Frank Auerbach: The Constant Painter

It will be for many, as for this writer, hard to credit that Frank Auerbach is now eighty-four years old. Born in Berlin in 1931, to a prosperous middle-class family, he came to London in 1939, as a child refugee from the brutality of the Nazis, who later killed both of his parents in a concentration camp. This year will see his major retrospective mounted at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn and later at the Tate Gallery in London. It will be the largest and most comprehensive showing of Auerbach’s work ever seen yet and it promises to provide telling insights into the work of this important contemporary “artists’ artist”, who is, since the death of Lucien Freud in 2011, probably the greatest living British painter and now the most distinguished survivor of what was known as the “School of London”. His work is distinguished by a constancy to his craft of painting pursued for nearly seven decades and quite apart from trends or fashions. He has long been recognised as an artist of dedication and inspired vision. This essay notes the origins and achievements of Frank Auerbach and his significance within the canon of the tradition of Western painting.

The artist’s background as a refugee from Nazism is part of the story behind the character of Auerbach’s distinguished body of work, but not too much should be made of this; for, as one of his regular portrait sitters has justly remarked, Auerbach is a “born painter” and his talent would have inevitably shown through, even if he had had an ordinary middle-class upbringing in Sussex or the like. Yet, in addition to a Continental and specifically German Jewish background, Auerbach came to England at such an early stage of his life that his cultural equipment is very much that of an Englishman of his vintage. He has said himself that his very first pictorial influence came from seeing an illustration of Turner’s celebrated painting of The Fighting Temeraire which appeared in an Arthur Mee’s Encyclopaedia opposite a poem about Turner’s picture by Sir Henry Newbolt! Auerbach’s well-modulated speaking voice is that of a cultivated Englishman of his generation, with only a trace of an accent.

Auerbach’s work is closely linked to his constancy of location; and whether or not his strong adherence to place is an expression of a refugee’s relief at finding a safe haven from an existential threat, it is readily apparent that what has long been Auerbach’s own neighbourhood and its environs, in the Mornington Crescent area in Camden Town in North London, is the central focus of what he depicts, in addition to his portrait work of a retinue of sitters drawn from friends and family, regularly attending there. Even the entrance to his studios in Albert Street, where has worked for decades, became the motif for a series of works featuring the humble but significant signage, “To the Studios”.

Auerbach’s son Jake Auerbach and Hannah Rothschild produced in 2001 a superb film about Auerbach and his works, which is now available on DVD. Auerbach has always been rather reticent about interviews and the like and had mainly limited himself over the years to brief biographical material appearing in exhibition catalogues. He co-operated for this film, but chose to say little about his private life and interests beyond his work, preferring to let the works speak for themselves, whilst being happy to answer some questions about them.

One very notable feature of Auerbach’s career as an artist is the tenacity with which he has stuck to the development of his craft as a painter and etcher. He rose slowly, from selling his pictures from the London pavements and railings as a teenager in the late 1940s and in the early 1950s, to become an artist of major international repute. By his persistence, he has outlived and, in the view of many, has outclassed the “New York School” which so dominated art in the Western world from the 1960s onwards. It must seem, to anyone with a serious interest in painting and who came of age in the 1970s, that he has always been there, as a hovering presence, glimpsed in lavish exhibition catalogues prepared by his London dealers Marlborough Fine Art Galleries or looking out at us, rather humbly but matter-of-factly, from photographs like the famous one of him taken in his studio by Lord Snowdon in about 1980. Significantly, he was featured in that special book Private View (1965), a sturdy, handsome, dark-haired German immigrant, planted in postwar London. Since then, and for fifty years, it has been the very same studio, with its accretions of paint splatterings on the floor and walls, and upon the sparse furniture, which has been the powerhouse of his oeuvre.

Auerbach’s work features in many major public and private collections internationally. We in Australia are fortunate that significant works in oils and many of his etchings are in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and other public collections in this country. For anyone not familiar with Auerbach’s work and his style of painting, there are readily accessible websites showing in colour a good selection of his works (for example on YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctO0XC31O9A). What is seen there gives an immediate impression of the distilled strength and single-minded dedication which Frank Auerbach has always put into all of his paintings.

