Page from letter to Miss Beston with ideas for Venice Biennale exhibition, 1984
Head of Jacob, 1984–85
A return to Germany, 1986
In order to hang the Venice exhibition in the German tour venues, Auerbach had to make two more trips to Europe, the first to the Kunstverein in Hamburg in October 1986. He was accompanied by Geoffrey Parton, by now his primary contact at the Marlborough, and Kitaj who came along to share the experience of Frank’s return to Germany after forty-seven years.66 The food and to some degree the German language seemed familiar, yet it was in no way a momentous return. In the dead of winter the following January they went to the Folkwang Museum in Essen. As Geoffrey reminisced when we spoke in 2013, knowing that Auerbach ceased to travel twenty years ago, even as far as Dulwich or Cambridge in 1992, ‘When he did go away, he really enjoyed himself.’
The critic Doris von Drateln, anticipating a German audience engaging with the work, interviewed Auerbach for Kunstforum. She was impressed by his seven-days-a-week routine and rather shocked at the primitive nature of the studio; she suggested such dedication to art implies an almost monk-like self-sacrifice. Pursuing this line of thought she received a disarming reply. ‘I would like art to save things that are in danger of disappearing. I must say that I am never bored when I paint. In the first place, the world is very interesting, life is interesting and seems an unearned gift; perhaps one wants to give something back. In addition, painting is a wonderful game. One has little power over the crises in life, or in friends’ lives. One cannot control wealth or poverty, happiness or misery. I am only in control when I am in the studio. Then I am close to life.’ He added, ‘If one is told that the man next door has been poisoned, or that someone has been run over in the street, one tries to behave decently but the real instinct is to get back to the studio and the brushes to make sense of these events.’
Perhaps thinking of twentieth-century painting in her country, from the Neue Sachlichkeit artists to an artist such as Joseph Beuys, he reflected, ‘It is possible that German painters address the public more than I do. I can’t do that. But if more people concerned themselves with their art they might do less harm. It might be a better world. So, if I cannot save the world, I might save myself.’ 67
And, in another interview, in 1988, with Richard Cork, if readers wondered how the implicitly autobiographical content of Auerbach’s art related to the death of his parents and millions of others in the Holocaust, Auerbach was concerned to deflect such thoughts. ‘I’m not certain that I became aware of evil any more than any other child who reads a fairy tale about the wicked step-mother in Snow White having her feet put into red-hot slippers, as they do in the German version … I think that there are very few people who don’t have some sort of experience of loss and danger at an early age. If it doesn’t take a real form, it takes a fantastic one.’ 68
‘I am happiest with a brush in my hand here’
Frank insists that painting every day of the year is a form of indulgence rather than toil. ‘I’m just having fun in the studio, I’d rather do that than go to the theatre or sit about … In the same way that people play games that have an element of intractability, something like chess, games with an infinite set of possibilities and difficulties. Or in the way that people perform a sport that doesn’t come naturally to them, or solve complicated puzzles [he is good at crosswords]. In that way, one does this immensely difficult, immensely challenging thing in the studio, with the added bonus that if one should finish something, which is relatively rarely, one surprises oneself. I can’t foresee the end of my pictures or my drawings. I keep on working, and trying to do them in the hope of finding this result which to me is surprising, more surprising than finding an Easter egg as a child.’ 69
On the last visit to New York, in 1994, Frank and Julia were put up in a suite at the Lowell Hotel that included a study, kitchen and bathroom (with a cockroach) and lots of telephones. He remembers running around trying to find one that operated when Robert Hughes rang. On Frank’s way home lightning struck the wing of the plane. ‘I thought then what an absolute total idiot I would feel if that was how I died – in such an irrelevant way. If, on the other hand, I had been standing in front of a canvas on which I was working with terrific fervour and energy and something burst inside me, that would be fine, even appropriate, as there is nothing I really want to do except to paint … One never knows how much time one has got left … I’ve been to New York three times and I found it enormously exciting. On my first trip in 1969 for five days and nights I simply didn’t sleep; I just walked around Manhattan literally drunk on the city. But that was then and now I am happiest with a brush in my hand here.’ 70
Auerbach has never liked crowds or appointments, and has always needed time alone, as most artists do. Jake recalls, ‘In the days before Frank’s reputation for hermithood was a reality rather than a useful semi-fiction, we would occasionally do pub quizzes (which we both love, quizzes are still a pleasure). It isn’t surprising that Frank knows a lot about a few subjects … Painting, theatre, poetry for example … what was surprising is how much he knows about so many subjects … Cinema, politics, history and more … Now, when a tempting opportunity to spend an evening away from the studio might come up … It might be considered but these days it is almost always rejected.’ The phrase of his father’s that rings in Jake’s ear is: ‘Painting is the best game I have ever played, why would I want to do anything else?’ 71
Bruce Bernard, Frank in the studio, c. 1983
Mornington Place – Morning, 1972
Chapter Five
Idiom and Subject
Beginning and finishing
An artist’s idiom distinguishes their work from that of another, yet Auerbach believes it is not entirely controlled by will: ‘Whatever else I can change I can’t, anymore than anyone else, change my handwriting.’ Like his penmanship, which is extremely clear, with capital letters for emphasis, his pictorial idiom is characterized by marks that are unusually legible, often made at different speeds. There are hooks, swipes, broken brushstrokes and tiny inflections. Close-up, curvy traces left by the hairs of the brush and furrows formed by his scraper are evident and somehow vital.
