In September 1940, the London Blitz began, the German Luftwaffe’s brutal bombing campaign of the capital that would last for eight months. It is hard for people now to appreciate just how devastating the effect was on the city’s streets. Looking up Piccadilly towards Green Park, there are several modern buildings flanked by historic buildings. Each of these marks where a bomb had fallen, the new building filling the gap that had been left by the explosion. In the eight months of attacks, some 43,000 civilians were killed. This amounted to nearly half the total civilian deaths in Britain for the whole war. One in every six Londoners was made homeless at some point during the Blitz, and at least 1.1m houses and flats were damaged or destroyed.

Frank Auerbach was fourteen years old when the Second World War ended in 1945. He was orphaned, both his parents having been murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Born in Berlin in 1931, he was an only child and did not share his parents’ fate because in 1939 they sent him to a progressive boarding school, Bunce Court, which had relocated in the early 1930s from Ulm in Germany to the village of Otterden in Kent, because of the increasing restrictions on Jews. As the pupils were mostly Jewish, the school principal thought it a necessary move, which was welcomed by parents concerned for their children in the rising tensions. Auerbach was eight years old when he was accompanied by his parents to the boat to take him to England. It would be the last time he would see them alive. He still received censored letters from them through the Red Cross until the age of twelve, but after they stopped coming, he gradually understood that they had not survived.  

When he was sixteen, Auerbach moved to post-war London where he received some support from what remained of his living relatives. After the Blitz, London faced a new challenge, that of recovery and regeneration. Some Londoners spoke of a sense of guilt for surviving but, as Auerbach explains, there was also ‘a curious feeling of liberty about, because everybody who was living there had escaped death in some way. It was sexy in a way, this semi-destroyed London. There was a scavenging feeling of living in a ruined town.’[1] Drifting through the city ruins and being solitary and very poor, Auerbach resolved not to get an office job, and although he did consider acting, his ambition to become an artist was the greater force. He signed up to art school and would spend eight years studying on courses at various institutions, most notably under the tutelage of David Bomberg, whose evening classes he recommended to fellow student and close friend Leon Kossoff.

Auerbach would go on to become one of the most important post-war painters of our time. Though he has worked independently and would not consider himself part of a specific movement, he has become associated with the School of London, a term invented by R.B. Kitaj to describe a group of London-based artists who were pursuing forms of figurative painting in the face of avant-garde approaches in the 1970s. In the wake of movements including Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, painting at the time was predominantly abstract. Auerbach was not interested in abandoning form in his painting, focusing instead on capturing the immediacy of experience in his work. The chief artists associated with the School of London, in addition to Auerbach and Kitaj himself, were Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin and Kossoff. Though they were all living in London except for Hockney, and engaged in figurative painting, they were not formally part of a group. They were aware of each other’s practices, and some were on friendly terms, but the term stuck regardless.

Brought together for the exhibition at Newlands House Gallery is a selection of paintings that exemplify Auerbach’s practice, both portraits and landscapes. By displaying his early etchings alongside his drawings, the show will enable audiences to experience first hand how the artist progressed from a formal figurative style to more abstract and expressive works as his unique style developed. Gathered in the upper galleries is a series of works on paper created by Auerbach in situ at the National Gallery in London, which were inspired by the paintings on display there, particularly by British painters including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable – both of whom created a number of paintings and drawings of Sussex. Auerbach’s studies were used as part of his artistic process, and to inform his paintings. The final element of the exhibition is the relationship between the artist and his patrons, specifically David Wilkie, an insurance clerk from Brentwood in Essex, who was a friend and collector of Auerbach and commissioned six of the paintings on display.

Auerbach is celebrated for his paintings of landscapes and cityscapes of Camden, his local area in north-west London, as well as intimate portraits of his good friends and select sitters who have regularly sat for him for numerous years, sometimes decades. Now in his nineties, he paints only five sitters: his biographer and the art historian Catherine Lampert; his son, Jake; his wife, Julia (née Wolstenholme); fellow artist and historian Bill Feaver; and businessman David Landau. There have been various sitters over the course of his career, including Auerbach himself when he was a student and couldn’t afford a model, and in his older years as he found his ageing face becoming more interesting. But Auerbach’s methods require reliable and consistent sitters who are able and willing to come to his studio regularly, sometimes for over a year, and to remain still as he paints. He painted Juliet Yardley Mill (known as J.Y.M. in the titles) for over 40 years. Estella (Stella) Olive West (E.O.W.), his lover of many years, sat for him from the early 1950s until 1973.

Auerbach is profoundly involved with his subjects and needs to develop an intense relationship with them to understand how to paint them and reflect their mood. He took turns with his very good friend Kossoff, each sitting for the other for an hour. This is true of his landscapes and cityscapes as much as the portraits. In his biography by Catherine Lampert, Auerbach recalls a new sitter, Deborah Radcliff, whom he tried to paint. The situation was so awkward for Auerbach that he painted her nude but with her head turned away from him. In the next sitting, he asked her to remain clothed. It did not work for Auerbach as he did not have a clear understanding of the model’s personality, and they did not continue to work together.

Auerbach is opposed to asking his sitters to pose with a prop or to pretend to perform an action of some sort, like Degas’s models who were depicted in the bath or combing their hair. Instead, he looks at the way a person might naturally and honestly position themselves. He rarely alters the position in which they sit. Lampert recalls that she had offered to change her position after sixteen years, an offer which Auerbach declined, explaining that by doing so ‘the whole thing would turn into an activity that would be inimical to everything I am trying to do’.[2] He records people, not poses. Auerbach also describes having a sense of responsibility for creating something worthy of his sitter’s time and places himself under enormous pressure to create something that is good enough. This is partly why he spends so long on each painting, which can take anywhere from six months to three years. Stella West, for example, was a widowed mother of three. Her husband had drowned in the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park, and she must have had little time to spare when her children were growing up. The thick layers of paint in Head of E.O.W. I (1960) indicate his repeated overpainting and the length of time it took to create the work.

In the case of his landscape paintings, Auerbach has found his area of North London to be a fertile subject that he has been exploring since he moved there in 1954. He focuses on Primrose Hill, Mornington Crescent and his immediate area in Camden, often returning to these subjects so that he might build on what he has previously drawn or painted. Where other post-war artists painted the ruins of the city, Auerbach painted the regeneration, fascinated by the various building sites and cranes to be found dotted around London. He was drawn to it compositionally as well as thematically. Furthermore, the National Gallery proved to be a treasure trove of inspiration, and he would visit the galleries there at least twice a week between the early 1950s and about 1995, after which he found himself more involved with his own subject matter. Auerbach was particularly drawn to the British painters at the National Gallery, such as Turner, Constable, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, and would draw directly from their paintings on display. When he was a boy at Bunce Court school, Auerbach recalls being stirred by a reproduction of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire – which is in the National Gallery collection – that he found as he was leafing through a children’s dictionary.

Auerbach used the Old Master paintings at the National Gallery to inform his own work, although their influence on him is more subtle than on some of his contemporaries. Francis Bacon’s Pope series, for example, is clearly directly inspired by Diego Velásquez’s portrait Pope Innocent X. Auerbach believes that Constable borrowed a lot from Peter Paul Reubens but that Constable offered the viewers a different pace. While Rubens’ paintings were action-packed, so that one’s eyes were compelled to dart around the canvas, Constable’s work is more serene. Auerbach found sketching from the original paintings an invaluable exercise and never worked from photographic reproductions. He sees his works on paper from the National Gallery as quick notations, to be used later in the studio to complete a painting. It is a painterly shorthand and a necessary part of his process. He also used this technique as a student in life-drawing classes, when he would draw in the classroom and then use the drawings when he went home to paint.

A good example of this process is seen in Auerbach’s Drawing after Constable's 'The Hay Wain' (1983). This rapid and energetic sketch follows the formal structure of Constable’s painting, which Auerbach then translates into his Park Village East series of paintings. The position of the house on the left of the trees, which are rooted just off centre, matches the location on the canvas of the same elements in The Hay Wain. While the hay wain itself has been replaced by a cyclist in Auerbach’s work, the lessons from Constable are clear. Auerbach described this approach to composition: ‘Constable always had to have something a little bit industrious in the front, evidence of work, even if it is only cows. It’s like: don’t believe that life is all going to be rainbows and heaven.’[3] What is remarkable is that Auerbach only noticed the compositional similarities after he had started work on the series.

Auerbach turned to the National Gallery’s Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian and its complex composition when he wanted to widen his repertoire and at the request of his patron David Wilkie. The painting shows Bacchus, the Roman god of wine with his dissolute followers, catching sight of the Cretan princess Ariadne, whom he later marries and transforms into a constellation of stars. The latter is represented by the stars above Ariadne’s head. In his drawings of the work, Auerbach grapples with the rhythm and the tone of the original. Following perhaps hundreds of drawings, Auerbach’s resulting painting of the same title is a radical skeleton translation of the original. On close inspection, all the elements remain. The circular constellation is replaced by a rainbow ring, and even the wreathed satyr is still there, scratched out as a few dark red lines. The lightning energy is retained in the painting, though the elements might be hard to distinguish.

His paintings, rendered with rich, tactile impasto, take Auerbach a long time to realise. His technique involves painting a work from top to bottom, giving it a unified appearance. If he feels the picture is not quite right, Auerbach scrapes the paint off the canvas and starts again. Earlier in his career, he would just paint over the previous picture, which meant his canvases were often thick with paint, pitted and textured, almost sculptural. Indeed, the paint on some of his works was so heavily applied it looks as if the paint might fall off the canvas. Ruthless and time-consuming as his method might be, it means that the final version of his paintings is produced rapidly and with a fluidity that is especially prominent in his later works. He often laments that he will not finish a work at the first attempt. However, despite the work being labour intensive, the result is never laborious.

Auerbach chose to go to art school because he enjoyed being creative and it seemed a pleasant enough career. Not driven by wealth, he felt it suited his ambitions to be creative and not have an office job. As he studied more, and began to work in earnest, Auerbach realised the mistake he made. As he explains: ‘I started off as a superficial person who was attracted to the arts willy-nilly. The more I realised how difficult it was, the more I knew that it was a challenge, that I would feel I had wasted my life if I didn’t try to grapple with it … You start to realise that painting is not quite as easy as you thought. In fact, what you are doing isn’t really painting at all. You gradually see how much of a historical backlog there is, and if you don’t take it into account, you are doing nothing more than fiddling about.’[4]

To make ends meet, from 1955 Auerbach worked as a teacher in various institutions, but preferred to lecture as a visiting tutor, at schools including Bromley and the Slade School. From 1958 to 1965 he taught at Camberwell School of Art, where he met Kitaj who was also a teacher there. Being an articulate speaker, his time instructing other artists presumably helped Auerbach to crystallise his thoughts on painting. He has a clear idea about what constitutes a successful work of art, which he summarises eloquently in The Last Art Film (2012), a film directed by his son, Jake. In it he defines three qualities needed to produce a successful work of art, whether it’s a painting or drawing.

The first element he considers a painting needs is the ability to convey a real experience of the subject. It has ‘to conjure up experience of weight and of mass and movement and it has absolutely nothing to do with the way things are done but to do with the feeling invested in the image. If the painter feels the thing, that he is making something tangible, he is making something that moved through space, that he is creating a world by magic, and this is conveying itself through the viewer without conscious thought.’[5] Auerbach compares a John Flaxman drawing that is decorative, flat and static, with a drawing by Jean-Antoine Watteau of a woman in a striped dress, seen from behind, which has depth and movement and demonstrates a tenderness towards the subject. Watteau is looking at his model and drawing her with empathy. 

The second element that Auerbach identifies is that of expression. He explains that the artist’s job is to be sensitive to the expression that is being depicted and to convey it accurately. He proceeds to draw six crude bird forms, consisting of a circle with an open triangle for a beak. ‘However similar I would have been able to get them, they would have still been different one from another,’[6] says Auerbach as he scratches the chalk on to the blackboard. When he is finished, he looks at the birds and attributes different qualities to them. Pointing at each bird in turn, he explains that one is ‘a complacent bird’, one is ‘a hectoring bird’[7] and describes the others as slightly dim, domestic and self-satisfied, outgoing and possibly soldierly. Though he notes that the process is subjective, he considers that to convey the expression correctly is an important part of the painter’s process.

Expression is not limited to facial expression, but exists also in objects, in terms of the scale and the proportions of one element compared to another. The angle at which one chooses to paint a building in relation to the other elements on the canvas will alter the expression of the work. In Turner’s Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, the stormy sky dominates the space, reducing the scale of the landscape and the people below to a relatively small presence. The overwhelming presence of the sky is what makes the work successful, conveying human’s vulnerability when faced with the power of nature.

The final element that Auerbach describes is that of tense surface character. To illustrate his point as he describes it in the film, he draws the Union Jack on the chalk board. It registers as an object with immediate impact. It’s a point well made and completely differentiates Auerbach from other artists’ alignment with total abstraction. He concludes as follows: ‘These three things … seem to be technical and mechanical and seem to have left out what’s called the “feeling of inspiration with the subject” and so on. When you are painting you are painting a picture. The feelings will be there if you have got them, they won’t be there if you haven’t got them.’[8]

Auerbach is famed for his monastic-like dedication to his art. He works seven days a week, spending almost all his waking hours on his art. There is a sense that he finds comfort in his routine, but perhaps he also feels the need to be constantly painting. He describes his hours of working as an indulgence rather than as a toil: ‘Painting is the best game I ever played, why would I do anything else?’[9] He has rarely travelled abroad, only doing so to install an exhibition, but he is always quick to return home to his studio. He once returned to Germany with Geoffrey Parton from the Marlborough Gallery and Kitaj to mount an exhibition. He found the experience unremarkable and was not affected by returning to the land of his birth, as one might have imagined. His dedicated approach to his work stems both from an absolute fascination with his craft but also from the knowledge that to create a ‘good’ painting, as described above, is an impossible task. His goals are to achieve something comparable to the great artists of the past and to create something that has never been done before, both of which he finds impossible. In this frame of mind, Auerbach continues in his Beckettian task to ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

In 1956, at the age of twenty-four, Auerbach started to exhibit at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London, which was run and managed by Helen Lessore. The gallery was known as the pre-eminent centre of the avant garde until its closure in 1965. When Auerbach first showed his work there, it was met with much critical approval, including from the curator David Sylvester, who pronounced his debut show ‘the most exciting and impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon in 1949’.[10] He was applauded by fellow artists including Bacon and also Lucian Freud, who reportedly bowed to Auerbach at the end of his visit to the show. It was here that the aforementioned David Wilkie first came across Auerbach’s paintings. Wilkie, a key figure in the current exhibition, was a mild-mannered insurance clerk who lived in Brentwood in Essex. He earned an average salary, which he spent on buying art. His house was full of works, hung in close proximity, by major artists including Auerbach, Craigie Aitchison and Michael Andrews. He was allowed to pay for the art in instalments by the Beaux Arts Gallery, which meant that he could afford to build up a good collection over the years, and live a quiet life at home, surrounded by his acquisitions. He developed a good relationship with Auerbach and commissioned six works by him, the first in 1965. They included two paintings of the nineteenth-century French poet Rimbaud (1975 and 1975-6), Study after Titian I and Study after Titian II (both 1965), The Origin of the Great Bear (1967–8) and Bacchus and Ariadne (1971). These works would not have existed had it not been for Auerbach’s relationship with Wilkie. Another of Auerbach’s paintings in Wilkie’s collection, Reclining Model in Studio No. 1 (1963), was sold by Wilkie to pay for his nursing expenses as he became ill towards the end of his life.

Wilkie was born in Ilford in 1921 and didn’t show much interest in art until he discovered it in his early twenties. He did not travel, only going abroad for his army service during the war. He found himself in Rome when the war ended, where he saw the magnificent art the city had to offer, including the collection at the Vatican Museum, and was transfixed. He was especially inspired by Titian and Bernini. He started to collect in 1956 once he started working, and would commission contemporary artists to paint ‘portraits’ of paintings he didn’t have access to, such as his beloved Titian. Wilkie was a very cultured man, and was also interested in literature, poetry, philosophy and astronomy, as was clear from his book collection. He lived alone after his parents died, and changed neither his job nor his residence his entire life.

Wilkie met Auerbach at the Beaux Arts Gallery, by which time he had already bought two of the artist’s works. The conversation that ensued resulted in the first commission in 1965 of two paintings of Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, specifically the version at the Akademie der Bildenden Künst in Vienna. This resulted in Study after Titian I and Study after Titian II. In both these works Auerbach worked from a nude model who echoed Lucretia’s pose, and on both he painted a raw gash across the canvas to express the violence of the action. This commission presented a new way of working to Auerbach, taking him outside his regular mode of operating and challenging him to work in a new way.

For the next two commissions, The Origin of the Great Bear and Bacchus and Ariadne, the challenge that Wilkie set for Auerbach was to paint a work that Titian had never painted. Auerbach chose the subject of Callisto’s death and her transformation by Jupiter, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The story goes that Callisto, a warrior nymph, is raped by Jupiter, and then banished by Diana for breaking her vow of chastity. She gives birth to Jupiter’s son, Arcas. Callisto is changed into a bear by the vengeful Juno, Jupiter’s wife. Arcas, out hunting, sees a bear and doesn’t realise it is his mother. Jupiter stops Arcas’s spear and transforms both Callisto and Arcas into neighbouring constellations in the sky, Ursa Major (the Great Bear) and Ursa Minor (also known as Arcturus). The Callisto myth as depicted by Auerbach is set on Hampstead Heath. One can make out the Royal Free Hospital in the distance, and Michael Foot, the Labour politician and later party leader, walking his dog in the foreground. Jupiter is shaped like an eagle in the sky in the top-left corner. Auerbach started to use brighter colours only later in his career, as he could not afford them earlier, and this work is bursting with colour and mystery.

Perhaps the more unusual of the commissions are the Rimbaud paintings. Wilkie told Auerbach of his love of Bernini and asked Auerbach to paint a version of Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Cornaro chapel in the church of S. Maria Vittoria in Rome. Auerbach was not very keen on the commission and asked to paint Rimbaud instead, whose poetry they both admired. He proceeded to paint the Cornaro chapel, placing his portrait of Rimbaud in the centre instead of the sculpture.

When Wilkie died in 1992, a selection of his works was bequeathed to the Tate Gallery, as it was known at the time, by the executors of his estate, one of the executors being Auerbach himself, who helped to work on the shortlist from the collection for the gallery. It was Wilkie’s wish that the art he so enjoyed in his lifetime would be gifted to a public collection for a wider audience to enjoy. Nicolas Serota, the Director of the Tate Gallery, was invited to view the works to be gifted, as it was rare – and still is – for such a large collection of superior quality be presented in one go. The collection was put on view when it was first acquired. When seen as a group, this highly individual collection reflects a keen eye and a passion for art. Wilkie was not influenced by fashion and paid no attention to the abstract painting that had gained ground in Britain since the 1950s. He collected in earnest admiration of the artists whose work he valued, and Auerbach was at the heart of the collection.

Auerbach is a painter who deals with the stuff of painting. His work is steeped in anxiety, adoration, fear and sympathy. It is a mirage of what he feels. The seemingly disassociated squiggles, U-turns and zigzags that whip around the canvas all fit together to make a whole. It was Bacon who insisted that Auerbach should glaze his final works, so that people are forced to step back and take in the work as a whole. His work is best viewed at such a distance. At times, the intimacy he portrays can make for uncomfortable viewing. He has created some of the most resonant and inventive works of recent times. In the words of Sylvester, Auerbach has extended the power of paint, to remake reality. His methods of scraping his canvases, sometimes hundreds of times, to create a work, surprises and captivates – and perhaps also horrifies ­­­– his audiences but, as Auerbach himself explains: ‘I don’t think one produces a great picture unless one destroys a good one in the process. And one doesn’t make a great picture by destroying a rotten one.’[11]

[1] Frank Auerbach, quoted in Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Talking, Thames & Hudson, London 2015, p.59.

[2] Auerbach quoted in Aidan Dunne, ‘A second family for Frank Auerbach’, Irish Times, 7 March 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/a-second-family-for-frank-auerbach-1.2558704.

[3] Auerbach quoted in Lampert 2015, p.62.

[4] Auerbach quoted in Nicholas Wroe, ‘Frank Auerbach: Painting is the most marvellous activity humans have invented’, Guardian, 16 May 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/16/frank-auerbach-when-paint-fantastic-time-lots-girls.

[5] Frank Auerbach in The Last Art Film, directed Jake Auerbach, released 2012.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Auerbach in Lampert 2015, p.164.

[10] David Sylvester quoted in Jay Elwes, ‘Interview: Frank Auerbach’, Prospect, 19 July 2012,https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-secret-structure-of-things-frank-auerbach-interview.

[11] Auerbach quoted in Catherine Lambert, Frank Auerbach, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London 2015, p.11.