#19 'O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful' – for Frank Auerbach
On the indelible nature of the Mornington Crescent Master's work
“O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful, wonderful, and yet again wonderful.”
Hiraki, my husband, came home the other day asking me what I thought about a t-shirt with that quote printed on it. He wanted to give it to a friend. It’s a Shakespeare quote*, he said; he’d found the t-shirt at the DT Suzuki Museum in Kanazawa, his hometown.
Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki is the Japanese philosopher credited with introducing Zen Buddhism to the West. Hiraki explained that Suzuki had landed on the Bard’s phrase as a way to express, in English, the Japanese concept of myo (妙), from the Myoho-renge-kyo, or the Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful Law (AKA the Saddharma-pundarīka-sūtra, an important Mahayana Buddhist scripture).
I immediately thought that A) I really don’t know enough about either Shakespeare or DT Suzuki, or indeed Zen Buddhism, and should get to studying all of it. And B) I do know what that quote describes for me right now.
*
At the very beginning of his exemplary 1992 monograph on Frank Auerbach, the art critic Robert Hughes writes that Auerbach’s career “says little about ‘the art world’, except that it may not matter much to a real artist’s growth.”
When Auerbach died on 11 November 2024, said art world, which, for so many decades had cyclically lauded him then forgotten all about him, mourned his passing as that not just of a man but an era. He was hailed as the last of his kind, a true great: a real artist, to reprise Hughes’s term, who knew no equal during his lifetime.
Obits went full literary in their attempts to get at what made him singular. They noted his “tortoiselike ways and adamantine sense of purpose”, his “lumpen approach”, his “visceral intensity'“, his “monkish” solitude, his “obstinate quietude”, these “hard-won, contingent, only just cohering images”. They dug into the darkness and emptiness some critics perceived in his work and underscored the emotional depths and trauma at its roots. He was, they said, a psychologist, an expressionist, radically courageous and supremely modern.
But what has long set aflame my eyes and my heart both, not just in the week of his passing (as you’ll know if you’ve been with me since the beginning of this Substack), but for the whole of my teenage and adult life is crystalline, undiluted marvel. What I feel, every time I see an Auerbach in person, or sit for a while with one of his books, is how utterly wonderful Auerbach’s work is.
My father** taught me how to draw. He first went to law school, then trained at theological seminary. Then, when I was in primary school, he went to university to study art. I don’t remember anything of what I drew at that age, but I do remember him working on big canvases in his studio in the garage. I have vague feeling-memories of going with him to classes at the Johannesburg Art Foundation*** and then to fine art lectures at Unisa.
First he showed me William Kentridge’s work and Lucien Freud’s. And then, when I was 15, he bought home a book about Frank Auerbach. It was that monograph by Hughes, and I drew from it incessantly. When, years later, I finally bought my own copy of the book, I opened it to page 137 (above: plate 97. Head of EOW, 1956), illogically expecting it to be smudged and lumpy with the minirolls of rubber you get when you erase something a lot, which is how I'd left my dad's book. They weren’t there, of course. Our two books are in places separated by an arm of the Atlantic ocean: how could they be? But it was as close as I’ve been to a Proustian madeleine moment.
My dad taught me to always look more at the thing I was trying to draw than at the drawing itself, to not be afraid to erase anything and to always keep working. Which I realise now chimes with what Auerbach told me when I interviewed him in 2023. At 92, he said, he was still learning how to draw. He said he felt like he’d spent his whole career learning how to draw. He hoped he’d die at his easel. He worked in boldly searching lines. His fearless, relentless erasure wasn’t a schtick, a habit, it was commitment on paper, to capture the lump—the thingness—of whatever he’d decided to draw, whether it meant restarting a thousand times or not. He said he hoped one day to not need to erase or layer on anything, to simply get there in one go. His goal —the there — was always the same: he just wanted to make good work.
He was hailed as the last of his kind, a true great: a real artist, to reprise that Hughesian term, who knew no equal during his lifetime.
Drawing and erasing and drawing and erasing. Now that I think about it, this is how I’ve learned to write too, looking and listening more than fretting over my own words. Often if I love a sentence too much, I’ll cut it. I never mind being edited. I know I can always work—write, draw—harder.
