On Frank Auerbach and What I Learned from Him

and How He Painted

Let’s name names.

I thought the Guardian’s obituary of Frank Auerbach, by Michael McNay, was pissy and obvious.

It begins —

Frank Auerbach’s paintings, each one wrested from chaos over weeks and months of struggle, place the artist firmly in the English tradition stemming from Constable, who had the same feeling for the material world and the materials of art.

Auerbach’s almost lumpen approach to his subject…

And then later —

..despite the Englishness of his work…

And then —

After the Beaux Arts years, Auerbach was taken up by the Marlborough gallery and gained increasing recognition abroad, typified by the award (shared with Sigmar Polke) of the Golden Lion prize at the 1986 Venice Biennale. Still, the deep seriousness of his art brought respect rather than love from most critics, but that changed when the Royal Academy gave him a retrospective exhibition in 2001.

Ah, he owed it all to an institution with Royal in the title, and English critics don’t love deep seriousness, and the paint was thick.

Let’s wipe this clartiness off and start again.

Like lots of people, I came to Frank Auerbach not through deep seriousness but through pop — though the cover to Japan’s live-but-rerecorded album Oil on Canvas.

That means I can be fairly sure that before June 1983, I had never seen an Auerbach painting, and that shortly afterwards I had.

Not that I owned a copy of Oil on Canvas. It was a double album and, with my limited pocket money, I couldn’t really afford those.

New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies also came out that month, so perhaps I went for that instead — with a sumptuous painting on its cover, too: A Basket of Roses by French painter Henri Fantin-Latour c/o another Peter Saville classic.

More likely, I bought two cheaper reissues.

Instead, over the following months, I picked out, looked at, thought about, and slotted back Oil on Canvas into the racks at Andy’s Records — wondering if the painting, actually a ‘Head of J.Y.M. II’ (1980), was a portrait of Japan’s lead singer David Sylvian. It wasn’t. It was a portrait of Julia Yardley Mills, one of Auerbach’s long-term models.

I’m not sure I saw a real Auerbach until Wednesday 7 January 1987, when I visited the Marlborough Gallery for the show Recent Paintings and Drawings.

Here’s my whole diary entry for that day. You’ll see why —

Went to London.

Went to Frank Auerbach show at Marlborough. Bought Landola guitar at Andy Guitars cost £200. (Don’t tell anyone.)

Left my programme from the show in the shop. Went back & who should I meet by Johnny Marr from the Smiths!

Was quite small. More angular than I’d thought. Asked me about the guitar.

Johnny Marr was wearing a very stylish Mod coat, and was with the equally stylish Angie — who was less keen on talking about my guitar. (Which my son now has.)

Anyway, by 1987 I was almost as much a fan of Auerbach as I was of The Smiths.

And Auerbach had begun to influence my writing in a way I didn’t understand for years, although it slowly became conscious.

I think this is where there’s something general and essential to be learned from Auerbach, by all kinds of artist, and it’s really the opposite of the obituary’s wrested from chaos and almost lumpen approach.

Auerbach’s working method has been repeatedly described. There are articles and book chapters about it. Go read them.

Essentially, it’s this — Auerbach wanted to capture the appearance of things, both permanent and momentary, and he went at it again and again, and again, until he had something he could bear to leave.

In the earlier work (and his method was physical labour, if not pugilism (also referred to as ‘going to work’)) — up until a certain point of development, he left previous pained-painted attempts on the canvas.

This meant that they grew thicker and thicker and, surely, it meant that his hand holding the brush making the new line was part-guided by skimming through the track of the previously accreted lines.

His impasto wasn’t a style choice, it was a logical result.

Later on, he started to scrape the oil off the canvas, after it had become cumbersome and too dictating of future efforts at representation. This would leave a stained beginning which he would cover, as quickly as possible, with fresh paint.

His method ended up halfway between two famous quotes by two famous writers. The first is the best bit (in my opinion) in all Philip Roth —

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

The second is Samuel Beckett’s greatest hit, familiar from mugs and T-shirts, but try to read it fresh —

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

The reason I’m quoting both is that I am not sure Auerbach would have felt his final abandoned attempt at a portrait was still getting the subject wrong. It might remain a failure, but it was a better failure. The subject was coming to be better known, more available. That was the point of all those previous layers, either left (early) or scraped onto the floor (later).

