Bacon cultivated special ways of fending off unwanted attention. Auerbach once saw him berated by someone in a pub who said, ‘I hate your paintings.’ Pulling his own collar as if to suggest he felt detached from his painting persona, Bacon replied, ‘I don’t much like them myself ’. This flippant attitude could be unjust. When Frank’s former tutor John Minton took an overdose of pills in 1957, his suicide following increasingly desperate behaviour, Bacon commented dismissively, ‘he was not an artist’. Auerbach remembers Francis trying to curb Dyer’s excessive drinking, on one occasion saying, ‘I’m not one to talk but you might drink a little more slowly.’ The photographer and later biographer of Bacon, Daniel Farson, had bought Auerbach’s Head of E.O.W. VI (1961) with Bacon’s encouragement, ‘and when he needed money he sold it to Francis who gave it to George Dyer, in an effort to provide him with capital – of course, George soon sold it in order to have money to spend’.6
Several of the tragedies in Bacon’s life are associated with the opening of major exhibitions of his work. Years later they remain disturbing in a special way for the few who were his close friends. The day Bacon’s first retrospective opened at the Tate Gallery in 1962, he learned by telegram of the death of his former lover Peter Lacy in Tangier. George Dyer’s overdose on the eve of Bacon’s opening at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971 is well known. Auerbach found that Bacon’s character changed and he fell out with everybody, including Lucian. ‘In what now seems to me to be a priggish way – I was totally mistaken – I thought that Francis felt that one should be sorry for him rather than for this person in whose death he was to some extent implicated. He picked him up, brought him to another life and then, for prolonged periods, ignored him. George was a very warm and simple person.’ 7 Bacon made highly original, almost operatic, paintings about his friend’s final moments and they are generally regarded as an act of exorcism. Frank insists they are what will last.
Bacon’s double portrait of Freud and Auerbach appears an oddly static diptych of two men with strong physiques wearing white T-shirts and apparently nothing else. It is based partly on a photo of French troops in Algeria from Paris Match. The subjects are lounging on red ‘thrones’ (or mattresses) set in a claustrophobic green-floored and -walled interior. If one thinks of Bacon as the silent – invisible – participant in this 1964 drama, this triangle of painters is, for me, potent in the manner of dream: illogical, uneasy but strangely companionable. It differs from Bacon’s triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), the yellow-ground picture sold by Christie’s New York in 2013, which achieves a startling likeness of the super-alert Freud, with something extra-visual about the contorted pose confined within Bacon’s familiar oblique-angled space frames. Looking at details in the lavish auction publication, Auerbach observed, ‘A feature that is a chin or a nose looks quite different when looked at in isolation than it does when part of the ensemble of the face. Somehow the two have to be reconciled in vivid portraiture. As Degas said, “Art is telling the truth by means of the false”.’
francis bacon, Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964
Although Bacon famously boasted about the role of ‘accident’ in his work, the description seems to Auerbach relative and exaggerated since all painters use accident. Bacon’s process was more like his own way of assimilating knowledge: ‘recognizing the useful accident is a decision (maybe an instinctive decision) not an accident.’ As the artist works, ‘there is a sort of rehearsal, there is a sort of build-up, there’s a sort of accruing of possibilities of how to behave,’ until in Auerbach’s own experience he tends to contradict what’s gone before, rather than synthesize it, and something unexpected, nominally ‘accidental’, happens. For both artists, with a loaded brush and a swift gesture, the fluid paint nearly subsiding, there is a fine balance between chance and manipulation; and if lucky, in Bacon’s words, the image becomes more real and begins to conjure up appearance ‘with a vividness that no accepted way of doing it would have brought about’.8
From what Auerbach observed, Bacon was much more organized than is obvious from pictures of the studio in Reece Mews (reconstructed in Dublin); despite the heaps of material, he knew where everything was (as does Frank). Bacon took from tabloid photographs, as well as limited edition specialist publications. However, as the writer and Bacon-specialist Martin Harrison has said, ‘his recontextualizations completely altered their original meaning’. Curiously, there was a precedent in British art in Sickert’s late work: the pictures that began with press photographs from the Daily Express or Daily Sketch of brides, weddings and news events, such as Amelia Earhart arriving at an aerodrome outside London following her solo transatlantic flight. As Harrison and art historian Martin Hammer have documented, these paintings ‘presaged the morphology of Bacon’s 1960s portraits’. 9
