The ghostly charcoals of Frank Auerbach

‘In some curious way, the practice of art and the awareness of the imminence of death are connected,’ Frank Auerbach said in 2012. ‘Otherwise, we would not find it necessary to do the work art finally does – to pin something down and take it out of time.’

There’s no sense of the imminence of death in Auerbach’s postwar landscapes of London building sites stirring with new life, but there is in his contemporary charcoal portraits, as scarred and sooty as the Blitzed city in which they were made. Auerbach started making large charcoal drawings from life as a student in David Bomberg’s evening classes at Borough Polytechnic, and carried on because the medium was cheap and allowed the endless revisions he found necessary to pin things down.

In art classes the model would sit for a limited period during which he was expected to get a drawing finished, but there were no limits, in theory, on the number of workings and reworkings a drawing could go through if a model was prepared to sit and resit. In practice, modelling for Auerbach required the patience of a saint. In the 1950s the only volunteer apart from his friend Leon Kossoff, for whom he sat in return, was Stella West, a young widow with whom he formed a relationship. Identified only by her initials, E.O.W., she deserves artistic canonisation for sitting for ten drawings over four years.

The over-life-sized heads in the Courtauld’s compelling exhibition – the first to focus on these formative early drawings – were not simply reworked: they were drawn and redrawn from scratch. At the end of a sitting the charcoal would be erased, leaving a ghost image on which the next drawing was overlaid. Only when something had ‘risen out of the battle into being’ would the artist consider a drawing finished.