Frank Auerbach

by Catherine Lampert

  The Wilkie commissions were shown at the University of Essex in 1973 at the initiative of Michael Podro, professor of art history and theory. In a review of the exhibition, the British philosopher and writer on aesthetics Richard Wollheim wrote at length about the complex relationship between Auerbach’s paintings and Titian’s original. ‘Consider, for instance, the two versions of Tarquin and Lucrece [the title used on this occasion]. These differ quite radically, and the most obvious differences lie in the weight, the handling and the colour of the pigment. To these differences it is surely right to assign different ways in which the central incident – a sexual assault – is interpreted. One painting (No. 1), the thicker of the two, represents the assault as a physical event, occurring in the realm of activity. The other (No. 2) represents it as a wish fulfilled in a daydream. Indeed, I would say of this second painting that it conveys with tremendous power the sweet, languorous equivocations of onanism, in which violence typically sugars itself over with a kind of objectless sexuality.’

  Wollheim argued that our initial response stems from our perception of the surface: ‘For instance, if we look at the second Auerbach painting, we observe towards the top left-hand corner that the painting miraculously swells out into a great double bloom of luscious pink and grey and white pigment. This occurs at a point on the canvas which corresponds to, in Titian’s painting, the stump or hilt of Tarquin’s dagger. Regarded simply as a contribution to sexual imagery, this blossoming of the paint has an obvious rationale. But to grasp its full significance we have to go back to Titian’s painting, and see what he made of this passage: or, perhaps better, we have to go back to our perception of Titian’s painting, and see what we can make of what he made.’ 46

  Study after Titian II, 1965

  Bacchus and Ariadne, 1971

  As Wollheim pushed his analysis into the area of critical theory about contemporary painting, he considered the ‘trenchant’ essays written by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, who defined a ‘canonical succession’ from Manet through to the present, including as their contemporary examples American artists such as Morris Louis and Frank Stella. Wollheim’s quarrel with their thesis was not the application but the premise, ‘For what illumination is generated by appealing to the nature of an art whose nature is said to lie exclusively in self-reference.’ Although he recommended comparison to the Titian ‘original’ to fully appreciate the contemporary ‘copy’, he appreciated that the facture is very different: ‘The assertiveness of Auerbach’s handling emerges as a kind of tribute to the ambiguity of Titian’s.’ 47

  The next Wilkie commission was an interpretation of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23) and, as Auerbach recalls, it required dozens of drawings made directly from the painting hanging in the National Gallery, ‘often immediately before I rushed home to get on with my “portrait” of it’. The bright primary colours of his Bacchus and Ariadne (1971) were associated with the shock of seeing the painting post-restoration and the energy that expands from inside.48 Michael Podro identified parallels with Bomberg’s early Vision of Ezekiel (1912) – ‘both make use of simple lines or stick-like figures to purge the subject of superfluities’ – and compared Auerbach’s ‘copy’ to an earlier landscape, Primrose Hill (1967–68). ‘There, too, the striations of paint seem to reconstruct the subject without anywhere making the explicit curvature or volume … The sharp patterning of the zigzag brushmarks resolve themselves into sharply realized spatial clues – an overhanging branch in the foreground, parallel pathways running horizontally across the park, the increasing density of overlapping trees as we look up the incline of the hill.’ 49 There is a remote correspondence between the éclat, radiant colour and thrust of the strokes in de Kooning’s landscapes, such as his V-shaped Suburb in Havana (1958), and later works, and Auerbach’s equally gravity-free, beaming, fast-moving Primrose Hill skies and terrain of these years.

