Stella described the ten years she lived in a small villa on Somerset Road in Brentford, west London, as the best in her life. Frank explained that his procedure was like that in Earl’s Court. ‘I didn’t have quite the freedom to muck up the rest of the house in those days. But again I would kneel, have lots of paint around me, and after we finished store the painting on the top of a cupboard or in a drawer and take it out next time I came.’ These paintings where Stella’s white flesh seems to float on an icy blue river of paint, the rhythms of the body gradually discernible, suggest the ambience was actually cosy. ‘I have to say looking at a reproduction of the painting brings the whole situation back to me very vividly indeed. Neither of us was in any sense neat or tidy so everything was slightly improvised, in fact the bed gradually became a sort of pit that most people wouldn’t have tolerated until I finally got a new one … it seemed an imposition to put an easel in the room, and also there was a basin in the corner to wash in the morning, there was a cupboard for clothes, there was a chest of drawers, and a tiny floor space, and it just seemed the only practical way to work in there. I never found it irksome to work in a crowded small room, to paint or be on my knees unable to get too far away from it, because finally, I think, all that thing of unity is in one’s head as much as it is by looking.’
At first Auerbach was resistant to the long journey to the outskirts of London. ‘I’m not coming to that bloody little rabbit-warren,’ he protested. However, he adjusted, arrived the same evenings each week, and the intense, frequently painful, but creatively productive relationship continued. Although the children had started attending Christ’s Hospital (a charity boarding school accepting pupils of all backgrounds) a few years before, they returned home for holidays. Four unusual large compositions made soon after the move describe the house, garden and three of its occupants. Two are of Stella and her daughters standing in their rather abandoned garden, Julia holding a cat and Sarah a guinea pig. A preparatory watercolour, with Stella wearing a red sweater, eight photographs of the garden and what appears to be a Poloroid (Frank owned this camera) are pinned to the wall in one of Snowdon’s carefully composed photographs of the Mornington Crescent studio taken in 1963 (see p. 102). Several pencil and pen sketches reference the greenhouse and trellis standing at the back, features reasonably easy to decipher in the first painting (see p. 111), but transformed into straight edges set against organic curves in the second. The Spectator critic, Nevile Wallis, a great champion of Courbet and of realist painting, was somewhat surprised by seeing a painting of figures in a garden (the first version was hung in the artist’s exhibition at the Beaux Arts in 1963). He wrote of ‘Auerbach’s incursion into Michael Andrews’s territory with a brooding group in a garden, oppressed with a sense of some obscure menace. A unity of vision pervades all these manifestations’, nevertheless, the inflection suggesting he caught the difference between this and Andrews’s more descriptive The Family in the Garden I (1960–62).21
E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown, 1962–64
The other unusual subject was set indoors, Stella’s sitting room. Drawings were begun at Christmas 1963; mistletoe is hanging (see p. 112). Again, the first of two paintings, The Sitting Room (1964), now in the Tate, is more readable. Stella appears in profile to the left, leaning forward in her chair, her ‘red’ hair swept back, while across the room, in the other chair, sits Julia. On the mantelpiece above Stella’s head is a sculpted plaster head made by an amateur artist and on the wall a painting in a square frame, one of Auerbach’s portraits of E.O.W. To the right is a black-and-white photograph of Dr West. The square format is divided by a tall standard lamp with a scalloped shade, and evening light comes through the doorway leading to the conservatory. When this painting was shown at the Marlborough in 1965 the Tate lecturer Lawrence H. Bradshaw understood how the material facts had been digested: ‘the forms are experienced rather than exhaustively explained. There is a depth and atmosphere. The room, as D. H. Lawrence would say, has a soul.’ 22
In The Sitting Room (1964–65), the viewpoint shifts to the other side of the room, Stella’s daughter Sarah occupies the low chair where her mother was in the earlier picture and Stella stands. It is possible to discern a bookcase, an open book on the arm of the chair, a radio to the right of the fireplace and a three-tiered table. Fifty years later Stella’s two daughters identify marks that might be pottery objects in the room, a foot made by a friend and Sarah’s black glazed horse. The white outlines of the chairs, lamp and two figures project forward against a harmony of brown planes.
