: ‘On a wall in this room, among many other paintings, there was a picture of a woman in oriental attire lying on the floor. She was gazing, longingly and challengingly, at the face of a man whose head lay on a silver salver. Later my girl cousin informed me, not without pride: “That’s Mama as Salome.” Aunt Elsie had been an actress in her native Cologne.’ 43
Uncle Leo, the youngest brother of Frank’s father, was ‘a handsome, elegant man, in the opinion of some of the family a little too elegant and something of a show-off. He was an attorney with an office on Unter den Linden, which the family regarded as inappropriate, as a sign of his hubris. He had broken the mould in two respects. He had a weakness for horse-racing and his bets occasionally landed him in serious financial trouble.’ A lawyer for casino owners, Leo escaped Germany for France before joining the Foreign Legion (where he was put in charge of the library). When he returned to Paris after 1944, his future wife, Ingrid, who claimed to be from the celebrated aristocratic Richthofen family, ‘had had her head shaved and possessed jewelry’, gifts from German soldiers. In his twenties Frank remembered seeing Uncle Leo a few times at birthday dinners for Uncle Jakob, who arrived in London in 1948. At one occasion at Kettner’s in Soho, Ingrid dropped a knife and as Frank bent to pick it up, she said, ‘Don’t bother; it’s the waiter’s job’. In the 1950s, Leo settled in Frankfurt and continued gambling. Another of Max Auerbach’s sisters married a Polish dentist and they lived in Washington. Their son served in the US army and had come to see Frank twice during the war, bringing with him American newspapers with enticing comic strips and a book of Karl Shapiro’s poems.
Marcel’s account of his early years includes two references to Frank and his parents. Uncle Max is identified as a ‘cheerful patent agent’. On the morning of 28 February 1933, Marcel remembers a telephone call: ‘He had an irresistible urge to give us some sensational news. It was not “The Reichstag is on fire”, but “The Nazis have set fire to the Reichstag.”’ Uncle Max ‘never ceased to believe that the Third Reich would shortly collapse.’ 44
As a teenager Marcel enrolled in the Fichte-Gymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in 1935, by which time he was already obsessed by the theatre and by literature, and he was very pleased his uncle Max owned books by the most exciting banned authors. ‘I often had an opportunity of making use of this gold-mine. My uncle had a delightful young son, then about five years old, and I was frequently needed as a babysitter. Those were wonderful evenings: I not only amused myself with countless books but was also generously recompensed.’ 45
The husband of Marcel’s sister, Gerda, Gerhard, or ‘Gerd’, Boehm, received special praise: he was described as a not very successful export merchant, a short man and a tall story teller, a likeable person, intelligent and articulate. ‘He was extremely well versed in literature, especially in the new German literature … He loved Kurt Tucholsky … More than once he quoted to me the ancient dictum Primum vivere, deinde philosophari [First live, then philosophize].’ 46 Gerd instructed Marcel about communism and Soviet art, about Lenin and Trotsky. Much later Marcel learned his brother-in-law had worked in the political resistance in Germany in the 1930s.
The Boehms arrived in London in the spring of 1938. Looking back, Auerbach sees the short periods he spent with the couple in the school holidays at the end of the war were in some ways ‘very beneficial to me because I led this extraordinarily cloistered life at a Quaker boarding school in the country … there were certain conventions and we seemed to be different from the rest of the world and had never quite caught up with the twentieth century ... certainly Gerda Boehm and her husband were very much the opposite of that.’ Although the marriage was not a success, the experience of living in cosmopolitan Berlin in the 1930s had ‘somehow imparted to Gerda a desire to dress well and cut a figure in the world, and an appetite for going out.’
Five of Marcel’s Berlin cousins managed to leave Germany to attend schools in England, whereas his own family lacked the money to guarantee costs. In October 1938, the holders of foreign passports (his was Polish) were expelled, so he joined his mother in Warsaw, and in September 1942 his parents and other Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto were ordered onto the transports to Treblinka during the Grossaktion. Marcel, with his hastily married girlfriend Teofila (known as Tosia), survived another six months in the ghetto before escaping, and from June 1943 until the end of the German occupation they were hidden in the house of a working-class typesetter on the outskirts of Warsaw. At night while they all rolled cigarettes to sell, Marcel entertained the poverty-stricken couple with stories from classical literature. After the war, he came to London as the Polish consul but when anti-Semitic prejudice re-emerged in Poland and he wished to turn his back on the communist world, Marcel and his wife managed to move to West Germany in 1958. Their son Andrew, educated partly in England, became a distinguished mathematician and academic, settling in Edinburgh. In the year before he died Marcel was regarded as so much part of German national life that he was invited to address the Bundestag on 27 January 2012, Holocaust Remembrance Day. At his death the German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid tribute to a lifetime dedicated to interesting a larger public in reading: ‘We lose in him a peerless friend of literature, but also of freedom and democracy. I will miss this passionate and brilliant man.’