Lots of art historians have written, marvellously, about Auerbach’s work. Perhaps because he lived for a century and really did work for all of it, many, many journalists and writers interviewed him too (I’ll list some books here below), even though he was always tagged as a recluse. He was considered, not verbose but not shy either. He was also pretty funny.
When we spoke about London, he started reciting Blake****; he had been reading the Cahiers du Cinéma and was exhilarated at his boyhood friend, the film director Michael Roemer’s recent re-emergence, aged 95, into the spotlight. He knew who I meant when I mentioned a tutor I’d loved very much who had recently passed away. “Is that the sculptress?” he said, understanding I meant Phyllida Barlow. “Everybody speaks of her as a remarkable teacher.” He, it seemed to me, loved people, didn’t care for their opinions but loved to speak with them. He just needed to work more.
*
For a long time I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I started working on the lowest rung of journalism straight out of art school because I was broke and I couldn’t figure out how to live off my work. I’d put InDesign on my CV, because at art school you kind of just try anything out to see what happens, and the Guardian was, right then, moving from Quark to InDesign, only nobody knew how to use it yet. So I was hired as a casual to lay out print pages, from drawings an editor would make with a ruler and a pencil on a sheet of A3.
I was quickly bored, so kept asking for more to do. I did layouts, subbed copy, did research, ghosted interviews, wrote camping guides, edited recipes, did illustrations, finally wrote a first piece the music editor hated so much he published it in the very last spot of a very long series, ghosted more interviews, reviewed cookbooks, wrote a tiny column, wrote for free elsewhere, did a first Shortcut, did a first Word of Mouth blogpost, tested readers’ recipes, got told off by Padma Lakshmi, finally wrote my first Arts piece, got Laure Prouvost to organise a really bonkers meal, performed at Tate Modern in Tarek Atoui’s installation and wrote about it, still couldn’t call myself a journalist, but, somehow, making art and also writing about art slowly became not incompatible.
In March 2023, when, after five years of trying to interview Auerbach, I finally secured a date, I read the email, sat down and called my father. He walked upstairs to his studio to fetch his Hughes book, opened it to page 137, and in the background I heard my mother, who does not draw or paint, say, "Oh yes, I remember Dale drawing that." She still has those drawings in a drawer.
EOW, JYM, Catherine Lampert, these were names I knew from Auerbach’s titles well before I ever came to London. They’re weren’t friends but they were presences. Art critic Jonathan Jones nailed it with his summation that “Auerbach painted faces, or as he titled them ‘Heads’, as if fumbling for their essence. Meeting any of his regular portrait subjects, you realise there’s no simple visual resemblance at all – to pose for Auerbach was to lend yourself as a near-anonymous icon of the human presence.”
So too with places. When I came to study at the Slade, St Pancras, Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill weren’t just dots on a map. They were places I felt like I knew too. Not inherently special places, or at least, that’s not what makes Auerbach’s focusing on them interesting. One journalist, in the weeks after his death, visited the places he’d painted to, as they put it, “see the streets how Auerbach saw them” and determine “whether he even liked London”. Which is a perfectly daft proposition.
You don’t look at London to figure out Auerbach. You look at Auerbach.
*
Last year came with two big shows in London. Frank Auerbach. The Charcoal Heads, at the Courtauld Gallery, 9 February – 27 May 2024. And Portraits of London, curated by Francis Outred, Offer Waterman, from 4 October – 7 December 2024.
Both were monumental logistical achievements. The Courtauld show made me cry. There was EOW from page 137 of my book, and all the other pages too, all those incomprehensibly beautiful early drawings. That the show couldn’t stay together for longer kind of broke my heart. You don’t always fully realise the import — the magnitude — of a temporary exhibition like this, where curators have worked so hard to collate in one space pieces belonging to collectors of all stripes, from across continents, so that you can see the coherence, the resonance between works, the artist’s thinking in full multidimensional song.
You don’t look at London to figure out Auerbach. You look at Auerbach.
Roemer, who is now 97, was three years older than Auerbach. They met at Bunce Court, a boarding school in Otterden, Kent on the south-east coast of England, where they’d both arrived as small boys fleeing Germany on the Kindertransport.
