In contrast, Freud slept only a few hours, sought out parties and danger and simply spent money; the betting and debts resulted in threats to his life and the necessity to pawn possessions. His obsession with horse and dog racing, for example, was different from that of Bacon who ran (and frequented) gambling clubs – although in Freud’s view, he seemed to stake what he could afford to lose. Auerbach accompanied Lucian to one or two ‘travelling chemmy games’ in various Kensington flats before they were quite legal, but never developed a taste for this time-consuming Chemin de Fer card game popular in the 1960s. However, he has admitted that ‘I did have a fruit-machine addiction for some years.’
Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, 1975–76
In 1975, Freud asked Auerbach to sit for him. ‘I was a good but reluctant sitter, always conscious that time and energy were leaking away. I was leading a more mobile life … and Lucian caught me at a good moment – for me a more flexible moment. I would sit in his very austere Paddington room, always considerately warmed, for about three hours or so. I found the process strenuous, but was convinced it was worthwhile in the sense that something was being made. I don’t think that I would have sat for anybody else by then. I cannot imagine working with – for – a more interesting person.’ 26 Once in winter the pipes froze in this flat on Thorngate Road and Lucian scooped snow from the roof to make the coffee – the result for Auerbach the most delicious in his memory. The first portrait was abandoned; the second is a masterpiece, a close-cropped view of his head from above, a painting about intelligence and self-awareness that is much more resonant set back in its dark frame than imposed on a white page in reproduction.
Auerbach’s drawings were as authoritative as the oil paintings, and for both artists success was marked by a quality that Freud identified as distinguishing a painted from a photographed portrait: ‘the degree to which feelings can enter into the transaction from both sides’.27 In the mid-1970s Auerbach had embarked upon bold charcoal, chalk and oil drawings of various sitters, the results striking in the way they convey personality, with rapidly made lines executed over weeks of attempts. In a drawing from 1975, Bruce Bernard looks much younger than his age: 47. The optimism of Bernard it reveals connects with his appearance when a model for Freud in the 1990s. Bernard wrote about Auerbach when the Hayward exhibition opened in 1978, describing a friend who works ‘in a concentrated turmoil of aspiration and invocation’, predicting that viewers would see ‘the transformation of some of the abstract painter’s vocabulary for his own far-from-abstract ends, and the originality of his ambition, as true innovation’.28
Head of Bruce Bernard, 1975
In subsequent years, Lucian was in the habit of telephoning to ask Frank to look at one of his paintings nearing completion. To accommodate Auerbach’s exacting timetable they would meet very early and Freud would cook a lavish breakfast. Auerbach recalls: ‘He didn’t, to put it mildly, always do what I suggested, but he’d incorporate it in his own process. Bill Coldstream used to get Euan [Uglow] to come over and look at his pictures, but I think their work is more cerebral or something … my idiom is so different, I repaint the whole picture so if someone said why don’t you, whatever … [such] advice would be of little use to me.’ On rare occasions Frank found comments from others welcome, ‘perhaps, once or twice’, and he sometimes asks the sitter, ‘“do you think it’s finished” and if they say “no” (often coming from Julia) that’s useful and if “yes”, they might be right’, but as I know from my own experience it would not matter if he himself had any doubt.
Freud envied Auerbach his ability to work from the outdoors and the way that Frank’s pictures were ‘decisive’. One senses this perspective in his choice of paintings when he began buying Auerbach’s work in the 1980s. He lived, for example, with works that were masterpieces of landscape painting: Primrose Hill – Winter (1981–82), Mornington Place (1973) and The Chimney, Mornington Crescent (1987–88).29 When Auerbach was invited to exhibit paintings and quick sketches related to the old masters at the National Gallery in 1995, Freud supplied a short catalogue introduction. ‘It is the architecture that gives his paintings such authority. They dominate their given space: the space always the size of the idea, while the composition is as right as walking down the street … The weather changes, so does the light. The times of day and night are recorded, the mood is one of high-spirited drama. In fact his work is brimming with information conveyed with an underlying delicacy and humour that puts me in mind of the last days of Socrates.’ 30
The bond between the two artists was special; it possessed something of the relationship of two friends in a novel: both charismatic and driven, both born in Berlin (the Freuds living in the more upmarket neighbourhood of Charlottenburg, near the edge of the Tiergarten). As children they read some of the same German books, their English was spoken with precision and with, as the journalist Andrew Billen observed, ‘a dash of German dissonance’, and, as the same interviewer said of Frank’s stories, ‘executed with deliciously cutting turns of phrase’.31 Frank described Lucian as ‘inherently glamorous, first because of his heredity and then because he was extraordinarily attractive, quick-witted, energetic and daring, with his own morality’. 32 At the end of Freud’s life, Auerbach wondered over and over, as his friend became distracted and weaker, whether a particular painting already begun would be finished, and was relieved when the nude of Perienne was taken away in April 2011, three months before Freud died. As the last picture, Portrait of the Hound (2011), progressed, taking several years, the heavily painted right hand of Freud’s assistant David Dawson almost lifted off the surface, and light coming through the window facing the garden was reflected on the white sheet covering the mattress on which the man and dog rested. It seems to me to indicate that Freud hoped to bring the outdoors inside, the painting’s terrain suggesting a snowy landscape with just an isolated man and his dog left, and in David’s intensely alert expression a note of farewell.
