Working from life in bare surroundings also has an analogy to the plays by Samuel Beckett, who was just becoming known, especially for Waiting for Godot, first performed in London in 1955. The suggestion of rather manic, solemn characters, survivors, resonated with Auerbach and accorded not only with the life that he and many of his contemporaries lived, but also, as his sitters experience, his habit of shouting, and reciting verse and denouncing his own efforts. In contrast, those among the theatre audiences who led relatively sheltered middle-class lives were shocked by the Irish playwright and ascribed the absence of props and stage-set and the monosyllabic dialogue to a deliberately avant-garde style.
Painting parallels and new models
Another artist who made an enduring impression on Auerbach was Willem de Kooning: ‘I saw black-and-white reproductions of de Kooning long before I saw them for real. When there was finally a chance to see three paintings in [the] 1956 show, it wasn’t a case of revelation, I knew the paintings and only went to see how they were made, what colours they were and what size they were.’ De Kooning’s work appeared in the exhibition ‘Modern Art in the United States’ at the Tate in 1956 and again in another exhibition brought to London three years later under the auspices of the Arts Council and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the director of MoMA, wrote the introduction to the catalogue of this second Tate show of contemporary paintings from America, beginning by noting the variety and asking what united the paintings. He began with size. ‘They envelop the eye, they seem immanent,’ and went on to remark that they displayed a flatness that was ‘a consequence of the artist’s concern with the actual painting process … a concern which also tends to eliminate imitative suggestion of the forms, textures, colours and spaces of the real world’, in ways that are ‘never formalistic or non-objective in spirit’ or solely concerned with the aesthetics or ‘plastic values’ of painting. ‘Despite the high degree of abstraction, the painters insist that they are deeply involved with subject matter or content.’ Barr traced the impetus back to American artists of the 1940s, such as Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis, and stressed that if existentialist echoes could be detected in the artists’ words, it was not because they were ‘politically engaged’; indeed Surrealism and Automatism were of more relevance to their art.7 This analysis differed from the accepted idea, then and now, that American Abstract Expressionists insisted upon a ‘tabula rasa’ approach to the past, eliminating the need for reference to the European old and modern masters.
Abstract Expressionist paintings continued to appear in group and solo exhibitions at the ICA, Whitechapel and various private galleries and are said to have helped shift the focus of the art world from Paris to New York, but an analysis of the politics and critical impact often exaggerates the one-way influence. Auerbach’s reactions accorded somewhat with Barr’s. Looking back, he suggests that what artists experienced in the 1950s can be viewed from a less ordained, less nationalistic perspective: ‘There’s always something in the air, good painting always captures in a way what is around, and these Americans had gripped large and made splendid an impulse that, partly as a reaction against what had been going on – the mannered formalized painting that had preceded them – made these particular images. They did it large and they did it with conviction and they did it so that anybody could see. But, having worked in Bomberg’s class, having an emphasis on being, as it were, inside the painting and that what one did was one’s gesture that arose out of one’s sensations, then a Kline or a Pollock, although admirable, was in no sense news.’ 8
Auerbach found he was not susceptible to the work of the slightly younger gestural painters working in New York, some of whom were his own contemporaries.9 Moreover, American art as such was not to be emulated; the painting and drawing by Europeans outside a ‘movement’ (like Abstract Expressionism or the New York School), pictures by loners such as Antonin Artaud, Nicolas de Staël and Chaïm Soutine, were equally compelling. Indeed, the words de Kooning used to praise the lushness of the tangled trees and hills in Soutine’s Céret landscapes sound like Auerbach speaking: ‘He [Soutine] builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There’s a kind of transfiguration, a certain fleshiness, in his work.’ 10