Frank protests that locating and naming features is not the point.23 ‘It was deeply autobiographical. I knew that sitting room very well – the lampshade, and the Christmas cards are up and the picture above the mantelpiece. Those pictures of the sitting room and of three people in a garden were records of a house in Brentford now no longer inhabited by those people. But the only thing is that to make that a true record, it has in some way to be digested and be turned into the artist’s gesture … The Sitting Room was a record, a record in the way that certain late Vuillards are, but clumsier. He seems to me to be vastly underrated. I admire his sort of morbid inventory-taking; it seems to me to be a very particular and special quality seen in certain late pictures like that of the dentist [Louis Viau].’ 24
In the same 1978 conversation where Vuillard is cited, Auerbach made a comparison to another interior scene. ‘About four or five months ago, I was drawing Picasso’s Three Dancers in the Tate Gallery, and I was surprised to find how much actual information about the railings on the balcony outside the window, about the window-frames, about hands, there was in that painting, and Picasso’s one of the most inventive artists and yet it’s full of fact, of information. He’s said many things brilliantly; he said “we painters make our pictures in the way that princes made their children – with dairy-maids.” He meant these facts, with these facts that we knock against, that when we wake up in the morning, whatever we feel like, and whatever we hope for and whatever we’re dreaming of and whatever fancy ideas we have about the curvature of time, these facts, the solid floor beneath our feet and then, these things on the table – that’s the stuff of painters. This recalcitrant, inescapable thereness of what I call everyday objects, which to people with an imagination seem about the most amazing thing.’ 25
The longer one looks at pictures of E.O.W. made in the years 1963–65, the stronger the sense of her magnetism and her essence. In several paintings her head is laced with garlands of red paint, dark blue and black marks defining actual recesses for eyes, nostrils and mouth. All were done by electric light, in the evening, and Auerbach acknowledges that this affected the slightly harsh clash between these primary colours and white. ‘You’ve got a head in front of you … it seems if you made the right marks, you could put
Frank and Stella in the garden of 33 Somerset Road, Brentford, c. 1962
E.O.W., S.A.W. and J.J.W. in the Garden I, 1963
Two studies for The Sitting Room, 1964
The Sitting Room, 1964–65
it down in twenty minutes, but you try for, you know, two hundred hours, a hundred sittings and it doesn’t come right. Now I think I would scrape it off, 300 or 400 times. Then I was less sure of what my methods were; I left some bits on because they seemed to me to be quite good … I added something and the picture somehow accrued to that sort of thickness. It wasn’t that I hoped that my pictures would bear a particular aspect of the world, but that the look of them was the result of the conditions of their creation. And I wouldn’t reject anything that seemed shocking or extreme, but on the contrary, I would value it, but I wouldn’t do it for its own sake.’ 26 On the single day Auerbach took his annual ‘holiday’, he and Stella amused themselves on the pier at Brighton. She was not someone to go to galleries although she liked to visit the Tate to see the painting by Stanley Spencer of people getting out of the grave. Very occasionally, Frank’s friend Lucian Freud would come out to Brentford on Saturday for Stella’s
roast beef or steak and kidney pie. As for the couple’s relationship, she was sanguine. Frank was adored, but as she observed later, as she approached fifty the age gap seemed larger: ‘I knew in my bones that it had to end sometime.’ Their obsession is not something that can be recounted or probed; Auerbach says this much: ‘The truth is that some successful relationships are posited on the fact that both people behave as badly as they are capable of and it deepens the relationship.’ He was determined and as Stella admitted, ‘I was very theatrical’.27
Around 1971 Stella moved closer to central London, settling into another tall house, this time on Elsynge Road in Wandsworth, where her daughters, now adults, could have flats and she the top floor. It was again her bedroom where she posed, the picture balanced on a kitchen chair, and as expected, ‘everything got covered in paint, stalactites coming down, the fireplace looked like nothing on earth because he’d flick the paint into it’.28
Seven paintings of E.O.W. made in the period 1971–72 are primarily blue, white and black (the last head dated 1973 is red and yellow). I asked Frank about one of the nearly monochrome pictures, a small head in profile, where the nose and the back of the head push against the edges of the board. ‘Perhaps in some way I wanted a more austere language. I’m just not self-analytical at all, but it may be that in order to concentrate, looking at the paintings, it seems to me that one could say so, although if I were a curator or art historian I wouldn’t have the cheek: “but a more dynamic way of drawing was searched for by Mr Auerbach and therefore he used a more restricted palette so he could concentrate on that.”’