Roemer started buying Auerbach’s work when he was in his early 20s. “I didn't understand why I was collecting the pictures so compulsively. My wife just let me do it. She didn't complain about it. She would say,’ Where were you going to hang it?’ And I’d say, ‘I’ll find a place for it,’ because our house wasn't that small, but still, it was full of pictures. If I were a betting person, I bet everything on one horse. And that was Frank.”
Roemer said he needed them, those portraits. He described his favourite to me as “one where the paper was completely worn away, and backed up with another piece of paper, which was worn away, so there were three layers of paper, a drawing of the face of EOW, you've no doubt seen.” Had I seen? I had to bite my lip to not squeal. He’d seen and bought and lived with page 137. His daughter now has it. “And it was a beautiful drawing,” he said. “I don't know whether the word beautiful is appropriate. But that's how it struck me: something classical.”
The exhibition of London cityscapes, too, was a museum-grade collation of works. It left you wondering, actually, why a museum hadn’t thought to put it on first. “Essentially I hope to record something hitherto unrecorded,” was how Auerbach relayed the driving principle underpinning the seven decades of work it comrised. I went to see it multiple times, before he passed away and afterwards. On one later occasion, Jay Jopling (founder of White Cube gallery) arrived. Someone even more VIP scheduled a private visit and scuppered my next visit. By the end, you could barely see the works for the oohing and aahing crowds in expensive cardigans, many of whom I overheard saying “but I didn’t know”. A group laudatio has never been my vibe, but they did all have a point, it just felt like they were just extremely late to the party.
I wrote pages and pages and pages in my notebook. Words that stand out now: “bold” and “frankness (franchise, in French)” and “bravery.” Auerbach favoured a fat brush. I marvelled at the way he afforded objecthood to colour. I followed tiny sequences where he worked up his hues in fine, speckled impressionist detail and thought, “Here is a painter wondering.” I tracked throughlines of red, like hiking routes on an elevation map; colour deployed as rope and weaving; expanses of pale or ochre or mud, unexpected bits of green. The character of his structural lines morphed, through the decades, from zigzag into shudder; bright under-layers bloomed beneath surface marks, clay leaching into a pond.
I love how every one of his works, whether portrait or landscape or interior, is never a window you dive into. Auerbach keeps you firmly on the surface, within the pigment and charcoal, line and ghost. He’d have drawn or painted whatever he’d had in front of him. That’s the point. That’s the work. That’s what you sit with, what you’re given.
*
When we spoke, it was three weeks before his 93rd birthday. He was about to open Frank Auerbach, Twenty Self-Portraits, presented by Frankie Rossi Art Projects, at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London, 19 April – 14 July 2023, an exhibition of all new works. Until then he’d only ever painted himself once or twice, so on the surface, the show was an exercise in an entirely new idea too.
But, he said, he was still trying to do what he’d always done. “I think I've tried to do the same thing all my life. And I think I've tried to surprise myself all my life. So possibly, these self-portraits too, well, I hope that they have a certain freshness about them, a sense of discovery, because that's what I'm trying for. That's what amuses me about painting: it's like finding an Easter egg, you don't where it's going to be or what it's going to be. But one hopes that it'll be something valid.”
He said, and feared it might sound pretentious, that in a sense, all of his new paintings had surprised him. “Because it seems as though I am productive. But I don't do anything else. I work seven days a week, although not with the same energy as I had when I was 21.”
In the film his son, Jake, made of him in 2018, titled Frank, Auerbach already was speaking about some works being made of an "old man's marks". But so many critics rightly highlighted the vibrancy of the self-portraits, those last works. He said he needed to hold on to his easel then, which perhaps explained why the marks were sometimes “slightly more summary and reduced”. As an artist, though, he was not remotely reduced. Newness and discovery and forward movement were at his core, right until the very end.
‘We tried almost every thing or thought about everything, that was on offer, until we found something that was difficult enough and puzzling enough and intriguing enough to sustain us for a lifetime.’