  This Primrose Hill (1967–68) was acquired by the Tate in 1971 and as it was being catalogued, the artist replied to the queries of the curators and the director, Sir Norman Reid, warding off generalizations. He said he avoided a routine method; many drawings were done at the beginning of the day and one at midnight, ‘so as to have an impulse, an idea, a new act, a newly discovered structure, to work from – and then to paint with older and newer drawings pinned up.’ 50 Auerbach tried to counter Reid’s use of the term ‘preparatory drawings’: ‘One looks – tries to understand what one sees as solid matter in space – and then makes a pictorial image, not of the projection on the retina, but of the mind’s grasp of the material … There is no one-to-one relation of mark to object (such as lamppost, branch, puddle, etc.). The painting is a single indivisible image of my grasp of their relationship.’ 51

  Inside a painting

  Auerbach responds to other dramas of extreme passion, such as Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way (1575), which he drew in 1985, as if events from life and the imagination. In 1992–93, he focused on Rubens’s Samson and Delilah (c. 1609–10). In the words of the National Gallery curator Colin Wiggins, its theme is about ‘love, betrayal and mutilation, about shadow, sweat and warmth’.52 For Auerbach, ‘if one looks at the hands there is something terribly poignant about the peasant hands of Samson and of Delilah and the sophisticated, tricky, sly Iago hands of the old woman and the barber … the yellow, the red and the purple drapery, that great knot of purple like a tear which underscores the fleshy drama which is an orchestrated accompaniment of poignancy and waste. It’s sort of obvious that she’s betrayed him, that he’s ruined and that she loves him.’ 53

  Frank’s comment on Cézanne’s The Painter’s Father, Louis-Auguste (c. 1865) is representative of his ability to live vicariously through paintings, even those with ‘ordinary’ subject matter that on the surface hardly seem charged with emotion: ‘it’s an audacious, marvellous picture, the object rendered raw and newly perceived … it comes at you in the most amazing way – that floor and those feet and that chair – who can forget them? But of course Cézanne’s inside. He hardly knew he was making chairs or what the things were called. He was inside the painting.’ 54

  This tall portrait, oil on house paint on plaster on canvas scrim, was mounted on the wall in the Cézanne family house, the Jas de Bouffan, in Aix-en-Provence for many years. True to his dislike of possessions, Auerbach has not retained works of his own (and is not very inclined to look at earlier pictures when they go on view), but there are some paintings that can be identified as more autobiographical than others. This was the case with the next subject set in a domestic interior, which dates from ‘a time of considerable change for me when certain people re-entered my life’. The change had happened after Frank acted on an impulse to reconnect with his teenage son in 1975. His invitation to Jake to visit the studio on Thursday afternoons was open and the two formed the habit of eating at a rather edgy Greek restaurant on Royal College Street in Camden. In 1976, equally quietly, Frank got together with Julia while keeping up his practice of sleeping most nights in Mornington Crescent. Jake and Julia became regular sitters. Paintings such as Head of Jacob (1978–79), and a three-quarter length seated figure finished in 1980, Jacob, indicate his exceptional height, good looks and fortitude. The intimate, close-up Julia Sleeping (1978) is the first of many pictures of her lying down, her head viewed from every angle.

  Two drawings after Rubens’s Samson and Delilah, 1984

  Interior Vincent Terrace (1982–84) records Julia’s front room in Islington, with the cat and the dresser; she is seated at the table, an ashtray in the middle. In a second version Jake joins her. Frank, Julia and Jake, left to right, are the figures on the steps of St Pancras station (1978–79); Julia and Jake come down Euston station steps in 1980–81. For some ‘irrational’ reason in one of the Euston Steps paintings (1980–81) a vision of Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (the film was newly released) crept into the scene. Such transposition recurs fairly often, and should remind the viewer not to over-interpret
the contents; throughout the urban landscapes figures might come from ‘someone I had some relation with recently and I bung them into the picture and take them out again’.

  As time goes on, Frank quite often describes people from his past I have never met. The most depressing prospect, for him, seems to be that of a couple, both artists, moving to the provinces, supporting themselves by teaching, becoming engaged in local cultural activities, their art in quantity and quality diluted by an agreeable married life. He cheers on artists who are taking risks and expresses relief when they enjoy sales and praise. This loyalty and engagement extends to those within his own circle. Jake had a reasonably high-prestige, well-paid job in his early twenties, but, as he recalls, ‘I was seriously bored and was considering launching myself into the precarious pursuit of work in films … I asked Frank for his advice (I now think I was probably looking for his approval). He said “I would prefer you to be drinking yourself silly in a pub in the West of Ireland than to be bored for another minute.”’ 55