De Kooning, a Dutch immigrant to America, speaking about the now iconic work Woman I (1950–52) to the critic Harold Rosenberg, explained that the creature who came into existence on the canvas, with her large breasts and prominent teeth, reminded him of something from his childhood in Holland: ‘It’s just like she is sitting on one of those canals there in the open countryside.’ 11 Elements in individual paintings and drawings from this period, although inventive and ostensibly primitive and improvised, also borrow from the art of the past: Baroque, Byzantine, Cubist. The critic Thomas Hess picked up the insouciance and hybrid nature of the ‘Woman’ paintings, describing one as ‘a Michelangelo Sibyl who has read Moon Mullins [the comic]’.12
De Kooning’s Police Gazette (1955), as the art historian John Elderfield explains, is ‘a painting of a woman reading that is even more difficult to unriddle, except for a book or magazine depicted clearly at the bottom’; the clue appears when the composition is rotated 180 degrees and we can see that it began with a seated woman reading.13 What Auerbach admired in de Kooning was the way each picture was a fresh undertaking; ‘the point of reality is that it always contradicts one’s preconceptions’, thus the whole painting is like someone or some place, not one part. Both artists then and later use lively, inflected strokes that enter the interior of the body rather than simply outline contours, and leave blurry passages where they have pressed newspaper to the surface to absorb the oil. The paintings of J.Y.M. in Mornington Crescent, 1963–65, reveal in the narrow, upright nudes a voluptuous full-length figure balancing on a chair; in the landscape format, her body is an odd lump or extruded ribbon of paint laid on a plank-like bed, with additional strokes carrying anatomical facts hard to locate, and bands of colour above and below. Sometimes the shifts were led by a reaction against expectations. Auerbach had begun to feel that he might be typecast as a painter with a predictable palette. ‘I simply felt that the paintings that I had done up till then in earth colours were of a particular sort that might be said to be more haptic, less linear … I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life painting as though I’d been cast in a play, for a particular role, so I wanted to stir the thing up. There is a painting in that series [J.Y.M. in the Studio IV (1964)] where there is a sense of this direction, the painting extending beyond the edge of the canvas and entering the room, something that somehow began to feel a bit more electric and alive and speedy than the paintings I had done up to that point, which whatever else you say about them don’t look particularly speedy.’
Chaïm Soutine, Landscape at Céret, c. 1920–21
WILLEM DE KOONING, Woman 1, 1950–52
In Studio with Figure on Bed I (1966) J.Y.M. lies face down. The more distant vantage point in the vertical version, Studio with Figure on Bed II (1966), where the figure is depicted in red paint straight from the tube, accommodates an intended inventory of the corner of the studio, with the variety of images (by Kossoff and others) above the picture rail fixed to the Masonite backboard. Auerbach does not expect viewers to discern details, but then and now, because each picture begins as a record of a genuine experience, he hopes ‘that the proportions and intervals are not as banal as they would be if I had simply done something arbitrary’. A few years later, J.Y.M.’s figure is transmogrified, the soft amorphous shapes made with even more malleable paint and bright colours, followed by several puzzle-like interiors with the zigzag indication of a figure who moves from the horizon to the foreground.
J.Y.M. in the Studio IV, 1964
Studio with Figure on Bed I, 1966
Other new sitters encouraged this experimentation and latent pictorial violence (akin to that de Kooning indulged in). A friend of E.O.W.’s, Helen Gillespie, offered to pose for Auerbach. So far the subjects had
been extremely close to the artist’s life. ‘In a way that I can’t put my finger on, except that it may have had to do with J.Y.M.’s dedication and partly because she was a model, I felt that she was part of my intimate life. Whereas, with Helen Gillespie I began to try to paint people in the world a bit more than I had before, although as I went on for so long, the act of painting produces, at least in my mind, a sort of intimacy with the forms.’ In 1961, Auerbach also asked his cousin Gerda Boehm to sit, which she did very devotedly until 1981. ‘It can’t have been in her character particularly and I had this head start of having seen her over the years.’ Agreeing with my comment that perhaps a certain bleakness enters the works as she gets older, he explained that things ‘creep’ into the paintings, ‘that is part of the magic of painting, in the same way that if I painted a Primrose Hill painting and it was sunny outside, or stormy outside, or misty outside, I never for a moment thought I’d paint stormy or misty but it creeps into the painting … I think Gerda would have liked to be more useful but somehow was too timid to get into a situation with people that she wasn’t related to.’