“I was taught by all sorts of intelligent people, that I was very pleased to be in contact with,” he told me. “One of the great things at London art schools is that we were continually offered a great number of alternatives. We tried almost everything or thought about everything, that was on offer, until we found something that was difficult enough and puzzling enough and intriguing enough to sustain us for a lifetime.” Doing what he did really did sustain him for a lifetime.
David Bomberg was the one tutor who had had the greatest impact on him. “Whereas the rest of the English art school was full of intelligent, well-intentioned, hardworking people,” he said, “there was nonetheless something provincial about it — as though they were teaching one how to paint a picture, or how to do something sound and acceptable. And Bomberg was nothing like that. He just had, in himself, a deeper impatience to get to something grander, which is the basis actually of any art of quality. He was a remarkable man, really remarkable. Considering what he put up with, I mean, in his life. At various times he taught drawing in Hyde Park, worked in factories, and yet, still made work and near the end, he still occasionally produced what seems to me to be — there's an open book of his on the studio floor now — a really inventive, totally convincing, totally independent image. Without any encouragement. You know when people talk about neglect, they think that people thought a bit less of him, but he was totally ignored. Nobody bought his pictures. Kenneth Clark despised his work. And there he was, and somehow he managed. In my mind, and for me, he can't be sufficiently celebrated.”
*
Roemer has a theory that this urge we have to make work comes from the Big Bang, that it is essentially the stars still in us that make us carry on. To which Auerbach’s response, when I relayed this theory, was so touching: “He's never enunciated this idea to me and I wish him joy with it. It's a very good idea. I have … I have a feeling that there is a muse.”
I asked him if the sense of doubt he’d expressed after finishing a piece very early on, where he didn't know if he'd be able to do it again, had always lived with him. “Absolutely,” he said.
“One's conscience, which is what one operates on, does go up and down to a certain extent but I hope it's always been present. And it always feels that I haven't gone as deep as I should have, or been as daring, as summary, as authoritative as I should have. Every painting and drawing feels hopeless as though there's never going to be an end and the end, when it comes, is almost always totally unpredicted, it always surprises me. I may be feeling tired at the end of the day, go over the drawing in a totally different way to what I'd drawn before. Or it may be that different situations or that something's interrupted me and I've gone back. I remember, I used to remember in detail the finishing of every single work, but now there's so many. But the finishing of a picture for me has always been an event. That all sounds very, very grand. But this is a drama for oneself. It's not that I think that I'm doing something amazing and public. That’s for myself, that is how it's felt.”
It’s definitely how it’s felt for me too: amazement at the event of Auerbach, amazement forever undimmed, at what he was doing. And I know I’m not alone.
Things to read and watch and look at and listen to
The Courtauld film: An Interview with Frank Auerbach | The Charcoal Heads
National Galley Stories: Frank Auerbach
The portrait Observer photographer Jane Brown took of Auerbach in 1986.
“What drives you, Frank Auerbach? A rare final encounter with art’s great workaholic”
Frank, a film by Jake Auerbach
Books
Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London, 2024
Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads, 2024
Frank Auerbach: Drawings of People, 2022 (Frank Auerbach, Mark Hallett (editor), Catherine Lampert (editor))
Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting by Catherine Lampert, 2015
Frank Auerbach, by Robert Hughes, 1992
Notes
*It’s what Celia, I read, says to Rosalind, in Act 3, Scene 2 of As You Like It, with a rather good bit left out: “, and after that out of all whooping!”
**Here’s my favourite of my father’s works. He’s never told me a title, but it is of a pulpit in an old Protestant church in Marseille, where he taught drawing and I took clay modelling lessons, I think, with the sculptor Jean Muhlethaler:
***The Johannesburg Art Foundation was founded by a Scottish-South African painter called Bill Ainslie, who worked with artists including Dumile Feni and David Koloane, and his wife Fieke, located at 6 Eastwold Way, Saxonwold, a large house with a tenniscourt where people parked their cars. Ainslie had people like David Goldblatt come to teach and Helen Sebidi and Kentridge come to learn.
**** “through chartered streets and chartered Thames I flow marks of weakness in every face…on the…marks of weakness, marks of woe…” Auerbach was casting about to remember the first paragraph of Blake’s poem, London: “I wander thro' each charter'd street, / Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” Not too shabby for a ninety-something memory.