Head of E.O.W. II, 1964
Head of E.O.W., 1972
In March 1973, Stella bought a ticket to Milan to accompany Auerbach to the opening of his show at the Galleria Bergamini. Then, owing to delays in customs, the exhibition was postponed to October. During July their relationship broke down. Auerbach had met someone else so joining him in Milan was off. Reacting with anger (throwing a vodka bottle), Stella insisted that they cease talking and she posing, feeling the ‘heartbreak’. After quite a while, they met as friends, began to speak every week on the telephone, and Frank has kept up with her children.29 Years later, Stella met a man wearing earrings and chains at a local photography show who recognized her as the artist’s celebrated muse. He exclaimed, ‘Ah, you are the beautiful E.O.W.’ But the vanity of posing for a famous artist, the immortality, was never a motivation for Stella’s sacrifices, it was just part of being with the person she loved: ‘Nothing stood in his way.’ 30
In her 1986 conversation with Robert Hughes, Stella remembered that Frank talked about his mother and father once or twice, as he got older. ‘His mother was Lithuanian, of course, and she was I gather not a warm mother, rather distant. His father was a lot warmer; he used to give Frank strawberries and cream, things like that. But I’ve seen photographs of her, and she looks rather beautiful. A sort of image comes to me – they used to go to the Baltic for holidays, and he described to me how, as a boy playing in the sand, he would see his mother a long way off, sitting on the rocks; and men were looking at her.’ Stella visualized ‘the image of a little boy whose mother wasn’t cuddly at all’. Hughes observed, ‘He was lucky to find you.’ To which Stella responded, ‘Well, no one could say I wasn’t cuddly. Too much so.’
Hughes continued, ‘You rarely see such a combination of surface modesty and extreme internal pride.’ Stella, ‘Yes, you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Frank’s got the pride of Satan. Most people think he’s very unassuming and modest, and humble. They are completely wrong. But he can be tremendously kind to some people who really don’t matter to him at all.’ Hughes speculated, ‘But he doesn’t suffer from jealousy over his career?’ Stella replied, ‘No, I don’t think so though he can be fairly waspish – though usually about writers rather than other painters.’ 31
John Seakin, Frank in the Golden Lion pub, Dean Street, London, c. 1962
Chapter Four
The Best Game
‘Quick-witted companions’, 1956–86
In the early 1960s in the Golden Lion in Soho, John Deakin, the man who became famous for his photographs made at Francis Bacon’s behest, asked Auerbach to point the camera at him, and presumably the same day shot some pictures of Frank. A more famous Deakin portrait from a few years earlier has the painter standing in front of a wall, a cigarette in his mouth. Handsome certainly, but on both occasions Auerbach hardly seems relaxed. This was not a golden age of bohemian life; the artists and writers were on edge, artistically, materially and in their private lives. ‘It occasionally comes to haunt me, the bad behaviour of my youth. I think, how the bloody hell could I possibly have behaved like that? … But if one didn’t behave badly then perhaps one wouldn’t behave at all.’ 1
Apart from the Golden Lion there were various drinking places that are now legendary: ‘We drank at the Pillars of Hercules when I was at St Martin’s, which was just around the corner on Greek Street. That was the base of Ian Hamilton, a very interesting poet, a stringent editor, but I never spoke to him. And at the Royal College when we went out drinking, Soho came into it. The Mandrake Club, the Caves de France, the Colony Room, the French pub [the York Minster], it became part of one’s life.’
