Frank Auerbach in his own words
E.O.W. on Her Blue Eiderdown II 1965, by Frank Auerbach.
Frank Auerbach, now 81, is recognised as one of the outstanding painters of his generation. His early reputation has been linked to his paintings of building sites of the bomb-damaged city, although he remembers that, as a young painter, he found the London of the post-war years was “a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags, full of drama”.
In the mid-Sixties he also began to work with another focus and scale. Eighteen of his first paintings of people can be seen in a new exhibition; they show that drama becoming more intimate, tangible and sensual, the paint surprisingly colourful and luscious. “Like time travel these things unlock memories for me,” Auerbach told me. “It takes me back to a time 45-50 years ago. It does what painting is supposed to do – drag the past into the present and reanimate it.”
His principle subject for 20 years was E.O.W. (Estella Olive West). They met while in the same play at the Unity Theatre in 1948; Stella was a widow with three children, he was 17, she 32. Three evenings a week, she posed for him in her house. Although he now paints other people, and other scenes, Auerbach still abides by an unvarying, rigorous routine, continuing to work from a handful of familiar models and to find subjects in the area around his studio in Mornington Crescent (three 2012 paintings titled Next Door record his wife, Julia, standing in front of a large white gate).
Early on it became this artist’s habit to live as much as possible with a brush in his hand, to work quickly and scrape off failed attempts before beginning again. He discovered that “the only way which I could, with luck, make a tiny contribution to art was to just simply work as hard and as much as I possibly could. I was always aware that I was very, very slow and that if a painting came together, or seemed to me to be satisfactory and not in any sense manufactured, it would always have happened unexpectedly, at any time, without me being able to foresee when.” Catherine Lampert
E.O.W. on Her Blue Eiderdown II 1965
“Stella was marvellous. She sat three times a week, she brought up three children, she worked as a social worker all day and got quite tired in the evenings, so lying on the bed and very often falling asleep was a good situation both for her and for me.
“I worked in Stella’s bedroom then because the children were growing up and I didn’t have quite the freedom to muck up the rest of the house in those days. I would have lots of paint around me, with the painting resting on a very, very painty chair. Stella would lie on the blue eiderdown thrown across her bed. And I have to say the painting brings the whole situation back to me very vividly indeed. These conditions, which I think most artists would complain about, I never found irksome, working in a crowded small room, to be on my knees and not able to get too far away from the painting, because finally, I think, all that thing of unity is in one’s head as much as it is found by looking.”
Studio with Figure on a Bed II 1966
“This is actually quite ambitious. sometimes one does the same thing three or four times then reacts against it. I became tired of the fact that the paintings tended to be of one object, and here I tried to make a sort of inventory of that corner of the studio, obviously interpreted and changed.
“It was a record of the paintings on the wall and of the picture rail and of the Masonite put on the wall to stop it absorbing the damp. There were two works by Leon Kossoff, a print of St Paul’s and a gouache of a hospital scene, and I think I had hung some pseudo-etchings by Rembrandt, a little one of a dark nude. It looks a success to me. It also works as a record of the place. I hope that the proportions and intervals are not as banal as they would be if I had simply done something arbitrary. The point of reality is that it always contradicts one’s preconceptions.”
J.Y.M. in the Studio II 1964
“J.Y.M. was a professional model I met while teaching at Sidcup College of Art, and suddenly she said: 'If you’d ever like me to pose for you privately, I will.’ She posed twice a week for many years, and was able to sit for an infinite time, sometimes five hours without a break.
“J.Y.M.’s willingness to pose, I think, gave me a greater variety of possibilities so that I’d paint heads, and figures on a bed, and seated figures. The studio was a very bare box, 85 per cent of the room was taken up by painting paraphernalia, 15 per cent by living conveniences, so many of the paintings have in the foreground the paraffin stove which was the only way of heating that damp and crumbling space and the chair which has served me for many years, although when it finally gave up the ghost was replicated by an identical one.