I tried to get all my understanding of Auerbach across in a poem I wrote after I moved to Prague in 1990. That full stop in the title is deliberate —

Auerbach.

          Vocation, unlike dirt, cannot be washed off

          at the end of the day. Instead, rooted down

          in the flinty night of earth, the violence

          explored by worms, vocation is bloody, like

          a mythic tree which, when its twigs are snapped,

          bleeds blood.

          Lost in the upper worlds for we cannot

          deny those basic, sub-iconic myths, of light

          and dark, of up and down: more basic

          even than male sun and female moon above

          the tangle of non-angelic thought, this

          is where you are not. Instead you are held,

          beneath, within.

          Instead the basics; the form before, and its

          appearance beneath a different kind of weather,

          within the lightbulb’s cool, facetious gaze;

          the shift of perception like the shift of clouds

          without the clouds themselves: completion like

          the cup in which the ignorant water rests.

                                           To instantly make

          the decision, breaking over the wave

          of occurrence, to see immediately that the decision

          was wrong, but not to regret the decision,

          to make the next decision and to accept

          the next mistake, knowing, at least,

          that your past mistakes were wholly meant.

What was important to me about this poem wasn’t the end result, which — as you’ll have seen — is still dubious. It’s that I decided, very deliberately, as a homage but also as a way of learning as much as possible, that I would write it in an Auerbachian way. That is, I would go at it again and again, and again, in draft after draft, quite possibly worsening and worsening it, until I came to a point where I could re-do the thing afresh, alive.

(I would suggest that every writer/artist should try this at least once. Test a poem/story/drawing/painting to destruction. Probably even better to try it once a year.)

I was working on cheap, rough paper, first with my handwriting and then with a Czech typewriter on which the z and y were — for me — reversed.

I would type up a draft, work on it with layers of revision until it was getting confusing, then type up a clean draft — perhaps inserting changes as I typed.

This remains, in essence, how I write.

Each sentence I come at start to finish, every time, handwriting it out, every time, making this small change or taking that whole new approach.

I am not comfortable with throwing a first draft straight onto the screen, and thereafter tinkering with it — going in to change a word, here and there, and rendering the previous word invisible. This risks the curse of the cursor.

I’ve written in a wordprocessy way — it’s how I write the Diary — but I think it misses out on what Auerbach was passionately getting at during all those years of trying and re-trying in his same Mornington Crescent studio.

His lesson.

I believe this continues a lineage within the whole history of Western painting, going back to Rembrandt and coming forward through Turner and Constable and Sickert and Soutine and de Kooning and Bacon. And also has kinship with the single achieved gesture, brush never leaving the page, of classical Chinese calligraphy. But Picasso is the key figure. You can see this by watching him at work in George Clouzot’s film, Le Mystère Picasso (1956).

It’s not the end result you need to take on — it certainly isn’t one of his best — it is his complete lack of hesitation in getting rid of something that most painters would find acceptable as an achievement.

The beach painting goes through stages of finishedness, of prettiness, of acceptability. But something still narks Picasso, and he won’t let it pass. This isn’t what he’s after. Nor this. And so next and next and next, without regret.

However, it’s Picasso’s sculpture ‘Head of a Woman (Fernande)’ (1909) that I think is where Auerbach got his biggest push.

This does what Polonious suggests in ‘Hamlet’ — ‘by indirections find directions out’.

Don’t illustrate. Get likeness through unlikeness.

Francis Bacon, I think, took the same sideways approach. And his interviews with David Sylvester are a way of understanding Auerbach, too — although Bacon is more about the violence of human presence, whereas Auerbach wants a totality.

The question hovers, why did Auerbach’s portraits not sometimes come out right first time? If this was his method, mightn’t he occasionally strike lucky with go number one? Why waste any more paint?

In later years, certainly in the drawings, this does seem to have happened. There are few underlines left. But Auerbach insists, old-fashionedly and hard truthfully, that you can’t know something well until you have known something over a long time, and have made repeated efforts at knowing something.

Our first goes are glib. And glibness is appealing, it’s catchy. But what we need to find for ourselves is a method of art that allows both repeated return and instant glimpse, both doggedness and blissful luck.

I take this as Auerbach’s gift, his always-to-be-relearned lesson, which is about clear perception not chaos and is always in pursuit of not the lumpen but the lucid.

I couldn’t be more grateful for it.