One can hardly imagine Auerbach exposing his life and feelings so explicitly as Marcel did in the autobiography, much less tolerating official attention. Several of his contemporaries accepted knighthoods and higher honours; Auerbach has avoided anything that sets him apart from other people living in London or which places him in the role of an exemplar. He reminds us that during the German occupation, Maurice de Vlaminck published articles deploring the ‘foreign’ influence on French art – meaning, presumably, Picasso, Chagall, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Miró, Soutine, Gris, etc. Picasso found this attitude disgusting and declared, most likely in jest, that collaborators should be executed and that in the case of Vlaminck he would be prepared to carry out the execution himself. Although the inhumanity of the Nazis and of war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann strikes Auerbach as unpardonable, he has commented that no one can be sure how the British, including painters, would have behaved if Hitler had occupied the country. He has avoided ‘all that gnawing at the past’. ‘I just think one plays the cards one is dealt, and that’s it. I’ve been aware of what happened all my life, and as luck would have it I found myself in the situation of being the “innocent party”. If I had not been Jewish who knows what I would have done or felt. I was also lucky to be young enough not to come with a lot of emotional baggage.’ 47
A painting that might consciously or unconsciously relate to death and religious persecution is Auerbach’s version of Rembrandt’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1635) in the National Gallery.48 Rembrandt’s Lamentation is twelve inches high and Auerbach’s 1961 version is over six feet. A bleak, monochromatic picture, the structure resembles the pictures of the Shell Buildings site from 19
59, which have a similarly illuminated central area. Here, in an echo of the features in the Rembrandt painting, the ruined city is in the background, and the three crosses, with the two ladders to bring down the bodies, are transposed into triangular shapes dividing the picture plane. Asked for more information in 1995, the artist replied, ‘I find it as difficult to read now as anybody else would, because it was done such a long time ago.’ 49 Rembrandt’s small painting, on the other hand, rekindled a response: it seems to be ‘so charged with feeling, with extraordinary detail of drama, with compositional invention, with sophisticated storytelling, that I couldn’t possibly have dreamt of making a small version of this vast idea on a small panel ... it is just such a highly charged little picture, it’s a miracle.’ 50
Frank (centre) with his cousin Marcel Reich-Ranicki (right) and Marcel’s son Andrew Ranicki (left) in Hampstead, 1970
Study after Deposition by Rembrandt II, 1961
The curator Colin Wiggins, writing in the catalogue Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters suggests that the deeper meaning of Auerbach’s work is conveyed in the facture: the painting is a modern statement about state murder. ‘Rigid and severe, it becomes a symbol of the torture and death of Christ, who seems to be the only figure who is still recognizable. He is differentiated from the rest of the figures by being represented in a lighter tone, his face and twisted legs picked out carefully in black. The other, grieving figures sacrifice their individual identities and become fused together in one living and tragic mass.’ 51
Self-Portrait, 1958
Chapter Three
‘Painting is My Form of Action’
Painting from life in the postwar years
In 1968, Andrew Forge reminded his readers that in the 1950s artists who worked ‘with any vitality and independence in a figurative way’ had needed to accept that they were ‘swimming against the tide’, and while it was difficult to define a commonality among those shown by Lessore at the Beaux Arts Gallery, he praised Auerbach, Kossoff, Andrews, Uglow and Craigie Aitchison, mentioning ‘their corresponding acceptance of the ethical content of painting’. As an example, he cited ‘Euan Uglow, whose timeless indifference to the dialectic of style is as radical and challenging in its way as the obsessive reiterations of a Kossoff or an Auerbach.’ 1
The dominant mode in Britain was still hidebound representation, as espoused by the majority of Royal Academicians, and an illustrative, rather thin neo-romanticism; whereas European Modernism was becoming orthodoxy in spite of such British exponents as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. William Scott shifted from making rather gritty still-life paintings of fish in frying pans to a distillation of floating shapes and open ground ‘abstraction’. A slightly younger artist, Peter Lanyon, thought the polemic that distinguished representational and abstract art was misguided and, instead, attempted to capture in paint the air, movement and forms experienced moving around his native Cornwall; after 1959 looking down from the perspective of a glider. Jack Smith and Prunella Clough, who had once focused on industrial and domestic subject matter, retained their characteristic emphasis on shallow space when they went abstract, while other artists such as Gillian Ayres, Robyn Denny and John Hoyland who exhibited in the ‘Situation’ exhibition of 1960 claimed their work was ‘without reference to the world outside the canvas’.2