The collection at the NGA in Canberra includes notably the important example of one of his very colourful Primrose Hill paintings, View from Primrose Hill (1962). In the National Gallery of Victoria are Oxford Street Building Site II (1960) and some various etchings. Other examples of work by Auerbach are found in various other state public collections, including those of New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia. The fact of this level of representation in Australia is in itself a measure of the international significance of Auerbach’s artworks, and especially so given the high prices his works now command (and have for some time commanded) on the international art market. In any event we are fortunate to have these examples—especially the major oils in the NGA and NGV collections.

As a result of the thoughtful early initiatives of Australian dealerships such as the Villiers Fine Art Gallery and Toorak Gallery in the 1970s and later, on several exhibition occasions, the Rex Irwin Gallery in Sydney, there should also by now be a fair representation of Auerbach’s paintings within some major Australian private collections, even though he is not an artist whose works have an immediately wide appeal. Auerbach is one of those whose works show that the collector in question is a distinctly serious devotee of contemporary painting.

Auerbach’s art has by now generated a substantial literature despite the artist’s personal reluctance to engage in self-promotion. There have been a multitude of exhibition catalogues with essays on Frank Auerbach and some monographs, the most important of which are Robert Hughes’s Frank Auerbach (1992) and William Feaver’s Frank Auerbach (2009) with its very extensive array of colour plates. The catalogue for the upcoming major retrospective exhibition should be a definitive tour de force and the exhibition itself is likely to stimulate further works on Auerbach.

Robert Hughes’s 1992 book is one of Hughes’s best, and by his own assessment it was his first serious monograph on a major modern artist of international renown. Hughes in his text referred to Auerbach’s personal background and art training and explored the central themes found in the artist’s work. Significantly, and in my view very rightly, Hughes started with a discussion of Auerbach as observed in his longtime studio at Camden Town, the location which is of such key importance to, and in, Auerbach’s oeuvre. Hughes not only interviewed Auerbach there, but sat for a very telling portrait. Others may write more upon Auerbach and his studio, but the insights Hughes provides about the importance of this studio to Auerbach as an artist are unlikely to be bettered, yet Hughes’s book is now out of print.

Feaver’s book has a detailed discussion of Auerbach’s work, and with its generous array of high-quality colour plates it is likewise indispensable. It is alike to Feaver’s excellent book on Auerbach’s friend Lucien Freud.

Like all people of solid achievement, Frank Auerbach has his detractors. These dissenters include the redoubtable Brian Sewell, art critic of the London Evening Standard, who in 2009 said of Auerbach:

his latest selling exhibition demonstrated yet again the falling-off in power and originality that was already obvious at least a quarter of a century ago … Put very simply, after the first short burst of originality, Auerbach relinquished the business of painting portraits and townscapes for the easier discipline of painting Auerbachs of Auerbachs.[1]

It should be noted that this type of verbal joke is a favourite of Sewell’s: he once spoke of “a copy of a copy of a bust of Michelangelo”. Sewell is almost an exact contemporary of Auerbach, having been also born in 1931, but in England. Yet one must say, with due respect to Sewell’s usual acuity of observation and assessment, that in this instance he does an injustice to Auerbach and his enormous achievement as a painter. That has come about by dint of a long and dedicated path taken by Auerbach since the 1940s and 1950s and from which he has not deviated. Moreover, if the drift and nub of Sewell’s criticism is that Auerbach has suffered the familiar kind of “falling off” in quality by an established and long-standing painter, then that seems to me simply not so in Auerbach’s case. One has merely to consider the evidence and follow the trajectory of the artist’s work, as shown in the books by Hughes and Feaver, to see that there is a constancy of observation and of execution which is remarkable.

The major retrospective exhibition to be shown at Bonn and London in 2015 will be another occasion to test all Sewell’s assertions in this regard.

