Frank Auerbach Notes
Chronology
1931: Born in Berlin
1939: Jewish parents sent him to England to escape Nazis persecution. He
never saw them again.
1947: Adopted British Nationality
1948-52: Attended St Martins School of Art
1952-55: Studied at Royal College of Art and had lessons from David Bomberg
who encouraged him to take inspiration from Paul Cezanne.
1954: Acquired Gustav Metzger’s former studio in Camden, London.
1956: First solo exhibition at Beaux Art Gallery. Julia Yardley Mills began to
model for his portraits.
1960: Began studies of great works of art including Rembrandt’s Deposition and
Titian’s Tarquin and Lucrettia.
1978: First retrospective exhibition by the Arts Council of England for the
Hayward Gallery, London.
1986: Exhibited at the British Pavilion at the 17th Venice Biennale. He was
awarded the Golden Lion Prize.
1995: Working after the Masters exhibition opens at the National Gallery
displaying Auerbach’s drawings made from paintings in the Gallery’s collection
2001: Royal Academy marked his 71st Birthday with a Retrospective exhibition
of his work.
Biographical
Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin. His Jewish parents sent him to boarding
school in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany at the age of eight. He
tragically never saw his parent again who died in concentration camps. This could
be said to be an underlying dark emotion depicted in his paintings; Auerbach’s
sense of loss and anger about war.
He was a talented young man. In 1939 he was sent to school Faversham in
England for training in an exchange program.
In 1947, Frank Auerbach became a British citizen. He started looking for work
in the expressive arts. His first steps in the adult world was performing.
Onstage Auerbach was successful, but his achievements didn’t bring him enough
satisfaction compared with his fine art work. He then saw his future in painting.
He painted in the imagination of untold paintings, relying only on his intuition and
instinct.
After becoming an English citizen in 1947, he studied at St. Martin's School of
Art (1948-52) and the Royal College of Art (1952-5). He is well-known British
avant-garde artists. He was a diligent student, teachers periodically pleasing
their complex and serious work.
Influences
He went to St. Martin's School of Art where he met fellow artists David
Bomberg and Leon Kossoff and developed longstanding friendships with them.
Both Bomberg and Kossoff would contribute quite an impact on Auerbach in the
years to come. After St. Martin's Auerbach studied at the Royal College of Art
from 1952 to 1955. He had his first solo show in 1956, and continued to gain
critical acclaim from then on. During his studies, he was inspired by Paul
Cezanne’s (famous French artist) expressive style. Auerbach’s early works
demonstrate several techniques inspired by this brilliant artist.
Auerbach also took evening art classes with David Bomberg, who became a
strong inspirational source for the student's emerging figurative painting style,
largely consisting of thick, heavily applied impasto. Auerbach has enjoyed a
great deal of success in the modern art arena. As one of Britain's leading
contemporary artists, Auerbach is often considered a member of a group of
"highly individual figurative painters known as the School of London.
Frank Auerbach initially established his reputation in London in the 1950s when
he was widely acknowledged as one of the most powerful young figurative
painters.
He is often associated with the School of London, a circle of figurative painters
that includes Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and
R.B.Kitaj.
Style
Through the successive post-war movements of Abstract Expressionism, Pop
Art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, these artists continued to paint from their
own experience" (Higgins 128). His expressive abstracted portraits featured in
a major Arts Council exhibition in 1978, and he participated in the 1986 Venice
Biennale as a representative of Britain. Even in the light of such public acclaim,
he received negative critical commentary by those who found his paintings
"muddy and overworked".
Auerbach works in an impasto painting technique, in which paint is built up
heavily on the canvas to render the image. Characterized by thick brush
strokes, impasto is a very expressionistic and emotional style. In Auerbach's
work, the paint is at times so thick and layered that the painting itself is
comparable to a sculptural relief. Art critic David Sylvester, who praised
Auerbach's work early on, comments that "in spite of the heaped-up paint,
these are painterly images, not sculptural ones... their physical structure is
virtually the better sense of the impression these paintings leave upon their
viewer.”
Close up, Auerbach’s paintings appear almost entirely abstract, with thick
deposits of paint protruding from the surface. However, as one steps back,
ghostly portrait appears, with a certain sense of accuracy and vitality
unmatched in others’ work.
His portraits also give the impression of restriction of movement - a lack of
freedom for the subjects within his pieces.
