Heads and London landscapes, that’s what Frank Auerbach is known for. And this exhibition at the Courtauld is heads: 17 charcoal portraits and six oil paintings, of the same sitters over roughly the same period, 1956-1965.
The drawings are monochrome – charcoal and chalk with a liberal use of typewriter rubber – on big, sometimes patched, sheets of paper. The heads loom out of the darkness and back into it and he has a disconcerting habit of focusing on less obvious features – the forehead, say, leaving us guessing about the rest. Yet there’s something haunting about these faces in the shadows, detached from a particular time and place, even though some have dates on.
The sitters were people he knew. He drew himself (there are two self-portraits, one the best work in the show), two of the women with whom he had a close relationship – the older Stella West, and Julia Wolstenholme, to whom he was briefly married – his fellow student Leon Kossoff, and his cousin Gerda Boehm, who was a motherly figure to the young Frank when he came to England in 1939.
He didn’t have to penetrate their psychological depths; he knew them already. In the case of Boehm that knowledge translates into an intense melancholy. Mind you none of the sitters is cheerful: introspection is the default mode.
What the show is keen to emphasise is that these charcoal pieces are finished work, not preparatory drawings – funnily enough the Royal Academy exhibition of Impressionists on Paper shows that they also viewed some work on paper as ends in themselves. Auerbach however worked in charcoal and chalk, normally the stuff of fleeting sketches rather than the laborious work of months.
But he didn’t do fleeting; like some modern Penelope on paper, each day he’d undo the work of the previous day, rubbing out his work to a ghostly outline and then reworking it until he achieved the depth he wanted. But what a performance. No wonder he had trouble with his sitters; it was the patient women in his life (or Kossoff, with whom he swapped modelling sessions) who had the stamina.
What this early work – from his 20s to his 30s – also shows is the influence of his extraordinary tutor, David Bomberg, whose drawing classes he attended with Kossoff until 1953 at the Borough Polytechnic: among Bomberg’s multiple aspects was skilled charcoal portraiture, though his work has more finish than Auerbach.
In the process of all the rubbings out and reworking, inevitably sometimes the paper broke. No matter; the resourceful Auerbach simply glued two sheets together or patched the paper as he went.
In the seven paintings shown alongside the drawings, the medium is piled on, sculpted rather than brushed, and in one head of Stella West the oil is simply squeezed on in thick lines. It’s one of Auerbach’s calling cards, this thick impasto, but in this still early work it has an arresting quality. As Brian Sewell observed, “after the first short burst of near originality, Auerbach relinquished the business of painting portraits and townscapes for the easier discipline of painting Auerbachs of Auerbachs”.
The good news is that Frank Auerbach is still painting and drawing self-portraits in the same studio, still looking ahead - at 92. What a man.