  Jacob, 1979–80

  Interior Vincent Terrace, 1982–84

  The studio with Interior Vincent Terrace (1982–84) in progress, 1984

  ‘A cultural activity’: Travelling for exhibitions and art

  Nearly all the visits Auerbach has made abroad have been in connection with hanging one of his own exhibitions. He arrived in New York on 16 September 1969 for his first show at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York. As always, it was his intention to return home as soon as possible, but the city was so exciting he stayed eight days. Michael Roemer met him off the plane and took him to The King of the Sea restaurant on 3rd Avenue, the place that boasted, ‘The flounder you eat today swam last night in the Chesapeake Bay’.56 During a second visit, in 1982, one of the most memorable experiences was going to the night court in the Bowery, a place where the authorities charged those brought in before midnight in order to keep them over. ‘They were mostly whores, with their pimps waiting in the seats, who just had to pay a fine. An older, dressing-gowned black man got up. The judge said, in an old-fashioned tone, “Most of us go through our lives without once being accused of murder. Our friend here has the distinction of being accused of murder for the second time in his life”. He was charged.’ On a postcard he sent to me Frank spoke of other diversions, ‘I got up at 6, watched a respectable businessman buy a Times and a gay magazine, had three breakfasts, walked down from 58th to Canal Street, got some pencils at Pearl Paints … In the Marlborough I felt as though I had shrunk crossing the Atlantic’ (the ‘I’ referring to his art).57

  Roemer drove Frank to Pennsylvania to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Barnes Collection in the suburban town of Merion, where Cézanne’s The Card Players (1890–92) made an enduring impression. ‘The particular way in which the people are scrutinizing their hands and the way a child is looking over the shoulder of one of them to see the cards, I’ve never seen anything that’s quite as convincingly true. The followers of Cézanne were aware only of his violent breaks with the previous style and latched onto that. I think these violent breaks with the previous style were in the interest of fact. Gradually the style falls away and one’s left with these card players.’ 58

  On one occasion the excursion was simply to see paintings. Leon Kossoff and Auerbach flew to Amsterdam in September 1972. In the Rijksmuseum the ‘special’ guide who let them in out of hours became impatient as they lingered in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Travelling by

  Paul Cézanne, The Card Players (Les Joueurs de Cartes), 1890–92

  Tree at Tretire, 1975

  train, they made rapid visits to the Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. Frank was struck by impressive groups of work by Dalí and Malevich.

  Auerbach’s international reputation was growing in Europe as well as the United States. The show at the Galleria Bergamini on Milan’s elegant Corso Venezia in 1973 allowed him to view Leonardo’s much restored Last Supper, ‘which functions, in situ, as though it were taking place, dissolved into the wall, behind the other, real table, where the monks ate’. Actual works routinely bring new reactions. ‘I thought I had no use for Leonardo da Vinci, he is not the artist I feel warmest towards, but I can’t deny that when I saw the Last Supper in Milan, and [later] the drawings in the Queen’s Collection and so on, they present one with an imagination that once one’s met, one can’t forget.’ 59 ‘Whereas the abilities of artists from the past are often lost, living artists must make their own discoveries. ‘If one meets a great quality or great fervour or great intelligence one’s first impulse is just to rush home and have another go … it’s not an effect of aping it, in fact, because one tries to leave it behind … the activity of painting is not like spitting, it’s a cultured activity.’ 60

  Sometimes the foreign trips were entertaining in a social way. In 1974, Dublin’s Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, as it was then called, arranged to show the six outstanding works by Auerbach that Sir Basil Goulding owned.61 An Irish cricketer and squash player as well as businessman, Goulding and his wife collected art, lived in a very modern house in the suburbs and entertained. The Earl of Rosse, active in the preservation of art and a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, drove Frank around Dublin, impressing him with his knowledge of Gilbert Stuart’s paintings, ranging way beyond the portraits of George Washington. He remembered Rosse’s very agreeable wife, Anne Messel, Lord Snowdon’s mother; she had looks like those of Vivien Leigh.