‘The thing is that the studio was very uncomfortable so I was only there when I was working. One had more energy in those days and I didn’t have as many models as I do now. I went for what people go to pubs for, distraction and uninvolving company. One had absolutely no money, so one bought a drink, and sometimes one was able to buy somebody else a drink. Francis [Bacon], with extreme generosity, bought me masses of meals over the years, usually drowned in so much alcohol that one couldn’t appreciate the food.’ In these places the intense necessity to paint was forgotten, and as Auerbach explained, you could remember what happened before and after, but not during. He came across poets, among them Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas and George Barker. Their reputations go up and down, of course, and years later Auerbach is cheered when others appreciate those he values: ‘I was rather pleased to find that Harold Pinter admired George Barker; I think Barker is an underrated poet, I knew him a bit. I admired him. I saw and exchanged words with Patrick Campbell and John Heath Stubbs. Stephen Spender, who rarely went to pubs, liked my work and was the first stranger who bought a painting, one of Stella. He was a very gregarious, handsome man; half a dozen of his early poems are, for me, very memorable. Poets go out more than painters, they depend on less paraphernalia and can write in corners of cafes, very few paintings can be done in the corners of cafes, poets like hearing words used violently. George was quite aggressive and irritating and he quite enjoyed chatting and carrying on.’
These places were frequented by artists such as Gerald Wilde, John Minton, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, as well as Bacon, Freud and Andrews: ‘So there was a time, now almost gone, when I had that curious sense which one has if one’s lucky of having quick-witted, intelligent companions with whom I could talk excited drivel for hours and occasionally stumble on a nugget of sense. I suppose I actually spoke about painting more with Francis Bacon than to anyone else, partly because he liked making statements, formulating dogma, laying down rules. Of course they changed all the time.’ 2
Francis Bacon's support and example
On 5 February 1956, at Bacon’s instigation, Helen Lessore brought Frank to the National Film Theatre to see Lorenza Mazzetti’s semi-documentary film, Together. In the art world it is legendary as much as anything for the two main actors, Mazzetti’s fellow students at the Slade, Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi, who play deaf-mute dockworkers in London’s bomb-damaged East End. Physically and in their manner the pair appear, as Auerbach says, to be like Laurel and Hardy.3After the screening Bacon took Lessore and Auerbach to dinner at Wheeler’s, the fish restaurant in Soho. Seeing Frank’s pleasure in consuming his first lobster, Francis urged him to order another.
A month after the opening of his first one-person exhibition in
January 1956, Auerbach was regarded as an up-and-coming artist and Bacon let it be known that he had been brought into his own circle. He boasted to Freud, ‘I go and talk to this very good-looking painter in the French pub.’ Their friendship developed over the years and in the 1960s, when Auerbach was taking a painting from Stella’s house in Brentford to the framer Robert Savage, whose workshop was on the Old Brompton Road, he might first have breakfast with Francis in nearby Reece Mews. ‘I sometimes saw things he had done. He once asked me for an opinion, which I gave him. I wouldn’t have done so unasked. And, he was pretty touchy. I made, in the most tentative way, a comment about what I felt about the painting, which was a triptych, and I said: “Do you want them to look like three cones?” Because for me there was something uncomfortable about the way all the figures tapered towards the top. And he was pretty miffed. But he did change the painting, making the heads bigger, and the whole thing better.’ 4As he had done with the Dutch painter Karel Appel and others, Bacon suggested that he and Auerbach might work on the same canvas. Auerbach declined, protesting that his ways of working, his methods, were too laborious, and they existed for his own purposes.
The first time Giacometti visited London in 1955, David Sylvester took him to see Coldstream at the Slade and to the Hanover Gallery to view their stock of Bacon’s work. Returning in the summer of 1964 to look at the spaces in the Tate where he would be showing the following year, Giacometti met and socialized with Bacon; the two artists praised each other’s work in very qualified terms.5 Bacon told Frank that after eating together, he insisted on going on to the club run by the female impersonator Danny La Rue, only to be refused entry since Giacometti was not wearing a tie and the bouncer was unimpressed that he was a famous French artist (as Bacon described Giacometti, who was Swiss). A year later, in July 1965, Auerbach was invited to join Giacometti, his wife, Annette, Bacon and his lover George Dyer for dinner at L’Escargot. The conversation was conducted rather awkwardly in English, French and Swiss-German. Auerbach recalled that Annette was jokey about the skinny figures Alberto made and Bacon, fairly drunk, tried to argue with Giacometti.
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