Researching Auerbach, the same themes are repeated: his émigré status of displaced jew, a holocaust victim in having his parents taken from him at the age of nine, his friendships with Leon Kossoff and Lucien Freud, his focus on his Camden Town studio (previously occupied by Kossoff) and the streets around his home, his process of removing the paint or charcoal marks made that day and starting over again the next morning, his choosing to paint people he knew well over many decades, his liking for 18th century art which he would view at the National Gallery, his heavy impasto; these elements are reiterated through every review of Auerbach one comes across on the net, most of them written after his major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2015.
From Six Etchings of Heads 1980-82
Given my own liking for etching, I was interested in some information on the Fitzwilliam Museum website on his process of printmaking; the Fitzwilliam Museum holds a complete set of Auerbach etchings. (“Frank Auerbach: Etchings And Drypoints 1954-2006 | The Fitzwilliam Museum” 2007) With his first two sets of portrait heads ( Six Etchings of Heads, 1980-82 and Seven Portraits, 1989-90) he would draw his sitter over a period of time, usually on tracing paper with graphite scribbled on the back so that the main lines could be transferred onto another sheet of paper. The final drawing however was usually drawn directly onto the plate. While one could consider this a fresh drawing straight from life, given his painstaking tracing process it also would have encapsulated the muscle memory from the previous drawings. Later on he changed this method of using preparatory drawings by working on a single drawing of his sitter over time. Once happy with the lines these were transferred carefully through the squaring up method onto an etching plate the same size. He would then develop the plate working directly over the top of his existing lines. As he used large plates he was able to place the plate onto an easel and work from it as on paper or canvas.
What the Fitzwilliam Museum description adds to the traditional representation of Auerbach as working feverishly, removing everything and starting over until somehow he was spent and the picture done, is that his process with printmaking is indicative of very considered reworkings of lines; it shows an investment in the lines which made him repeat them precisely through tracings, even if these would later be redacted. It gives a different picture of this artist who worked indefatigably over a career spanning 60 years, showing how considered his mark making was.
Continuing with focussing on his portraits, art historian Marcia Pointon queries this definition, “portraits”, in an article entitled: “Heads you win: Marcia Pointon on Frank Auerbach and the question of portraiture”. (Pointon 1993)
“There are three points at which we might invoke questions relevant to portraiture as a genre by way of establishing parameters for a discussion of Auerbach’s JYM series. The first is the question of format, the “head and shoulders” motif identified by Packer; the second is the question of a sequence or series and how it functions; the third is the question of the portrait as the site of an irresolvable struggle to reconcile permanent feature with arrested motion.”
She goes on to dissect these elements of portraiture as irrelevant in an appraisal of Auerbach’s heads, concluding with:
“Auerbach unites the portrait as depiction of object with the portrait as site of subjectivities. The evasiveness over identity and gender, the fragmentation and violence of facture and the obsessive realignments and repetitions, deflect the narratisation that those subjectivities (the artist’s, the sitter’s and the viewer’s) produce. ”
Reduced to working in my own space due to the pandemic and unable to visit galleries, my own knowledge of Auerbach in the flesh is derived from having seen some of his paintings several years ago. It is easy to talk about his background and process, although I would add that his printmaking techniques add an interesting insight. What is more complex is why his work has a visceral power to it that cannot be explained in words. He drew and painted what he knew, over time. Taken as a life’s work one might say his subject matter was the passage of time. He might be said to be a case in point for the sentence in the course notes that posits: “The power of a drawing comes not from faithful replication but from other parts of our thinking about the subject – knowledge/memory.”
“Auerbach has said how looking at the same things and people so obsessively is a kind of understanding of time, as things and people are in a continual state of flux.”(Vaizey 2015)
What is undeniable is that his work somehow encompasses the beauty experience. Standing in front of an Auerbach it fills you with something….awe? Something unknowable that you want to become part of. Perhaps it is this that makes all the reviews I found on Auerbach exhibitions somehow thin – although Marcia Pointon’s analysis provides in-depth insights into the nature and function of portraiture and Auerbach’s questioning of the genre. Discussions of subject matter and process however do not seem to reach into the heart of the how – not the knock-your-socks-off shock and desire you feel standing in front of one.
References
Pointon, Marcia. 1993. “Heads You Win: Marcia Pointon On Frank Auerbach And The Question Of Portraiture”. The Women’s Art Magazine, no. 50.
Vaizey, Marina. 2015. “Frank Auerbach, Tate Britain”. Theartsdesk.Com. https://theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/frank-auerbach-tate-britain.
“Frank Auerbach: Etchings And Drypoints 1954-2006 | The Fitzwilliam Museum”. 2007. Fitzmuseum.Cam.Ac.Uk. https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/calendar/whatson/frank-auerbach-etchings-and-drypoints-1954-2006.
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