Living in the moment

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.