Auerbach works across the whole picture, all the time, with the result that the surface remains unusually unified, as if kept at a constant, fresh temperature. Often viewers assume that the picture is merely the sum of all the daily versions, when actually his idiom demands removing the fresh paint before beginning again the following day. Another way in which he identified with de Kooning was that this older painter ‘actually had an irrational feeling that the paint would rot unless it was one continuous coat of wet paint’.1 By the 1970s the impasto was becoming more fluid and adventurous in terms of colour. For example, Mornington Place – Morning (1972), exhibited in Milan in 1973 and brought from an Italian collection to Sotheby’s London in 2014, where it was cleaned and re-photographed, was described by the auctioneers as having in the foreground ‘a scumbled verdant pavement that recedes into the distance of a warm silvery skyline [that] anchors luscious crimson and purple tones intersected by lattice-like scaffolds of thick cadmium and orange pigment’. When face-to-face with the picture, a juicy blue trapezoid conveys velocity and it becomes evident that it is actually a lorry pulling off on the right.
After weeks and months on a picture, the surface might become somewhat corrugated or bumpy and a single stroke crosses boundaries and appears inflected; from varying viewpoints the terrain is quite material. By the 1990s, in order to achieve greater surface freshness and flexibility, Auerbach adopted a very extreme process: ‘It became necessary for me to scrape the thing down thoroughly before I started working, so that except when I was ill, I’ve never had more than a day’s break on a big painting, and I scrape it down every day because if I left for two days it would become much harder to scrape down.’
In answer to a question from the American art historian James Elkins, posed in the course of
writing his book What Painting Is (1999), Auerbach replied: ‘As soon as I become aware of what the paint is doing my involvement with the painting is weakened. Paint is at its most eloquent when it is a by-product of some corporeal, spatial, developing imaginative concept, a creative identification with the subject. I could no more fix my mind on the character of paint – than it may be – an alchemist could fix his on mechanical chemistry. I have put this clumsily – but I am certain that you understand.’ 2
Near the entrance to the studio 2.5-litre tins of paint are clustered, bought from Stokes Paints, the Sheffield family firm that manufactures for ‘every use’, from tools, furniture and agricultural equipment to heavy duty engineering; supplying artists is a sideline. The brand is high in oil content, the white especially heavy and sticky, their particular terre verte, Indian red and yellow ochre not quite like those of any other manufacturer.3 The artist’s thinning solution is paraffin; in the 1950s a man Auerbach met at Bromley College of Art had checked it out and, with a bit of oil added to the solution to make it less volatile, declared it safer than white spirit. Various artists’ colours are bought in tubes. In 1987, Auerbach purchased a second studio, a flat in Finsbury Park, as security against something happening to the one he had near Mornington Crescent. There he paints his wife, Julia, using acrylic paint so as not to cause problems with the lease in a residential house. Given the medium and its fast-drying qualities, he admits to being slightly more enterprising in the colours he orders.
The finished paintings continue to be a total surprise to him. He increasingly wants both a command of his material and an inventive way of putting it down, even more so as he has been gradually trying to eliminate ‘pictorial scaffolding’ and, indeed, anything that could be explained. One of Auerbach’s aspirations in the 1980s and beyond was to emulate Matisse and ‘to paint by juxtaposing one area of colour against another and hoping that it will make the form.’ 4 Frequently the dominant tones and colours change completely the following day: ‘I think colour has to do with relationship and one can transpose it into a different key and it can be the same relationship. In fact, if you think of the paintings that have been done … the difference between Venetian colour and Rembrandt’s colour … can you say that either of them is false or true … they’re both arbitrary.’ 5
Searching for more ‘technical’ information, I speculated with Frank that when painting people he was more likely to use smaller brushes, to which he responded, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t think so. Certainly in some bits of the landscapes I find myself working with the wrong end of the brush or reaching for a matchstick on occasion to do things with. I usually have several sizes of brushes on the go. In a sense to be able to do the most delicate things with a big brush seems the nicest way of painting, but sometimes I need a little brush. There is a very good painting by Piazzetta, The Sacrifice of Isaac (after 1735) in the National Gallery (I was told it wasn’t very authentic), painted with a big brush. The idiom isn’t really the thing. With Veronese you can see the pencil lines underneath and somehow the older I get, the more marvellous I think Veronese is.’
