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.