Working Methods
It is important to consider Auerbach’s paintings in real life, compared with when
you see his work in books or photos, it looks flat. However, seeing the actual
pieces, can make you realise that they are very much 3D, with layer upon layer
of paint. Auerbach builds and manipulates such a thick quantity of paint on the
canvas; it seems as though it were a modelling material. It is very hard to
believe, looking at them, that it is just paint, not reinforced underneath with
something else.
After he had painted something, he would put it on top of a filing cabinet for
however long it took to try. This was usually several months before such a layer
of paint would dry solidly. He also scrapes and works into the paint on the
surface of the board or canvas.
The colours in Auerbach’s earlier work seemed to be of uniform and similar
colours, but it was when he was a student, it was less expensive to buy the
unpopular colours.
Some of his most dramatic work is in greyscale (black and white) which creates
strong emotions. He is extremely dynamic in the way he applies his media, the
brush strokes clearly visible in his paintings and mark making in his drawing, in
all directions. An example of this is Auerbach’s ‘Head of Julia’ drawn in 1960.
This piece is a portrait of a woman. He used charcoal to create the piece, select
areas of the canvas pitch black, and other areas stark white. It has a messy,
but collective feeling in the piece, allowing al the different directions to cross
and merge. There are areas of texture in the piece that look rough and
weathered because of how Auerbach has manipulated his media.
Auerbach’s method in creating portrait studies involves noticing their key lines
and shapes that make up a face, boldly emphasising them and giving his subject
a sense of form and structure.
Auerbach makes tone no longer a necessity to the depth or forms of his work.
He rather invites it to emphasise what he has already achieved on his own. His
use of line is important for defining the features like the jaw or the side of the
face.
The thick lines seem to pin the features within the painting down onto the
canvas. Without them, the features in his work would seem as though they were
floating.
The colours he uses within the piece suggest the struggle and the forced
restraint. In his handling of paint, Auerbach is one of the most inventive
painters at work today and in his large-scale drawings he has invented an
entirely new way of drawing and of reformulating the subject before him.
Auerbach typically did many sketches and paintings before arriving at a finished
product. In his drawings he would erase, rework, and draw over his subjects,
using layers of paper that had a similar sculptural effect.
Famously, Auerbach is seen as an obsessive recluse;"a beast in a burrow who
does not wish to be invaded”. He works from 7am to 9pm 364 days a year,
producing 200 sketches for one painting. This reflects the tension and his time
consuming method of painting, reworking each drawing and painting.
Subject Matter / Mood
His subjects are the people and places that he knows intimately.
His three main subjects are his wife Julia; professional model, Juliet Yardley
Mills (usually referred to as "J. Y. M." in titles) and his lover, Stella West. Each
picture often requires many sittings from life, in his studio.
Auerbach said once that painting himself was like chasing his own shadow and he
preferred drawing his friends.
"One doesn't ever really know what one looks like," he added. "One never sees
oneself in action and if you look in the mirror you stay the same age in your own
eyes until you are 80."
Each painting conveys a detectable fear that is compressed well into the piece.
As though the painting itself is smothering the subjects, so no one can see their
true emotions. But they bleed through and over the lines in waves of distressed
colour and abominations of shape and form.
Achievements
Many of her portraits were awarded the prestigious art awards.
Auerbach, one of the world's most collected living artists, spends 364 days a
year in his Camden studio, communicating with the outside only through his
models. One of Britain's leading post-war painters, ranked alongside Francis
Bacon and the equally shy Lucian Freud, he recently called himself "a beast in a
burrow who does not wish to be invaded".
In 1973, Frank Auerbach made his debut with his collection in Milan. And in
1986 the world community recognized his art, calling the creator of genius
today.
The first major retrospective of Auerbach's work was presented in 1978 by the Arts
Council of Great Britain for the Hayward Gallery, London, and then toured to the
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. Other major shows have included "Frank Auerbach:
Paintings and Drawings 1977-85" at the British Pavilion at the XLII Venice Biennale
(1986), where he shared the Golden Lion prize with Sigmar Polke; "Frank Auerbach at
the National Gallery: Working after the Masters" (1995), at the National Gallery,
London, presented drawings made over a thirty-year period from paintings in the
National Gallery's collection; a major retrospective at the London's Royal Academy in
2001. Many of his works are in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery.