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.