Auerbach had his own difficulties in his private life in the 1950s, which were later resolved and which were in any event related to his commitment to work. In film interviews, his long-term sitters, including his wife Julia and his sometime lover Stella West, remarked that Auerbach’s commitment to his work was astounding and that, at the relevant periods at least, he habitually took only one single day off from his studio work in each year, travelling with Stella West for a “day out” at the seaside resort of Brighton. He was a longtime close friend in London of his fellow artist Lucien Freud (1922–2011) who was also a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and who led a colourful life in London art circles. However, Auerbach’s marital break-up, later repaired, was by no means comparable to Freud’s particularly complex private life, although both artists have consistently displayed a fierce devotion to their work. Auerbach’s personality and his painting style are reflected in the character “Max Ferber” in W.G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants (1992).

Frank Auerbach has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art from 1948 to 1952, then at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. He also took additional classes at the Borough Polytechnic in London where he and fellow student Leon Kossoff were taught by David Bomberg (1890–1957) from 1947 to 1953. Bomberg became a major influence on Auerbach, a fact that is immediately apparent from many of Auerbach’s early London cityscapes.

After various teaching posts, notably at Camberwell art school in London from 1958 to 1965, Auerbach steadily developed his style. In 1978 there was a major retrospective at Hayward Gallery in London followed by his Venice Biennale showing in 1986 and in the exhibition Eight Figurative Painters at Yale Center for British Art in 1981 alongside Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, Sir William Coldstream, Lucien Freud, Patrick George, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow. A major exhibition of Auerbach’s etchings and drypoints was held at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; and of course, over the decades since his first solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery London in 1956, Auerbach has held regular selling exhibitions at Marlborough Fine Art London and Marlborough Gallery in New York. He also exhibited in Germany, Holland and Spain.

Auerbach’s works can be divided roughly into the following main categories: the early London cityscapes, often of bombed-out sites being dug out and “redeveloped” in the 1950s and 1960s; town and streetscapes observed in the vicinity of his Camden Town studio and particularly of Mornington Crescent; the “Primrose Hill” series of landscapes with figures set in parkland; and of course the distinctive series of portraits done in the artist’s studio. Auerbach regards one of his early London cityscapes, Summer Building Site, done in 1952, as his “breakthrough picture”. He has noted that early in his career, his palette was restricted to the basic colours of black, white and browns (with only a few others sparingly used), the cheaper colours the struggling artist could afford, but that as he became better known and started selling more works, he was able to move into stronger and more vibrant colours, including reds and oranges, such as appear in the “Primrose Hill” series of which one very brilliantly coloured example is in the NGA at Canberra. He painted a series of works showing views of his studio building, many incorporating the homely sign pointing “To the Studios”; the 2001 documentary, To the Studio, takes its title from this series. It must be said that the cityscapes and street scenes are strongly reminiscent of the influence of his teacher David Bomberg, whose remarkable “figurative-expressionist” landscapes such as those done at Cuenca in Spain during his middle to later periods are of a similar style.

It is clear, however, that as commentators have said, Auerbach is not an “expressionist” painter as such. He is essentially a figurative painter, as is shown by his strong focus on human portraiture and on townscapes. One of the most conspicuous features of Auerbach’s paintings is the thickness of the paint applied, largely the product of the intensity of his painting methods, which also involve frequent “scrapings off” of paint and the addition of further layers to better develop images. To borrow and adapt a phrase of Robert Hughes’s, Auerbach was “nothing if not self-critical” and his portrait sitters speak of lengthy multiple sittings and of many self-critical revisions and scrapings off of paint by the artist. As well, his portraits include many of the same sitter as observed over the years and in some cases, decades. Indeed, there is in his work something of the intensity seen in Giorgio Morandi’s celebrated and closely-observed studio still-life series, of objects arranged on a table or shelf. However, in truth, the greater resemblance is that Auerbach’s cityscapes can be compared to Morandi’s superb very early landscapes. In this, we are back in the territory of Bomberg’s dry, precise landscapes such as those he did in Jerusalem in the 1920s. However, Auerbach is by no means “dry” or reserved—his works are of great vivacity, even verve. One is reminded of that phrase of Cezanne, doing Nature “after Poussin”. It has been somewhat overworked in art literature, but it is very true of the manner in which Auerbach makes all his forceful landscape pictures.

