Frank Auerbach was a colossus of modern art – but the man I encountered was humble and wise
Although Frank Auerbach was 93 years old when he passed away on November 11, it seems impossible to believe that he has gone. Only a few weeks ago, I was marvelling at the staggering vivacity of his London landscapes gathered together for a brilliant exhibition at Offer Waterman & Francis Outred in Mayfair (until Dec 7). These are paintings that – in many cases, decades after they were created – still seem entirely contemporary and alive.
Consider The Origin of the Great Bear (1967-68), lent by the Tate, an astonishing reworking of a Greek myth, with a wrong-footing, zinging-yellow palette. In ancient myth, the gods often swept mortals up to heaven; now, they’ve come for Auerbach, that colossus of post-war British painting. He was an original, very different from most of his so-called “School of London” contemporaries (such as his friend Lucian Freud), with whom he was routinely grouped. His early work – brawny, earthbound, dark – reprimanded the antiquarian fripperies of inter-war British Neo-Romanticism, and articulated what it was like to exist in a blasted new era of atomic anxiety; in later years, he tapped a brighter, jauntier vein, with its own idiosyncratically crazy verve. Throughout, he fought for, and revivified, figurative painting.
I wasn’t one of the lucky few who committed to sit for him, week in, week out, as he toiled on their portraits. Typically dissatisfied at the end of each session, he’d scrape off all the paint he’d thickly applied, before, next time, starting again: a process which, itself, sounded mythic, Sisyphean. I only interviewed him once, but, oh my, what a joy that long conversation was.
By then, Auerbach was known to be so ferociously committed to his art, and to lead such an ascetic lifestyle, that little outside the studio mattered to him any more. Yet, my interlocutor, who’d once described himself as “the beast in the burrow”, and who I feared would prove to be a terrible grump, was – surprisingly, to me – witty, lucid, and disarmingly self-deprecating, as well as moving and wise.
And this was despite that, as he told me (then aged 91), he no longer had the “energy” to maintain what had been a “relentless”, seven-days-a-week “routine” inside his studio down an alley behind Mornington Crescent in north London, where he’d worked (and often slept) almost every day since 1954. Imagine what he must have been like at the height of his powers, circa 1970.
A couple of things he said that afternoon have, above all, stayed with me. First, that, even in his nineties, he still had “no faith” in his “ability to turn out pictures”: “I’ve been working for 70 years, but, every time I pick up a brush, I am totally incompetent, and I start again from the beginning.” That’s humility.
Second, that, “possibly because of my background, I’ve always painted as though I’m going to die tomorrow.” That background was brutal: born in Berlin in 1931, the son of a patent lawyer and a former art student, he was packed off to England on a boat in 1939, and never again saw his Jewish parents – who were killed in a concentration camp.
Inevitably, this engendered within him a profound sense of life’s fragility, but, rather than crushing him, it made him approach what he loved – that is, painting, which he took up in the 1940s, while living in a bombed-out London that was, he told me, “not very far off what Ukraine looks like now” – with spirits-raising gusto. And the hard-won energy that he could summon on the canvas was – is – phenomenal.
For some onlookers, perhaps, his portraits and (comparatively underrated) landscapes, with their bold, courageous strokes, and globs and peaks of paint, may appear difficult, excessively clotted, even fierce. His dark-toned early work has the claggy quality of mud. But Auerbach was allergic to clichéd pictorial niceties; he had no interest in painting prettiness. He wanted his pictures to convey a sense of “mass”, not “surface pattern” (hence their three-dimensionality); his portraits were intended to evoke the presence of his sitters, not their likeness. Each of his paintings, he told me, had to be “true” to its subject.
In one of my favourite quotes about art by any artist, he once said that he was always striving to make a “stonking, independent, [and] coherent image” that had “never been seen before” – something, he explained, that “stalks into the world like a new monster”. Well, if you caught his show at London’s Piano Nobile gallery in 2022 (his first retrospective in this country since one at Tate Britain in 2015), you’ll know that the world is full of Auerbach’s painted “monsters”. I say that with gratitude. They deserve to stalk our museums and galleries forever.