As Auerbach has said on several occasions, artists must hold many things in their head; their thoughts will be travelling along certain paths and trying out certain possibilities and structures, creating certain hopes. He resists anyone tracing developments year on year or dwelling on similarities between pictures done in the same vicinity since he has no sense of essaying or finishing a series. ‘I’ve more or less sleepwalked all my life.’ 6 An enduring comparison is to the experience of astronomers and physicists as they make discoveries, a point brought out in two books that fascinated Auerbach: The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959) by Arthur Koestler, which he read in the 1960s, and James D. Watson’s The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, published in 1968. Going back to a figure from the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler, as an example, Auerbach explained: ‘Kepler tried to find the orbits of the planets and was absolutely convinced that they were elliptical and went on until the amount of measurement and knowledge that had been accrued began to create a unity of its own, and he did come to the point where he more or less correctly plotted the turning of the planets around the sun. That’s a very grandiloquent comparison, of course, but it’s a little like that, you keep looking, and you keep measuring, you keep moving it [a form] up and down, you keep trying to make it and its background one, and then you gradually begin to exclude certain things that you’ve put in by habit and you begin to see it more freshly and with any luck at the end you may find a bold way of stating how what you’ve learnt has come together.’ 7
The paintings still in progress Auerbach regards as horrible; the situation becomes so extreme that he feels if ‘you let yourself off the hook and stop twenty seconds too soon it won’t be any good’ and the only thing to do is scrape everything off again.8 The more the picture speaks back to him, the more it animates and challenges, the more likely it might mysteriously ‘escape the thicket of prepared positions’ and emerge as something surprising that is also a resolved entity. Nothing gets easier. Actually, the older he gets, the more reluctant he has become to let anything out of the studio that does not measure up to a high benchmark or is too like anything done previously. The last session is not necessarily dramatic, at least from what a sitter sees. ‘It’s a strenuous physical effort but occasionally, if the knowledge is accrued, if one’s rehearsed the thing so much, it’s surprising how much comparative delicacy and unity and likeness one can get very quickly.’ 9 This comment brings to mind the way Marckwald insisted on serious rehearsals, act by act, for the school plays, yet in Everyman, Frank’s inspired delivery of a speech was unrelated to anything prepared. Even two of his lines, ‘I will make my testament Here before you all present’, seem prescient.
As soon as the works are finished they are brought to the gallery to rest until dry enough to be photographed and framed, the larger landscapes hanging on the wall in Geoffrey Parton’s office at the Marlborough, the smaller ones laid flat in a box. Both framed drawings and paintings are under glass, a practice Auerbach began after Bacon persuaded him of the advantage, which, apart from protection against touching, encourages viewers to step back and see the whole image. ‘I’m not really interested in the paint per se, as paint, I couldn’t care less, and the glass distances people a bit from the paint.’ 10
Seeing the black-and-white photograph is a bit like when a writer reads his handwritten work typed out. Auerbach has often thought a picture was finished that wasn’t. ‘I get it back from the framers and scrape it and repaint it. I’ve got a whole collection of things that have been photographed, framed and then repainted.’ 11 Three criteria help him decide: the picture should convey a sense of something specific in the tangible world; it should function like a machine, ‘every part of it performing a function’; and it must seem ‘an object like nothing on earth’. These ideas, outlined in a letter published in Cambridge Opinion in 1964, were reiterated when Frank was interviewed by Jake for The Last Art Film (2012). There he used a blackboard and chalk to illustrate the point, adding that it must ‘feel exact, having the expression that your idea has’, and further emphasizing the importance of a ‘tense, surface character’ by sketching the recognizable design of the Union Jack.12 However, there is no simple answer to the question of how he knows a picture is finished, mimicking T. S. Eliot’s jaunty declaration: ‘in so far as there is some discernible difference in quality between one creative artist and another, that difference lies in the critical faculty.’ 13
Subjects: Landscapes since 1977
‘I’ve never been moved by a real landscape as I have by paintings of landscape. It’s because every moment is transmitted by human will that we identify ourselves with it. In a painting you re-experience what the painter experienced, one brushstroke over another, it’s like a perpetuum mobile.’ 14
Before Auerbach acquired the freehold
to the studio in c. 1983 he was ‘in continual fear of being thrown out or something going wrong, and I may say that before it was re-built I think the Council if they’d seen it would have disapproved of it. I needed this space so I clung to it like a drowning man to a raft.’ 15 In a state of anxiety, he began paintings of the entrance to the row of three studios in 1977, focusing on the view between the red-brick Victorian house on the left and a block of ‘modern’ houses on the right, down the alley, with the backs of terraces in the distance and further still the gleaming white upper floors at the back of Greater London House, a grand Egyptian Revival building, now offices but formerly the Carreras Tobacco Company factory. Around the same time he began painting the looming façade of the Camden Palace theatre, with its ‘happy’ eyebrow-like arched windows and roof surmounted by a copper-covered dome.
Frank Auerbach Page 13