Sickert’s late paintings were shown at the Hayward Gallery in 1981–82. Auerbach had suggested the exhibition; long an admirer, he wrote a short foreword for the catalogue, making his usual distinction between idiom and the final painting. ‘If one were to ascribe a development to him, one might say that Sickert became less interested in composition, that is in selection, arrangement and presentation, devoted himself, more and more, to a direct transformation of whatever came accidentally to hand and engaged his interest, and accepted the haphazard variety of his unprocessed subject matter … He made obvious his frequent reliance on snapshots and press photographs, he copied, used and took over the work of other, dead, artists and made extensive use also of the services of his assistants who played a large and increasing part in the production of his work. But these interesting ways of producing paintings would have been, of course, of no interest if the resulting images had not conjured up grand, living and quirky forms.’ 10
The single painting by Auerbach that seems to make reference to lens-based imagery, Gaumont Cinema, Camden Town (1963), was then and is now somewhat of an anomaly in his work. Although the perspective is downwards to the scattered spectators partially filling the theatre, with the dense lower area rendered in warm reds and yellows, our attention is arrested by a large head and arm of a man smoking on a blue screen in the upper left of this horizontal canvas. Years later Richard Cork wondered whether this subject matter constituted a latent ‘Pop’ aspect. Auerbach discounted the implication of anything second-hand, in a reply to Cork’s questions delivered in the third person via the Marlborough: ‘The image on the screen represents a cigarette advert. Paying four shillings to enter, there was half an hour to draw before the film started and another ten minutes in the dark before he left to resume the painting. This went on for over one year; he said it cost him a lot of money! He cannot remember the films that were showing at the time – he wasn’t interested in them, but he remembers there was one with Vincent Price’, which he watched to the end.11
Given the date of Gaumont Cinema – 1963 – Cork may have associated the painting with those by the newest group of Royal College graduates, who were inventing and borrowing styles with less emphasis on formal qualities and more on joining disparate sources in lively and self-exposing ways, such as David Hockney’s Man in a Museum (or You’re in the Wrong Movie) (1962). Auerbach served for several years on the juries of the ‘Young Contemporaries’, the annual show of work by British students initiated in 1949, the period when Lawrence Alloway was the Chair, and artists such as Bernard Cohen and Andrew Forge were on the jury. In January 1961, Auerbach insisted that the pictures submitted by David Hockney, a second-year student at the college, should be included, commending their urgency, conveyed in inscriptions like raw graffiti and in their content. One painting selected, Adhesiveness (1960), depicted two figures in a ‘69’ position (the title was taken from Walt Whitman, who used the term to denote ‘manly love’).
Gaumont Cinema, Camden Town, 1963
Although artists such as Hockney, Derek Boshier, R. B. Kitaj and Patrick Caulfield were born only a few years later than Auerbach, in the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of 19
64 Bryan Robertson hailed them as a ‘new generation’. More tellingly, Auerbach realized attitudes had changed. Whereas in the 1950s painting figurative pictures was ‘a sort of Robinson Crusoe activity where you have to construct your own way of doing things’ – and he preferred to work away quietly with some success, bolstered by a few sales and the early reviews – in retrospect he became aware that there had been no ‘mantle of glory cast over one, and it took me some time to realize that it hadn’t happened and that success in a dealer’s gallery in London is confined to a tiny circle’. In contrast, these artists were more extrovert and they ‘had the feeling that the world could actually be conquered … instead of believing that you have to be this kind of Ishmael’. 12
Exhibiting at the Marlborough from 1965
