Frank Auerbach at the Tate Britain

Frank Auerbach at the Tate Britain

Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin, Germany in 1931 to Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burckhardt.  He was transported to the UK in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme, a project which saved almost 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi persecution.  His parents died in a concentration camp in 1943.  He began his art education in London firstly at St Martin’s School of Art from 1948-1952 and then the Royal School of Art from 1952-1955.  He studied under David Bomberg from 1947–1953 his most significant early influence.  Bomberg (1890-1957), like Auerbach, was an émigré, his family had arrived from Poland, settling initially in Birmingham.  Bomberg was one of the Whitechapel Boys, a group of Anglo-Jewish writers and artists who met in Whitechapel, at that time a notable Jewish community.  Other members of the group included war poet Isaac Rosenberg and Clara Birnberg.  Bomberg was also a notable war artist whose work was the subject of a Tate retrospective in 1988. 

Frank Auerbach is said to be one of the most notable of the post-WW2 painters, his work is often compared to that of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and Lucien Freud (1922-2011).

After leaving art school Auerbach occupied Bomberg’s flat in Mornington Crescent which provided typical subject matter for his paintings.  He also worked in London suburbs such as the building sites of Earls Court (which can be seen in his early work Building Site, Earls Court, Winter 1953), Primrose Hill and Hampstead where he painted expansive landscapes of previously peripheral areas bordering on the countryside surrounding London.  His earliest work includes self-portraits which emphasize Auerbach’s roots in figurative art.  Auerbach worked with a small set of models some of whom were his lovers and all of whom he tended to paint obsessively.  The earliest of these was Estelle Olive West known by her initials E.O.W. in the paintings, the monograph thus conferring a certain anonymity and mystery.  Auerbach’s portrait of her Head of EOW II 1961 offers an example of his impasto technique combined with a restricted palette which favours pink, yellow and red pigments.  Another sitter was professional model Juliet Yardley Mills known as J.Y.M. who Auerbach painted for more than 30 years and Auerbach’s wife Julia who clearly did not have a monograph conferred upon her.  Auerbach’s work J.Y.M. Seated in the Studio VI 1968 is clearly one of his most experimental and extreme works determined by irrational and literal factors.  It may be that some of Auerbach’s models preferred to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.

The first six rooms are arranged chronologically from the 1950s onwards except for the last room which represents the choices of the curator Catherine Lampert.  Auerbach’s early paintings are bound up with his impasto technique, with dark hued abstracts, artworks about building sites and the areas of north London that he loved and the nudes and portraits that were his singular preoccupations.  These works usually make sense from a single viewpoint, otherwise they seem distorted but always in a uniquely creative sense.  The paint is plastered on possibly one hundred or two hundred times until the ultimate image begins to coalesce.

Auerbach’s early impasto technique of the 1950s and 1960s gradually gives way to larger post-expressionist or abstract expressionist paintings mainly utilising oil on canvas where the artist often draws with his paintbrush and preparation gives way to the release of spontaneity and expressivity.  Other typical materials include charcoal, black oil pastel and crayon on paper for the artist’s preparatory work.  Auerbach seems to continue the Expressionist tradition typified in the work of the artists of the Die Brücke (1905) movement such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and Emil Nolde (1867-1956).  The works of these artists emphasized muted or starkly contrasting tones that are anti-naturalist, flattened or zero perspective and distortion of planes and surfaces to exemplify subjective, altered states.  The movement also may have been a response to positivism which declared that reality is formulated through empirical evidence rather than subjective states and feelings.  Its precursors, such as Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and August Strindberg (1849-1912), came from literary or philosophical disciplines which suggests the movements origins as a theoretical objection to the main currents of Victorian society which were optimistic about the idea of progress, the triumph of Western values and the positive effect of science.  Although Auerbach’s work clearly points towards the Expressionist tradition he probably never considered himself to be an Expressionist but his work is often regarded as a further development of the movement.  Auerbach is clearly a figurative artist being influenced by Expressionism.  However, most of Auerbach’s mid-period work seems to be strongly Expressionist in flavour.  These paintings constitute large canvases, landscapes of the suburbs that Auerbach was familiar with.  The impasto of the earlier works has declined.  A good example of these works is Mornington Crescent – Early Morning 1991.  In this painting the perspective is bound up with colours that accentuate the visionary moment created out of the natural, spontaneous joyfulness of dawn as we have it here with its pink, red and pale yellow tones.

For Auerbach the term ‘Expression’ is central to the making of art and without it he declares that painting is inert, studio bound rather than ‘a page torn from the book of life’ (Auerbach greatly admired this quote from Walter Sickert (1860-1942), an artist émigré, born in Munich, Germany associated with Whitechapel and Camden Town.  Indeed, Sickert’s studio was off the Holloway Road which is situated between Whitechapel and Highgate.  The notion of a torn page seems also to allude obliquely to Patricia Cornwell’s belief that Sickert was the real-life Jack the Ripper.).  Auerbach seems to detest artists who deliberately attempt to emotionally manipulate their audience with feelings that their artworks are meant to have.  For Auerbach intensity, expressivity and truth are all bound up together as opposed to inauthentic, abstracted material that sits outside the artistic process.

The exhibition had a small amount of explanatory text and no audio guide, either online or on a headset, so there is a clear decree to go and find out about the paintings rather than depending on texts or the opinions of authorities.  It is clear that we are being allowed to make up own mind about the painting but the overall impression was of a dearth of comment.  Whether this is a successful strategy or not is open to question although the atmosphere was like a gallery opening rather than a key retrospective.

Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, February 2016