As for Auerbach’s many portraits of those in the small circle of sitters drawn from friends and family in London, some of whom have visited his studio on particular days of the week for years, or even over decades, it remains to say that they are powerful and to some tastes disconcerting works when first encountered. However, on examination and after duly considering them over time, one comes to see just how singular they are. Some of them evoke memories of images by Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) and the apparent brevity and rapidity of the main brushstrokes might suggest very rapid execution, but more often than not, quite the opposite is the case, Auerbach having taken a long time to fix the image and then to develop his intentions to arrive at the final version. Also, these pictures, or at least most of them, come in several series. Certain of them, such as the Portrait of JYM II (Juliet Yardley Mills) chosen for the cover illustration for Robert Hughes’s monograph, bid fair to achieve a place amongst the great classic portrait images in oils in the Western tradition.

This brings us to another and very important aspect of Auerbach and his work—namely, the extent to which his work is influenced by, and in a sense continues, the great Western tradition of figurative painting. As informed observers, and most particularly Colin Wiggins of the National Gallery in London, [2] have pointed out, Auerbach has for decades made it a regular practice to visit the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and to take in the Old Masters and their techniques and imagery, which have indeed informed his practice as a painter to a higher degree than is the case for most contemporary artists.

In an article on Auerbach for the art quarterly Modern Painters, Wiggins quotes what the artist had to say in 1990 about his views of the Old Masters:

I have slowly lost the luxury of hating any great masters. I used to hate Hals and I used to hate Leonardo da Vinci but I’ve gradually grown around to them. I think that the people that one is constantly told are the great masters, very usually one finds that they are. [3]

Again, when commenting specifically on the developments over time in his own response to artists of the Venetian School, Auerbach had this to say:

the sequence of preference was: when I was 20, Tintoretto for swagger and blatantly brilliant composition; 35, Titian for involvement, subtlety, completeness, humanity (I still think him, as everybody does, the best); 45, Veronese for stoicism, dignity and undramatised intelligence—sadness. The women in Veronese are superb although the first impression is quiet, as is the first impression of superb women in life! [4]

This gradual progress to humility before the Masters is of a piece with Auerbach’s reclusive reticence. He declined the offer of a knighthood in 2003. Given his contribution to British art, he deserves the Companion of Honour.

Writing in the admittedly somewhat different context of Lucien Freud’s portraiture works, Martin Gayford has noted:

The modernist critic Clement Greenberg once pronounced that it was impossible nowadays for an “advanced” artist to paint a portrait. Lucien Freud, however, spent his entire long career doing nothing else. Indeed, he expanded the notion of portraiture beyond its historical boundaries. As Freud interpreted the idiom, a portrait was not just a depiction of a specific individual human being. Anything, absolutely anything at all—an egg, a leaf, a floorboard, a chair—was, when he painted it, an example of portraiture … Every single thing that an artist’s eye might encounter was individual. And what you might call the individuality of individuals was his true subject: their faces, their bodies, their personalities, their moods. [5]

In Auerbach’s case, the focus was primarily upon the person depicted and less upon any external features, although Auerbach’s habitual wooden studio chair would often appear. Auerbach’s portraits differ from Freud’s in that Auerbach’s are generally even more “expressionist” in appearance than many of his cityscapes—and they end up taking on a special life and appeal of their own, capturing the essence of the sitter in a manner of painterly execution that at first seems glancing, but is in fact the product of long and careful deliberation. There is another quality to the best of these portraits—and it is again reminiscent of certain of Soutine’s paintings—namely, that the thick paint has an “opalescent” effect and a careful variety of colours are chosen and used to achieve an image reflecting the personality depicted. This is very apparent, for instance, in the JYM portrait mentioned earlier.