“She looked a very harmonious, pale figure. There was something about the way she posed that was curiously Victorian, like those women in 19th-century French photographs, but I wouldn’t have been influenced by that when I was painting, and of course, she’s not playing a part and it’s not made up, so what one is painting is one’s reaction to this human animal.”
E.O.W. 1972
“A tiny painting done fairly late in my relationship with Stella, it is like the others, done in the bedroom and they all took ages. I was doing a number of paintings in just blue, white and black; again it’s always a reaction, it is not planned, though in the sense of a daydream, perhaps I wanted a more austere language.
“I’m not self-analytical, however, looking at the paintings now, it seems to me, that one could say, although if I were a curator or art historian I wouldn’t have the cheek, 'a more dynamic way of drawing was searched for by Mr Auerbach and therefore he used a more restricted palette so he could concentrate on that’. And, the black is a way of drawing.”
“Stella was marvellous. She sat three times a week, she brought up three children, she worked as a social worker all day and got quite tired in the evenings, so lying on the bed and very often falling asleep was a good situation both for her and for me.
“I worked in Stella’s bedroom then because the children were growing up and I didn’t have quite the freedom to muck up the rest of the house in those days. I would have lots of paint around me, with the painting resting on a very, very painty chair. Stella would lie on the blue eiderdown thrown across her bed. And I have to say the painting brings the whole situation back to me very vividly indeed. These conditions, which I think most artists would complain about, I never found irksome, working in a crowded small room, to be on my knees and not able to get too far away from the painting, because finally, I think, all that thing of unity is in one’s head as much as it is found by looking.”
Studio with Figure on a Bed II 1966
“This is actually quite ambitious. sometimes one does the same thing three or four times then reacts against it. I became tired of the fact that the paintings tended to be of one object, and here I tried to make a sort of inventory of that corner of the studio, obviously interpreted and changed.
“It was a record of the paintings on the wall and of the picture rail and of the Masonite put on the wall to stop it absorbing the damp. There were two works by Leon Kossoff, a print of St Paul’s and a gouache of a hospital scene, and I think I had hung some pseudo-etchings by Rembrandt, a little one of a dark nude. It looks a success to me. It also works as a record of the place. I hope that the proportions and intervals are not as banal as they would be if I had simply done something arbitrary. The point of reality is that it always contradicts one’s preconceptions.”
J.Y.M. in the Studio II 1964
“J.Y.M. was a professional model I met while teaching at Sidcup College of Art, and suddenly she said: 'If you’d ever like me to pose for you privately, I will.’ She posed twice a week for many years, and was able to sit for an infinite time, sometimes five hours without a break.
“J.Y.M.’s willingness to pose, I think, gave me a greater variety of possibilities so that I’d paint heads, and figures on a bed, and seated figures. The studio was a very bare box, 85 per cent of the room was taken up by painting paraphernalia, 15 per cent by living conveniences, so many of the paintings have in the foreground the paraffin stove which was the only way of heating that damp and crumbling space and the chair which has served me for many years, although when it finally gave up the ghost was replicated by an identical one.
“She looked a very harmonious, pale figure. There was something about the way she posed that was curiously Victorian, like those women in 19th-century French photographs, but I wouldn’t have been influenced by that when I was painting, and of course, she’s not playing a part and it’s not made up, so what one is painting is one’s reaction to this human animal.”
E.O.W. 1972
“A tiny painting done fairly late in my relationship with Stella, it is like the others, done in the bedroom and they all took ages. I was doing a number of paintings in just blue, white and black; again it’s always a reaction, it is not planned, though in the sense of a daydream, perhaps I wanted a more austere language.
“I’m not self-analytical, however, looking at the paintings now, it seems to me, that one could say, although if I were a curator or art historian I wouldn’t have the cheek, 'a more dynamic way of drawing was searched for by Mr Auerbach and therefore he used a more restricted palette so he could concentrate on that’. And, the black is a way of drawing.”