John Deakin, Wheeler’s, Old Compton Street, Soho, 1963. From left, Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews
The ‘School’ that was invented
In 1961, the London Magazine asked a number of artists, including Auerbach, ‘What is the most important development in British painting since the war? … Assuming such a thing as an international style exists, how do you see your work in relation to it?’ Frank replied: ‘I cannot answer these questions because they seem impertinent to my situation. I think of painting as something that happens to a man working in a room, alone with his actions, his ideas, and perhaps his model. He is affected by his circumstances, and by the standards and events of his time, but he seems to me to be the sole coherent unit. I cannot think of British painting as an entity, I do not understand the phrase “international style”. These concepts seem to me irrelevant to an activity which postulates the persistence of a unique and individual experience.’ 33 A decade later, conceptual art was gaining favour and Auerbach observed that young artists ‘started doing demonstrations and typing little notices to put on the wall’. Thus ‘the only people who painted figurative pictures were the people who really had to. It stopped being the common current mode.’ From his point of view the situation was actually better, ‘because it meant that only those people who really wanted to paint did so and this became an eccentric activity … you just did it in a way as an outcast, which was very, very healthy.’ 34
Auerbach continued to regard art as the reinvention of the physical world, and the challenge for him was how to pin down one’s reaction to the fact that we are moving in space and encountering matter and volume. Art from all periods, if it succeeds, attacks fact from an unfamiliar point of view and in his words an image that looks genuine and fresh is often one that as it is made seems ‘actively repellent, disturbing and itchy and not right’. In my 1978 conversation with Frank he reiterated that view: ‘I wouldn’t reject anything that seemed shocking or extreme, but on the contrary, I would value it, b
ut I wouldn’t do it for its own sake. I mean to do it for its own sake then becomes part of the world of advertisement and fashion.’ 35
At the time, the ‘School of London’, a term initially coined in the 1950s as a label like New York School and Ecole de Paris, was re-introduced. R. B. Kitaj used the expression in his introduction to the catalogue of ‘The Human Clay’, the 1976 exhibition that resulted from the Arts Council’s invitation to him to purchase drawings for their collection. Kitaj sought with almost religious reverence images of ‘the single human form as if they could be breathed on, whereupon they would glow like beacons of where art has been and like agents of a newer art life to come’. 36 Among the 103 works included (a number of the paintings and drawings were loans), some were by artists from an older generation such as William Roberts (b. 1895), and a few were by those normally considered abstract artists, such as John Golding and Anthony Caro.37 Kitaj described London as his ‘adopted city’, a place of ‘artistic personalities’, and ‘speaking for my own life in art’ he singled out those whose work meant the most to him: Bacon, Hockney and Auerbach.
The photograph taken by Deakin in Wheeler’s restaurant back in 1963 became a trope; this staged photo, a commission by Francis Wyndham for Queen magazine, interpreted as if it were a club meeting heralding the ‘School of London’. Freud, Bacon, Auerbach and Andrews gesture to each other, Timothy Behrens, a younger painter, looks on. Enthusiasm for defining a group with these four, plus Kossoff and Kitaj, spread from curators and critics, and shows organized by the British Council in the 1980s, to the commercial art world and private collectors. But the ‘School of London’ lacked any of the expected criteria – a manifesto or shared idiom, the rebellious spirit of a single generation, or even social compatibility – and Auerbach thought the concept ‘rubbish’.
Kitaj also claimed that the majority of the artists he identified with were in some way émigrés, describing his choice as ‘also very “diasporist”’, citing those born outside London.38 That contention is just as debatable. Although he was born in Ireland, Bacon’s parents were of English descent and he spent much of his youth in England; Kossoff was born in London of Russian Jewish immigrants; Freud and Auerbach identified with being English and Andrews came from Norwich. Only Kitaj felt foreign. Conveniently their ‘foreignness’ and ‘Jewishness’ were associated with the subjects looking so anxious. If Auerbach had any voice in his work being thus marginalized, he rejected the premise. He described Kitaj as an ‘impressive, inspired visionary’, whom he saw two or three times a year. In 2008, Auerbach wrote in reply to questions by a student called Katia: ‘I don’t feel I belong to a Jewish school, I don’t think there is such a thing – I feel myself to be Jewish in the sense of being a person, in all other respects exactly like everybody else, who has been made to feel uneasy.’ 39 On various occasions he has explained that he would not disavow his Judaism as long as anti-Semitism exists, ‘but religion and ritual mean nothing to me’.