However, it has been the very thickness of his painting that has attracted criticism. In 1956, an unsigned review in the Manchester Guardian (once famously called “that prudish Manchester newspaper”) opined that Auerbach’s technique in oils was “so fantastically obtrusive that it is some time before one penetrates to the intentions that should justify this grotesque method”. [6] Some journalists, ever chasing for notions of the absurd with which to appeal to readerships eschewing “modern art”, have written about paint so thick that it falls off canvases.[7] Even in the 1980s (when one might have expected that nothing at all could any longer shock an art critic) Auerbach was denounced by a critic for his adherence to an (alleged) “conservatism as if it were a religion”, and this appears to have been on some basis that Auerbach lacked any sense of “irony”, which of course gets close to a cultural stereotyping.[8]

It seems that nothing will please many of the people who write art criticism; and this was against a background of changes in the art world much more dramatic and downright bizarre than the fondness for laying oils on thick. What really seems to have annoyed some of these people was the fact that Auerbach had been true to his own convictions and practice for a very long time indeed—and it may be that this also lies behind the rather jaundiced views of Brian Sewell on late Auerbach noted above.

All this has been “water off a duck’s back” to Auerbach, who has lived up to the latter half of his surname, by simply getting on with his work and turning out marvellous pictures, which are in increasingly high demand on the international market and which collectively show him to be the leading and most esteemed survivor of the London School. It is very clear, from his brief appearances in the film To the Studio, that in contradistinction to many artists today, Auerbach does not affect any arrogant pretensions of “artistic theory” or “philosophic meanings” in his work, but that he regards his works in much the same light that Sir Denis Mahon described as simply “opere fatto per mano”—artworks made by hand—rather than manifestations of any aggressive philosophising.

Further, and despite his humble start as a teenage refugee and émigré in London in the late 1940s, Auerbach is not a bohemian figure in the manner of, say, Augustus John. Indeed, he appears to lead a quotidian existence in Camden Town, working hard there and occasionally visiting the National Gallery. He rarely travels and says that he goes out to the theatre twice a year and to the cinema about once a month when he is tired. It is clear that Frank Auerbach is a very intelligent and well-read man; his appearance and courtly but reticent demeanour and his manner of speech are all consistent with a personality of depth and rich compassion, with no illusions about the world and no interest in the ephemeral fashions of cultural “happenings”.

Few artists in London or for that matter anywhere in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century could (or can) point to a more dogged, faithful and persistent commitment to their work as Frank Auerbach has shown to his painting, as it has developed over much more than half a century—and despite the usual stylistic developments, the subject matter and the basic “mode” of his painting have changed very little over the decades from about the time of what he records as his major personal “breakthrough”, which came with the painting of Summer Building Site in 1952.

If there is perhaps something “Brechtian” in Auerbach’s works, he is certainly not a noisy propagandist. The spirit of his work is more like that of Samuel Beckett—a certain sparseness, strangeness and a sense of some foreboding. He is certainly a “driven” artist, and he has said himself that he is keenly aware of the passage of time, as in the maxim ars longa vita brevis. He has said that painting is indeed a “mystery” and some years ago turned down a request that he participate in a film seeking to “de-mystify” painting, remarking that it is no good making out that artists are just “approachable blokes who happen to paint”. Traditionally, a Master Craftsman was obliged by Deed to instruct his Apprentice in the “art, craft and mystery” of the relevant calling, trade or craft. It is in this sense that Auerbach has referred to the great “mystery” of the painter’s art. It is not something achieved simply by training, but neither is it a wholly innate skill or “inspiration” which does not need or benefit from sound instruction and experience in the fundamentals of its manual practice. It is of particular note that Auerbach regards the daily regularity of that practice, whether in the studio or before an outdoor motif, as vital to what he has achieved.

Overall, Auerbach can be placed in art historical terms as one of the world’s leading contemporary painters; and along with Leon Kossoff, he is in that line of artists who were influenced by London’s Borough Group centred around David Bomberg (whose importance to the development of Modernism in art is now recognised, but perhaps still not to the high degree which he deserves) and through Bomberg, back to Walter Sickert and Sargent and to the French Masters and the Dutch Old Masters. Auerbach’s 2015 retrospective will undoubtedly confirm this.