In the spring of 1964, Auerbach was approached by Harry Fischer from the Marlborough, an ambitious gallery with considerable international standing and business acumen, suggesting that they organize a retrospective of Auerbach’s work. Fischer, together with Frank Lloyd, who was also a Viennese émigré, had founded Marlborough Fine Art in 1946, and a third partner, David Somerset, joined in 1948. For many years they had staged historic exhibitions from Van Gogh to Egon Schiele and Kurt Schwitters. In 1964, they opened a branch in New York and soon after began to represent the Estate of Jackson Pollock and prominent American artists such as David Smith and Mark Rothko. Fischer proposed a retrospective entitled ‘Ten Years of Painting by Frank Auerbach’, which would be accompanied by a catalogue containing a three-way interview with the London gallery’s star painter, Francis Bacon (who had urged them to sign up Auerbach and expressed an interest to participate), and David Sylvester.13
Before closing the Beaux Arts Gallery, Helen Lessore had planned a final show for the spring of 1965 devoted to Auerbach’s work, so the new arrangement depended on her being willing to lend eleven paintings from her stock of works made between June 1963 and April 1964 (and giving the Marlborough a commission on the sale of these), and the new gallery bending to the artist’s desire that two recently completed large figure compositions be included. These, as Frank explained in a letter to the gallery, he regarded as ‘absolutely essential to make the exhibition as I want it to be. Even on the most short-term commercial considerations, I should have thought we stood a better chance of selling pictures from an exhibition which makes some sort of impact.’ 14 Fischer’s original idea had been to pair work by Lucian Freud and Auerbach, but ‘as it happened, when I went to see Lucian, I could not find anything suitable for exhibition and there was so little that I was really at a loss to know what to do.’ He prudently accepted that this first exhibition would be a ‘forerunner to the big show’ of Frank’s work a couple of years hence.15
Auerbach wanted his inaugural exhibition to stay open for a full four weeks – the month of February 1965. He regretted the inadequate space at 39 Old Bond Street and a catalogue of the most modest dimensions, while saving his voice for something he would continue to demand ever after, the freedom to ‘select the pictures to be hung solely on the basis of quality’.16 Most of these were recent: the tall, naked figures of J.Y.M. in the Studio I–VIII and another one of her seated, four pictures of E.O.W., three heads of Helen Gillespie and one of Gerda Boehm. The single ‘essential’ figure composition E.O.W., S.A.W. and J.J.W. in the Garden (1963) shown in the end, which was over six feet high, was almost too large to be carried up the gallery stairs (see p. 111).
After he joined the gallery, Auerbach’s direct contacts at Marlborough were with John Synge, James Kirkman, until he left in 1972, and with Valerie Beston, who was with the gallery from its first year and also handled Bacon. Auerbach advised Miss Beston and Kirkman as soon as he was ready to send a newly finished painting to the gallery, often adding the warning that the picture would require two people to bring it from the framer’s van into the gallery. The sense of event and the artist’s apprehension about whether the pictures were required are evident. In a letter written on a Sunday evening (c. 1966), he describes the newest landscape as ‘considerably better (more of my daemon in it)’ but certain to take a month to dry, and in April 1966 he reports that ‘what may be the best, and certainly the heaviest, of the street scenes’ is finished.17
When there were sales such as that of the Head of Helen Gillespie III (1963) to the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, Auerbach would send notes like: ‘Things seem to be going almost too well. I am going on Safari to Southampton on Saturday’ [he was accompanying Stella to see her daughter Julia off to Australia]. An exchange of letters in the summer of 1966 indicates that Auerbach was broke, and thus deeply relieved when he signed a better contract with the Marlborough, explaining to Fischer that with the upgraded prices and advance, ‘It really does give me every opportunity to do something worthwhile in the next five years.’ 18 As he admitted privately to Kirkman, after apologizing for not sounding more cheerful at the good news, his anxiety was chronic, ‘my sense of Hubris is so strong that when something good happens I expect a thunderbolt’.19
A fairly perilous financial position continued, with the Marlborough meeting bills for paint and framing, which they set against sales. In 1972, Auerbach queried his accounts with the gallery, taking note of another rise in prices written into the 1971 agreement, and Miss Beston was happy to report that ‘the picture is much brighter’ and the Marlborough actually owed him money: £438.34.20