Katia went on to ask whether because of his origins was her teacher’s assumption that there might be a link between Auerbach and twentieth-century German and Viennese painters like Ludwig Meidner correct. Others have wished to connect Auerbach’s work to Oskar Kokoschka’s early paintings or perhaps to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or another German Expressionist. Auerbach rejected this line of thought: ‘I am not an expressionist and I do not like expressionism – precisely because it intends to provoke a reaction’, suggesting to me this would be like the strategy of a demagogue. Earlier in this exchange Katia was told, ‘I never think that my painting should induce a specific emotion – somehow that seems to have something to do with effect, and suggests that the painter invests less than he hopes to evoke. I do think it very important that the subject (Abstraction is of course also a subject – a view of life, it is not “a way of painting”) should be felt to be momentous; the “emotion” is the result of the qualities the painter invests, transmuted and united by some sort of miracle where the painting becomes independent.’ 40 The subject might connect to anything, including recent events and political indignation. Auerbach admires, for example, Richard Hamilton’s paintings about ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and work by Otto Dix reacting to the violence of war and society during the Weimar years.
A more meaningful group exhibition of artists working from life was the one devised by Andrew Forge and presented in New Haven and Santa Barbara, in 1981, with the rather unexciting title, ‘Eight Figurative Painters’. It was structured around the impact of three older artists (Bomberg, Bacon and Coldstream) and extended to Patrick George and Euan Uglow. As Lawrence Gowing was preparing the catalogue introduction, he asked Auerbach to come to the Slade, where he was professor, and quoted his observations throughout. At the end of Gowing’s text Frank explains that what these artists have in common is the tension that produces the pictures. Their ways of behaving in the studio are simply manoeuvres to get each to ‘the point where the will is surrendered … One finds oneself subservient to what the model is doing. Without knowing why one is doing these things, one is simply inhabiting it [the scene]. Two painters’ ways are simply two separate manoeuvres to get to that point.’ 41
Painting Titian and other artists
Whereas Bomberg and Kossoff ‘were a formative influence’, and Lucian and Francis ‘good and valued friends’, Auerbach insists that ‘My main influence is – of course – great art; the artists I have never met who are always communicating through the work and memory of their work.’ When pressed for names and art that he likes, Auerbach often proposes less well-known works, for example, Edouard Vuillard’s La Causette (1893), and Fernand Léger’s study for Les Constructeurs (1950) with its fusion of metallic architecture, clouds and men; as well as art without named creators, such as Aztec and Egyptian sculpture. Whenever Auerbach speaks of the old masters, he adds another caveat: ‘I could cover three pages with names and I would not exhaust the list. They have all affected me deeply. But although we may be stimulated by works of art we make our pictures from living sensations. The aim of painting is this: TO CAPTURE A RAW EXPERIENCE FOR ART.’ 42
Writing a somewhat formal letter to The Times, printed on 3 March 1971, when the question of a campaign to save Titian’s Death of Actaeon for the nation began, Auerbach makes a similar point by emphasizing the value of ‘source material’:
Sir, Your correspondents tend to write of paintings as objects of financial value or of passive beauty. For painters they are source material; they teach and they set standards. In this respect, reproductions are good but are no substitute for paintings, good paintings are no substitute for extraordinary ones.
I know that painters have used Titian’s The Death of Actaeon to help them in their work. I too have found it exceptionally useful; in as far as painting can, sometimes, be thought of as a profession, it is an irreplaceable professional facility.
Yours faithfully, Frank Auerbach, Care of Marlborough Fine Art (London) Limited, 39 Old Bond Street, W.1.
A year later, speaking about the same painting in a radio interview, Bacon voiced his intense identification with Titian’s tragic late work. Seizing on the moment when the hares attack Actaeon, who has been transformed into a stag, he highlights the wild, erotic fantasy, ‘the tearing of the human image to bits’. 43 Six years earlier Auerbach had uncharacteristically accepted a commission to paint from the rape scene by Titian after the story of Tarquin and Lucretia. Study after Titian I and II (1965) were the first of eight pictures made at the request of David Wilkie, a very reticent English collector who worked in an insurance office.44 Wilkie’s attachment to art had been fostered in the army when he was posted to Rome at the end of the war and went to see the Vatican collection. Then, in 1949, sight of Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia (1515) in the ‘Art Treasures from Vienna’ exhibition at the Tate produced a memorable effect: ‘for a fraction of a second I had the impression that the room was on fire.’ 45 Wilkie initially asked Auerbach to interpret the Vienna version of Titian’s Tar
quin and Lucretia rather than the more elaborate painting in Cambridge of the same subject.
The two paintings were done entirely in the presence of J.Y.M., who posed for Lucretia. The canvas was turned on its side so she could recline while approximating a woman resisting rape, her arms warding off Tarquin: ‘I think it could have gone flat if I had simply copied a reproduction of the Titian … It is somehow assumed that because these were mythical and biblical themes that these were done, possibly from a few engravings, a few drawings or paintings by others, but more or less out of his head, and I always felt the people in Titian’s paintings were as likely as not to be portraits. In the recent biography by Sheila Hale she suggests that he actually took models along with him when he was going somewhere to fulfil a commission. There is a Venetian type of woman, who would be present in Veronese and Tintoretto and Titian, and to a certain extent in Bassano, and we know what she’s like, quite plumpish and she has a particular classical head, she’s a woman of Venice.’
Frank Auerbach Page 11