Frank Auerbach (born 1931) is flavour of the month. A museum exhibition of his early paintings has opened at the Courtauld (until 17 January 2010), a substantial monograph by William Feaver has just been published (Rizzoli, £100) and a commercial show of recent paintings at Marlborough Fine Art runs until 24 October. Meanwhile, the notoriously retiring and work-obsessed artist has been seen at Private Views and has even granted one or two interviews. Does this mean that Auerbach is relaxing the habits of a lifetime?
Not really. He still works seven days and five evenings a week, gets up extremely early and puts in long hours in the same smallish studio he has occupied since 1954. The myth that Auerbach never leaves the country, travels by plane or stays in a hotel was dispelled some decades ago when he flew to New York and loved it. For the rest, he does what he needs to do. He says, ‘As one gets older one has less energy. It’s simply a choice between working and doing something else, and I prefer to work. If I’m not doing that now I watch a bit of television (which I never used to) — Morse or Sherlock Holmes — isn’t Morse good?’ He reads less than before, but returns to favourites. ‘Yeats keeps coming back and Eliot. My generation was energised by ‘The Waste Land’, and Pound seems to me to be marvellous, the language is totally magical.’
The Courtauld exhibition, expertly and sympathetically hung, makes a strong argument for the small-scale monographic display. The visitor can learn much more about an artist from a show of this size than from the average Tate or Royal Academy blockbuster. As it focuses exclusively on the 14 building-site paintings (and related studies) Auerbach made between 1952 and 1962, it takes us back to the beginning of his career when he began to paint in the radical way which made his name. The paint is thick, the approach realistic rather than abstract, but much of the expected imagery is buried in the churned layers. The paintings are remarkable physical objects, in some ways equivalents to the earthworks of the sites, their heaped and crinkled surfaces trenched with lines of energy.
Auerbach was initially drawn to the bombsites which littered London in the post-war years. ‘It was when they became building sites that they became formally active,’ he says. ‘I feel that I react formally, not with sentiment. I don’t say “isn’t this moving?”, but there was such implicit drama in those things — destruction, phoenix rising again — it was the most active, the most eloquent landscape you could possibly imagine. This was a raw subject, and I think the whole business of painting is to capture some undiscovered territory for art. And as it turned out, the end results seemed raw and strange to me.’
The paintings conjure up a world of much darkness, rifted through with light. As he moved around the city, Auerbach made drawings of sites in Bruton Street or Earls Court, Oxford Street or the Embankment. Most dramatic of all was the Shell building. ‘That was gigantic. I must have been stirred by its grandeur and size. The holes were deeper, the buildings were higher. And I have to say that the rebuilding of the Empire Cinema was an absolute gift. I was passing and I looked in and did some drawings. It looked so amazing.’ The paintings that grew from these drawings were the labour of many weeks in the studio: the brilliant flaring of ‘Shell Building Site: from the Thames’, with all the intensity of a religious subject; the Stygian gloom of ‘Workmen Under Hungerford Bridge’; and the real beauty of ‘Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square’, with its crusty but not unsubtle surface, capable of moving from emphatic to fragile and back again.
Auerbach insists that the paintings just emerged in response to the subjects. ‘There was no sense of essaying or finishing a series. I’ve more or less sleepwalked all my life. I’ve tried to listen to my instincts rather than make plans. I think there are two sorts of painters: one sort is buoyed up by saying how good they are. They’re not to be despised: you’ve got to remember that Courbet was a provincial braggart and a marvellous painter.’ And the other sort, to which Auerbach himself clearly belongs? ‘I have felt all my life that my work is inadequate and I try to do better with the next painting, and that’s worked for me.’
His aim has always been to achieve a true but not a literal representation of the physical world, an approach which owed something to Existentialism. ‘I very much liked the idea that you made your own justification for existence. I don’t think I can exaggerate the degree to which consciously or unconsciously the atom bomb hovered over all our heads. Very few of us thought that we had many years to live. So what are you going to do? You live in the moment and you try to construct your own framework to justify this brief and instinctive existence.’ Feeling he had nothing to lose, he didn’t want to play safe.
At the same time he was also painting Primrose Hill. ‘It was an antidote. The building sites were angular, Primrose Hill a swelling thing, and of course I painted the people. All my life I’ve painted people.’ The long series of searching portraits for which he is perhaps best known is the result. He paints landscape but not still-life, and for the last 30 years he hasn’t used really thick paint, though there’s a common misapprehension that he does. These days, it is the succulent colour that distinguishes his paintings.
‘I never visualise a picture before I start,’ he says. ‘I have an impulse and I try to find a form for that impulse. The great benefit of manuring the thing with reality is that reality continually belies one’s expectations: where one expects the grand sweep it suddenly starts becoming petty, where one expects it to be hard it becomes soft, the proportions — almost every day one goes out there, one has different sensations about them.’ This is reflected in his habit of scraping off and re-working: ‘I change the painting every day.’ So how does he decide when it is resolved? ‘Firstly, it’s got to look new to me. At the time of finishing it’s got to look like nothing I’ve seen before. Secondly, there’s got to be nothing in it that isn’t part of a coherent geometrical entity of a new sort. And, thirdly, it must feel like the subject. One’s got to have the most pretentious aims — without pretensions there’s nothing to live up to — but in retrospect I’ve never lived up to them, so I go on with another picture.’ Long may he do so.
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