It was painted nearly 70 years ago, but the features — lofty brow, sensual lips, direct scrutinising gaze, expression at once assertive, sympathetic and inward, with emotion held back — in Frank Auerbach’s great charcoal “Self-portrait” (1958) are immediately recognisable in the inquisitive, furrowed face which appears at the door to welcome me to the studio in Mornington Crescent, north London, on a sunny January morning in 2024.
The picture is a highlight among many large, sombrely beautiful and evocative 1950s-60s portraits in the Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads. In the painting, the face emerges from darkness, pressing towards the light — austere, monumental, also intimate, provisional. Frenzied charcoal lines and scratches puncture the paper, torn and roughly stitched, scrambling the likeness, suggesting vulnerability within vitality. It strikes me that Auerbach, 92, still energetic and strongly focused, though becoming physically frail, is growing old in parallel to this singular “Self-portrait” caught between sharp, deliberate realisation and chance wear and tear.
“I don’t want to spoil the party, but I’d be grateful if you didn’t describe the studio,” he begins as he ushers me into the space where he has worked since 1954. “It’s quite private.”
This is an understatement. Auerbach has followed a hermit-like existence here: “I’ve worked every day of my life, seven days a week, it’s always taken me a long time to do something. I never liked holidays, everything means more at home.” His landscapes are drawn from the dense city vistas immediately to hand, portraits from a few faithful sitters.
Art historians Catherine Lampert, 77, and William Feaver, 81, come weekly. “It’s human contact now, as well. I spend all my time totally alone.”
Until middle age, Auerbach was so poor he worried about being able to afford paint. Now his work fetches seven-figure sums. Last year “Mornington Crescent” (1969), changed hands for £5.6mn. Early portraits such as “Head of Leon Kossoff”, (1954, £2.6mm in 2016), are also extremely coveted.
To paint, Auerbach believes, is “to pin down something and take it out of time”. The “Charcoal Heads”, I say, convey exceptional presence. “I can’t pretend they don’t represent a very intense experience — one is young and formed by what happens in youth,” he replies.
“During the years when I did those drawings, I felt I was working at the very edge of my powers, I couldn’t have done more.”
Now, “getting a likeness goes slightly as one gets older, it’s enfeebled powers . . . I hope I’m wrong.” Working from life allows “the unexpected, deviating from the norm”. In the 1950s, he used charcoal for economy, and because “I felt I’d been exposed, that in public I’d put on a costume of thick paint and earthy colours, I was imitating myself”. Working in charcoal instead, “I had the courage to wipe things out, I would draw and next time rub it out, so gradually I freed myself from the thick paint.”
The “Heads”, declaring drawing as painting, took years and are hard-won, fervid responses to each sitter. Packed lines following the contours of head and jaw in “Leon Kossoff” imply his fellow painter’s absorption, concentration. “Head of Julia II”, downward-glancing, is radiant, lovely, self-effacement achieved through inner strength. Julia Wolstenholme married Auerbach in 1958; they had a son, soon separated, reuniting in 1976. As his model, “Julia was extraordinarily committed, it’s her work as much as mine.” She sat for him, “even when she was confused and it was difficult for her to climb the few steps”; she is now in a nursing home.
Most urgently, agitatedly depicted is Stella West (“Head of E.O.W”), who modelled for Auerbach three nights a week in her Earl’s Court basement. “It was a real lively relationship with splits and rows and dramas, not many unacted desires. I thought Stella might refuse to sit. I knelt on the floor and she sat in a chair by the fire, charcoal was everywhere. After 10 years she said she was fed up with having charcoal all over the bed.”
“Frank proved our existence by rendering us as individuals,” says Auerbach’s life-long friend, film director Michael Roemer — they met as German-Jewish refugees at school in England in 1939 (Auerbach’s parents died in Auschwitz). Auerbach himself says: “I would like my work to stand for individual experience. There is no grander entity than the individual human being.”
He is, he adds, “preoccupied with a sort of anti-Trumpism. People want to demystify — but art begins with the mystery. These things are so strange, the idea of the muse now seems a fanciful one but it’s persisted for 2,000 years. It’s got very little to do with what people want, it takes them over. Think of the great English poets, the illiterate agricultural worker John Clare, the hunchback ostracised Catholic Alexander Pope, the office worker who wrote down the expense of every cup of coffee — that’s T S Eliot: it’s almost as if the muse had a sense of humour. The muse picks certain people, I feel it in myself, the muse looked out for me, there were moments when life was dicey.”
The desire for a life in art came “very very very very early”, in childhood. “There’s the real world, which occupies 90 per cent of people at art school, then there’s people for whom art is the first thing. I had marvellous friends — Leon, Lucian [Freud], Mike Andrews — full of courage, independence, unself-protection. We didn’t care about money — we were vain enough to think we were painting to make something good.”
An early collector was an insurance salesman who as a soldier “found himself in Venice in a room of Titian’s paintings, he felt the room was on fire. From then, his life, on very modest means, was about looking at and collecting paintings. Art’s not for everyone, but it can be for anyone. It’s not elitist — some people are open to it, others aren’t.”
While rejecting biographical clichés — he scorns WG Sebald’s The Emigrants, where a painter called Aurach erases his work “because of the Holocaust. It’s philistine: I erase to make a better image!” — his conviction of art’s personal, emotional dimension is unwavering. “When ‘Guernica’ was first shown, people said it was narcissistic, Anthony Blunt said it’s no good because it’s self-referential. But Picasso didn’t address the public, it was about him and Dora Maar, his sense of violence in himself, his abhorrence of violence. It’s because it’s so private that it’s the most effective painting about war ever made.”
Art is “a human construct, a standard set. In the studio, alone, brush in hand, I’m never bored, surrounded by memories of the great Masters, as if they were there. Rembrandt is in all of them. There’s no progress in art, nothing as marvellous as Giotto, he’s painting empathy, one’s moved by everything, it’s reimagined internally. It all happens now. It’s a marathon, they’re all still running. The older I get, the more acutely I am aware of the Old Masters — until the thing takes off and then I’m not aware what I’m doing any longer.
“Everything I finish has been a surprise, not what I intended or hoped for. It’s when you’ve run out of conscious things, something takes it over, and one has done something that can stand up for itself.”
February 9-May 27, courtauld.ac.uk
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