One of his favourite ‘professional’ models was Paula Eyles, who came to the studio for four years, beginning in 1968. ‘She had children and a partner and posed for a living, and was a very nice warm woman whose life was a bit of a struggle … looking at it [Head of Paula Eyles (1972)] now I think her independence has got into the painting, it looks a little bit Frans Hals-y as though she is going to go off and do something, which she often did. I remember I asked her once after she had been away for a fortnight what she had been doing and she said she’d been “snuggling with her boyfriend Dougie in a caravan”.’ 14
In general, the heads of these four female sitters fill the frame, with thick lines underpinning masses of hair and the shape of the skull, and the faces introspective to the point of grimace. Robert Hughes described the heads from 1968–69 as ‘grotesque, even caricatural’, their graphic brusqueness and jagged black outlines unforgettable: ‘These are like latter-day reflections on the sombre, grotesque heads in the human pyramid that surges up in the foreground of Goya’s Pilgrimage to San Isidro.’ 15
Head of Gerda Boehm, 1967
Snowdon, Frank in the studio with canvas to the wall, ‘at a banal stage’, 1963
‘Fragments from a conversation’, 1959
As it happens there is a record of what was going through Auerbach’s mind in 1959, his thoughts verbalized in just as dramatic and at times desperate bursts as those in the comparison of his heads to Goya’s late work. It came in the form of four pages of conversation with the writer Elizabeth Smart, interspersed by four full-page reproductions of new work, one a sketch of E.O.W. Nude (1959) – the actual work (although not reproduced in colour) is radiant and intimate, allover yellow-green. The piece was commissioned by the poets David Wright and Patrick Swift, editors of the magazine X, for the first issue, which came out in November 1959. The line-up of contributors was impressive – writers such as George Barker, Anthony Cronin, Hugh MacDiarmid, Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh and Stevie Smith. Giacometti’s evocative text, ‘The Dream, the Sphinx, and the Death of T’ was translated and illustrated.16 Auerbach knew and admired Elizabeth Smart, mother of four of Barker’s children, and ‘Fragments from a conversation’ is both a testament and a confession; by the end the reader understands that he will choose the adventure and discipline of painting over anything involving external obligations. The text began: ‘Painting is a practical day-to-day thing I think. One might say something clever, one might say something big, but one does something limited. It is a serious thing – like religion – like love – one does the persistent thing, and then the really remarkable happens when something’s there that wasn’t there before.’
He referred to working from E.O.W. ‘I’ve painted the same person thirty times (one’s got to use small words) … with someone one knows one’s got to destroy the momentary things. At the end comes a certain improvisation. I get the courage to do the improvisation only at the end – a gaiety … a serious word … Miro is a gay painter.’ In the following paragraphs he began to describe the tension and exaltation experienced in the studio: ‘In painting one destroys everything, in life one can’t do it – the day-to-day crudities destroy all the things one’s used to … known already. It’s a sort of rage … I always finish pictures in anger … it’s exacerbated conscience. One never has power over anything, can never do anything clearly or purely.’
If a picture doesn’t relate to one’s intimate life, then the artist will be lacking a necessary moral dimension and a sense of obligation to be faithful to what he calls ‘the relevances’, to a moment that cannot be repeated. ‘That’s why one paints the things one loves because one is aware of all the relevances maybe, it’s the only way to get power over the things one loves … that’s why in the Jewish religion it’s forbidden to make images … because one worships them not the things they are images of. One gets suspicious of love, of religion, of everything. In the end it’s impossible. In painting one can destroy it [what is on the canvas].’ The implication is that formal problems are bound up with a question of conscience and of being true to oneself. He continued with a comparison to Van Gogh, and to Degas at the end of his life: ‘their feelings about clouds above cornfields, aloneness, blindness … it’s all contained within their paintmarks. One can feel how it’s been done if one is at all alive to anything – the moral quality’s always there.’