Friendly letters indicate shared preoccupations and opinions. For example, Auerbach commented in a note to Kirkman on 10 January 1967: ‘I still think that the [Henry] Moore looks a bit like wholemeal bread.’ Miss Beston wrote in April 1966 about a feud between Truman Capote and the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan that began in the Observer over the author’s bestselling ‘non-fiction’ novel, In Cold Blood, which had been serialized in The New Yorker in 1965 and published in hardback by Random House that month. Capote had arrived after the murder of the Clutter family on their farm in 1959, a New Yorker entering a small Kansas community to write a book about what happened; he inveigled himself into the lives of the townspeople and his book focused on the gruesome details. Tynan’s review implied that the author rather willed the execution of the killers so his book would have an effective ending. Auerbach took sides: ‘I am for Capote – against Tynan, after all Capote involved himself with these people and laid himself open to charges by people such as drama critics, one might prefer a saint to Capote – but I identify myself with writers rather than with saints.’ 21
One of Auerbach’s new cityscapes, the wide format Behind Camden Town Station – Autumn Evening (1965) was chosen for the cover of his next Marlborough catalogue. The exhibition opened in January 1967; among the twenty-five paintings, drawings and screenprints were two of Mornington Crescent Underground station that take in the traffic island with the statue of Sickert’s father-in-law (Richard Cobden) added to the title.22 In an exceptional one, Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law III, Summer Morning (1966) there is a shift to brighter colours, light blue against butter yellow. The obstructive, linear marks relate to what the artist saw on a particular day, but they are not always decipherable by viewers: the striding stick figure under the lantern-like street lamp in the upper right corner might be Cobden or it might be a passer-by. To either side of the bulwark of Mornington Crescent station there are the open channels of the roads running south. Information about the location is curiously specific without being linked to perspective or measured scale. In an undated letter to Miss Beston, Auerbach provided a diagram of one of the Mornington Crescent paintings with annotations like ‘hole’, ‘man with wheelbarrow’, ‘distant houses’, and ‘I can’t remember if that is a man or a cement mixer’.
The art critics continued to comment on the thickness of the paint; one had reservations about the ‘blinding chromatic variations’ and several characterized his work as expressionist. John Russell, writing in the Sunday Times, praised Auerbach’s new ‘streetscapes’, regarding them as ‘a prime example
of the way in which he can adapt the metal sinews of city life to his purpose’, and then addressed the pictures of people with more caution. ‘Where the human body, and more especially the human head, are in question the problems are quite different: the image in such cases tends to settle slowly towards one corner of the picture, like a collapsing parachute, and the fascination of the work resides in the pull back and forth between the image (the head, as something intimately known) and what looks to be the chaos and savoury confusion of the paint.’ He concluded that Auerbach was renewing the notion of figure painting with works where ‘ideally the end result would be a maximum of informed tenderness in the vision presented and a maximum of original eloquence in the paint’.23
Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law III, Summer Morning, 1966
Behind Camden Town Station, Autumn Evening, 1965
Lucian and Frank: A lasting bond
Critics reacted to Lucian Freud’s exhibitions at the Marlborough in 1958, 1963 and 1968 with considerable alarm and often hostility – Lawrence Alloway in 1958 going so far as to say ‘the new portraits reveal a disastrous interest in painterly values … the richer pigment he uses is subjected to the same obsessional fussing as his line, so that it takes on a weird surface animation’; other critics, such as Nevile Wallis, disagreed, appreciating the ‘unquiet spirit’ and predicting Freud was destined ‘to outlive most contemporary reputations’.24 Slightly against his will, while still a student, Auerbach had found himself impressed by the intensity of Freud’s paintings and drawings of the 1950s, although ‘when one is young one tends to think there is a particular virtue in one’s own idiom. But as time has gone by one realizes that quality matters more than style.’ 25 Even with this new looser mode Freud worked in an incremental way, his scrutiny of people exhaustive, painting close-up ‘naked portraits’ that disturbed most viewers with their detail, whereas by this period Auerbach’s paintings had become almost entirely the result of the last bout of work. He would lie awake wondering how he could afford the massive quantity of materials his particular way of working required so as to be able to scrape off, carry on with what was on the easel and still pay the rent. Money makes him anxious and he is mystified ‘how other people are so insouciant about it’. Frank remembers subsisting on rice, lentils and tahini until he was 50.
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