Auerbach views such claims and labels as essentially meaningless; for him, where figurative art excels, if it is any good, is in what is abstract within the painting and the concept. The forms one engages with, and invents, will have a plastic character and individuality unconnected to their names. In his experience, work that does not ‘go to the beginning where the thing is everything but art’ is likely to add to ‘the boredom of the world’. Implicit in an interview with John Christopher Battye in 1971 is his impatience with those who try to define polarities and identify a current mode. ‘People paint hard designs, shapes and the great revolutionary spirit makes everything massive, messy, chaotic and anonymous; then the named and the labelled become the general movement and the whole thing goes on like a pendulum … I mean if you look at Mondrian and you start off with the chrysanthemums and the landscapes and the still lifes and the self-portraits you see this extraordinarily patient and touching and dedicated process of Mondrian trying to extract from this material what it is in it which is fact and not art, and you see him arrive at these – which are not marks on canvas, but notations of a sense of space, tension and movement in the world of fact. The difference between that process and the process of somebody getting out of Swiss Cottage station and arranging a red square, a black line and a blue square on a canvas in some way that they think has to do with designing or dividing the canvas, is not the same sort of process done at a lower temperature – it is an entirely different process.’ 3
Auerbach’s own development was evolving by way of very subtle changes in subject matter as well as facture. As the range of sitters became wider, he was challenged to react to each person differently; this becomes patently evident in the very austere, resonant – and large – charcoal drawings made between 1958 and 1962 where the aura of the individual, and their relationship to Frank, extends into marks outside the figure. The portrait of Lucian Freud from 1960 conveys a sense of both men dropping the guards they used in public; swift, multi-directional lines encircle this inward-looking, amazingly energetic subject, his face in shadow. The several drawings of Julia Wolstenholme, also from 1960, were as heavily worked in charcoal; however, their simplicity suggests her beauty and wary self-effacement, her eyes downcast, the space around light and rather empty. Two self-portraits of 1958–59 and the heads of E.O.W. of the same date set the subject off-centre, and a kind of chiaroscuro made by rubbing away charcoal illuminates their foreheads, with penumbral passages beyond. The situation conveyed in the 1959 nudes in oil and charcoal of Stella lying on her back in the evening darkness of the house in Earl’s Court perpetuates the air of exigency, the room sequestered so that such daring work might crystallize. In comparison, the pictures from the same period of a new model, J.Y.M., also in black and white, and identified at this point only by the pose rather than her name, present a spirited nude figure in the studio, luminous in contrast to the darker bed, stove and room. When Auerbach works in oil on paper he introduces strong black contour lines, hinting at something sculptural, as if wet, malleable pigment might be underpinned by aggressively rendered marks.
Julia Yardley Briggs Mills, called J.Y.M. (as in ‘Jim’) by her friends, began posing for Auerbach in 1957. They met the year he was teaching at Sidcup School of Art. During a class, quite unexpectedly, he heard her address him: ‘If you’d ever like me to pose for you privately, I’d be glad to.’ She posed twice a week for forty years, and as Frank remembers, ‘she was able to sit for an infinite time, sometimes five hours without any break, quite extraordinary, and didn’t seem to mind it.’ Early on, ‘she looked a very harmonious, pale figure … There was something about the way she posed that was like those models that you get in nineteenth-century French photographs, but finally it is a sidelight. I wouldn’t have been influenced by that association when I was painting, and of course, it is an organic human person and she’s not playing a part and it’s not made up, so what one is painting is one’s reaction to this human animal.’
What Auerbach required of his model was certainly experimental and arduous. J.Y.M. resisted admitting she was suffering. Sometimes lying flat on her stomach was difficult, whereas putting her hands up while seated ‘just came naturally’. The studio near Mornington Crescent was ‘a very bare box, which was taken up 85 per cent by painting paraphernalia, 15 per cent by living conveniences’, so many of the pictures have her sitting in front of the paraffin stove, which was the only way of heating the damp and crumbling space, and as Frank explains, when the large chair that served him for many,
Head of Julia, 1960
David Cripps, Julia Auerbach, c. 1960
Seated Nude, 19
60
Head of E.O.W. III, 1960
many years, finally gave up the ghost, it was replicated by another, identical one (the rungs just as unforgiving). Comfort and propriety were more or less irrelevant; this was the case not just with Auerbach but also artists such as Freud, Kossoff and Uglow. 4 ‘It was normal for us to sit in a small room with no means. We wanted to say something profound and precise, something sharp about truth … an artist like Giacometti offered hope, to continue and to give everything for a truthful art without any compromises … The image of Giacometti who created a rich oeuvre, inventive and refined, with modest means in a small room, was very attractive. It made a life in art seem possible; it suggested that courage and dedication were as important as luck.’ 5
In the late 1920s, Alberto Giacometti had fashioned reduced, concentrated forms to represent men and women, some virtually two-dimensional plaques – made in clay and plaster – followed by beautiful spikey, more surrealist sculptures, of which the best known are The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932) and Woman with her Throat Cut (1932). Auerbach finds such works very well conveyed in reproductions and he often looks at them. The 1946 special issue of Cahiers d’Art and the catalogue of a Giacometti exhibition in the spring of 1948 in New York circulated in London; they introduced a new development, the portrait busts and standing figures with elongated bodies, their profiles, surfaces and distortions realized through revision by the sculptor using his fingers as much as modelling tools. The results often seemed as if still in flux, as Auerbach’s paintings began to become in the early 1960s, for each working day Giacometti was making profound changes, not just altering the outward appearance; as Sylvester reported, ‘he needs to do it each time from the inside out, reliving the full process of its growth’.6
Frank Auerbach Page 7