Since everybody has only a certain amount of energy, it is essential to direct it at what really matters to each individual. ‘Fragments’ was published the year after Jake was born, and it is clear that being an involved parent conflicts with the single-mindedness art requires. ‘Sometimes I think it weakness, madness, a disease, but it’s [painting] the only creative thing anyone does except the thing women do … it’s a question of getting up in the morning … [but] before one can say anything one’s got to learn the language.’ The way Auerbach recounted finishing Summer Building Site (1952), the painting that emerged the day he entered the Royal College of Art and regretted becoming a student again, sounded here like an epiphany. ‘I could tell you the date at which I reached it, finding the image – strange and new to me. In the morning I’d been working, very, very conscientiously, painting a building site … suddenly I was conscious of something underneath it … this building site, I’d done it again and again, I knew it intimately … and then there suddenly was the image underneath it … I’d destroyed all the reminders (that is, of painting) to get a unique thing … it began to operate by its own laws … but it’s senseless and irrelevant unless it’s tied, anchored, to truth. It’s a question of freeing the possibilities of improvisation which contain the mysteries.’ 17
This description relates to how he decides when a work is finished. ‘It takes a great deal of courage to do a picture because every element in it has to be a response to every other element. If there’s a tiny corner that isn’t part of this stream of feeling, then the whole thing is gimcrack. And in order to do that one’s got to be prepared to destroy everything that’s nice about it.’ 18
With Auerbach’s progressively destructive and revisionary way of working, the possibilities escalate and hope arises when he is ‘painting quickly again and again and again’, the success or failure resting on a ‘hair’s breadth’ gesture or the sudden introduction of an atypical idea that might come after a long time trying to make a likeness and unity. By implication the artist needs to conserve energy and ambition for what happens in the studio, but this is continuously affected by external events. ‘Fragments’ continues: ‘Then of course one always has physical needs – food – love – peace. Painting is a form of action, moral action – the bad is intolerable. I often feel it’s a disease, a form of weakness that makes me turn to painting … to do something unnatural in order to … but it’s also entertaining. One has energy that needs to act.’ Auerbach then discusses the different idioms artists use, from ‘the pernickety’ o
f Michael Andrews and Delacroix’s inclusiveness to the ‘gaiety of Tintoretto, the conscientiousness of Rembrandt’. In the National Gallery he drew from their paintings and then drew from his own sketches as if they had been made by these masters. Working becomes an obsession and Frank concludes with the necessity to be single-minded: ‘Painters if not committed to painting might spend their energy on other things. Painting is my form of action.’ 19
Stella West in Brentford and Wandsworth, 1961–73
In 2012, the critic Jackie Wullschlager asked Frank to focus on the ‘early paintings’ about to go on display at the Offer Waterman gallery and his show of new work at the Marlborough in London, and at times his comments echoed those of 1959. ‘I was always aware of death because of my background. And in some curious way the practice of art and the awareness of the imminence of death are connected. Otherwise we would not find it necessary to do the work art finally does – to pin down something and take it out of time. If you take a photograph, it becomes historic five seconds later. But if you do a painting: Frans Hals’s portrait of a woman – he’s yanked her out of the seventeenth century and brought her here and in a small way he has defeated death.’ 20 When I showed Frank reproductions of the paintings of E.O.W. on her blue eiderdown in the bedroom of her new home in Brentford, they took him back to the feelings and the circumstances: ‘Again, for me, like time travel, these things unlock memories, sometimes more, sometimes less; it certainly takes me back to a time which even though it is forty-five, fifty years ago, it does that thing that painting is supposed to do, that is drag the past into the present and re-animate it. It is very intimate and it is all true, the same eiderdown that was thrown across the bed, the same Stella.’
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