  The scope of another Marlborough ‘branch’ exhibition at their gallery in Zurich in 1976 was ambitious, virtually a retrospective, with two paintings from the 1950s, sixteen from the 1960s, fifteen from the 1970s plus works on paper, various studies for Primrose Hill landscapes, and a new print of the tree outside Brigid Campbell’s Herefordshire house, Tretire. In the Kunsthaus Zurich, Auerbach saw Giacometti’s work arranged by subject. ‘Father: paintings, drawings and sculptures; mother: paintings, drawings and sculptures; Diego: paintings, drawings and sculptures, and so on. I can think of one other artist – not Degas, not even Matisse – where the three media are so clearly expressions of one single vision. That artist is Michelangelo.’ 62

  In early 1984, Auerbach was invited to represent Britain at the XLII Venice Biennale in 1986. As soon as he was approached, he outlined his ideas to the director of the fine arts department at the British Council, Julian Andrews: thirty works ‘if they were discrete and independent images, would probably fill the space without looking wilfully austere and negative’; his preference was for a spare hanging and a wall colour ‘grey or perhaps blue-grey’.63 The light in the British Pavilion during the Biennale brought out the radiance in Auerbach’s pictures, and the show was widely acclaimed; he shared the prestigious Golden Lion prize with the German painter Sigmar Polke.

  The Marlborough organized a celebration lunch, which took place at Harry’s Bar on Friday, 27 June 1986. One of the things that Auerbach relished about his rare travels was the food. The menu was one with local style: ravioli speciali di pesce, fegato alla veneziana con polenta. Just off the plane and arriving late, Jake remembers the glamourous atmosphere and this exchange with Robert Hughes, next to whom he was seated:

  ‘Waiter, get this man a Bellini … [to me] Have you ever had a Bellini?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know how it got the name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The colour is supposedly reminiscent of the great master’s angels’

  bottoms before the age got to the paint.’

  Frank and Julia went for the day to Padua, Auerbach’s first experience of Early Italian frescoes in situ, and he was struck by the ‘radicalism’ of what he saw in the Arena Chapel. ‘It’s very interesting because the light has faded the frescoes at one’s own level, at ground level and because light hasn’t attacked the frescoes as they go into the darker ceiling, they’re pretty fresh up there … There was a guide going around
and saying, here somebody’s weeping about something, some biblical scene and you looked and that’s what they were doing. He [Giotto] represented the emotion and the drama directly. I think they’re done in response to feelings, so that the gesture would not be done with any sort of view of correctness thrust into you but if somebody touches somebody gently or the cherubs are blubbing because of death, it’s done out of feeling.’ John Tusa, who was interviewing Auerbach for BBC Radio 3, speculated, ‘And wonderfully innocent?’ ‘Yes, but then in a sense there’s a sort of element of innocence in great art. There’s an element of innocence in what was perhaps the most sophisticated painter who ever lived, that’s Velázquez and yet if you see a portrait of Philip IV there he is. You don’t think this is Velázquez being clever, it’s just he’s ingested it.’ 64 In a later conversation with me he extended the observation, ‘I saw a fragment of a Giotto fresco that had been peeled off the wall, and it was obviously breathing. The outlines had to do, not with silhouetting something, but with understanding it and understanding that it was pulsing with the space next to it.’

  The critic Judith Bumpus, interviewing Auerbach for an article published in the run-up to the Biennale, suggested that rather than hardly venturing out, perhaps it might be more daring to travel more often in the future. Frank’s reply was direct: ‘It would be more daring to be a bullfighter, or a stunt pilot or an acrobat! The daring that I’m talking about is simple daring in painting … I’m naturally timid. I’m frightened of heights, I can’t swim, I can’t drive, I’m afraid of large dogs. It seems to me to be sensible to avoid the seaside, bridges and Alsatians. Painting is a relatively safe way of being courageous.’ In the studio the artist has to be prepared to throw away a picture that would be convenient to finish: ‘And I think one does a good painting by destroying a rather good one, not by destroying a rotten one. So there’s always this moment when one gambles, when one flings away everything in the hope of getting something better … I think one’s got to be prepared to starve to death in order to keep on doing that.’ 65 As his financial situation has improved, Auerbach’s desire not to repeat himself or release an ordinary work creates just as extreme a mental pressure, one that matches the physical exertion, and not illogically increases with age.