With this Tate Britain exhibition, Frank Auerbach joins the masters

No sooner had I stepped into the private view of Frank Auerbach’s exhibition at Tate Britain than I bumped into the painter himself. Auerbach was standing, surrounded by his pictures of 60 years ago, but he immediately started talking instead about Michelangelo. Of course, it is generally safe to assume that when artists talk about other artists they are also reflecting, at second hand, on their own work. And so it was in this case.

Michelangelo, Auerbach pointed out, had stingingly described someone else’s architectural design as looking like ‘a cage for crickets’. So, he argued, Michelangelo was clearly striving to make his own work the opposite of that: to give it grandeur.

Now, in writing about Auerbach’s art, it is the intense laboriousness of his methods that are usually stressed: the way in which he has worked daily in his studio since the early 1950s, how for a long time he took just one day’s holiday per annum, spent on Brighton Pier, but eventually gave up that frivolity. Another frequent theme is the startling quantity of pigment he used in his early years — and understandably so, pictures such as ‘Head of E.O.W.’ (1961) have a greater thickness of impasto than almost any in art.

You have only to glance around the galleries at the Tate, however, to find majesty there too. ‘E.O.W., S.A.W. and J.J.W. in the Garden’ (1963), for example, has the presence and dignity of an ancient Egyptian sculpture. Except, of course, that it’s obviously a picture of a modern woman and a couple of children in a suburban backyard.

Auerbach’s work often combines those two qualities. On the one hand, there’s a geometric power that reduces a north London street scene such as ‘Looking Towards Mornington Crescent Station’ (1972–4) to a series of bold slashing and intersecting brush strokes.