FRANK AUERBACH’S CHARCOAL HEADS

surpassing conflict and contradictions in time

self portrait, 1958 by Frank Auerbach

REFLECTION
In the last two weeks
I’ve written about two of the thoughts which lead from Democracy to Kindness.
Based on responses it seems to me that readers were not particularly interested.
For me this is distressing in that one of the reasons I write, week-by-week,
is that I have had the luck to be able to read across the last decade
a substantial amount of books, essays and articles
about the politics, economics, cultural and social issues
which dominate our lives.
Because the reality of these things is befogged by the media’s smoke and mirrors,
it is difficult to see how we are exploited by the dominant neoliberal ideology
that runs every moment of our lives.
For me, this privilege of learning needs to be shared.

A TREAT
As a relief from those previous two essays
I’m going to tell you about an extraordinary exhibition.
I visited the Courtauld Gallery in Sommerset House last week to see an exhibition
that had been highly recommended to me.
It consists of a small group of large charcoal portraits and several painted portraits
by the British painter, Frank Auerbach.

The exhibition was small but totally enveloping and mesmerizing.
After having walked around the exhibition
I sat on a bench and stared at the paintings one by one,
 asking myself, ‘what am I seeing that is so compelling’?
How has Auerbach seduced me into this trance?
Why have I found it difficult to look away?

Each image had been worked and reworked,

drawn, smudged, erased and redrawn.
In some cases the paper had ripped,
perhaps as a result of the erasing and reworking,
and in some cases perhaps Auerbach had cut and pasted.

I realised that I was seeing multiple realities
in the multitude layers of studies overlaying each other.
They embody the complexity of his sitter’s
layers of differing truths and being.

portrait of Gerda Boehm, 1961 by Frank Auerbach

There is nothing romantic in these portraits.
They are tough and visually often harsh,
but there is immense tenderness
even in the shadows of the erasure smudges, rips and layered repairs.
Auerbach was revealing the rich complexity of human nature.
He drew and painted the same few people
over and over across more than a decade beginning in the early 1950’s.

In their tenderness but insistence to reveal truthful conditions or states of being
his explorations surpassed conflicts and contradictions in time
which dissolved as I continue to investigate the drawings.
It was as though investigating, layer by layer,  an archaeological site.

I began to recognise the love Auerbach had for each sitter.
Other painters, from the Renaissance on have honoured,
complimented, desired, pleased their sitters,
but I think it is rare that the viewer sees deep caring and love
as in these images.
It is rare, special and part of the engagement with the work. 

16^th c  portrait of A YOUNG GIRL by Petrus Christus   A sitter perhaps honoured and to be pleased, but surely not loved by the artist.

I purchased the book of the exhibition
and have looked again and again at these powerful images.
Purposely though I have not read the texts yet as I wanted to write with fresh eyes,
with my photographer’s eyes
which have been commissioned to make many portraits,
and having my own history of developing an approach to portraiture.

Sitting on the bench, looking at the images,
I began to have memories of Da Vinci’s drawings of children, adults,
and of fine looking or distorted humans.

Da Vinci’s Drawing of Two Men

Glancing back at Auerbach’s images it was as if seeing Da Vinci on steroids.
Many of Da Vinci’s drawing studies are more complete,
more finished and reveal a regard for different human types,
as in the study below.

Da Vinci’s Study for the Composition of St Anne.  I see this as one of the most beautiful drawings of western art with the use of chiaroscuro, the soft transitions from feature to feature with tone rather than lines and the lifefullness of the characters including the motherly indulgence of St Anne, the mother, for her young daughter Mary’s new role.

Whilst being compelling and in many cases beautiful,
they also ring of social and biological inquiry:
Da Vinci was exploring what it was that created individuals,
in so doing, escaping from the narrow moral restrictions of the church
with its insistence that human beings were neither individual
nor of a specific personal and private character
but only reflections of their God.

In art, as opposed to reportage, content is abstracted,
estranged and mediated in the name of deeper realities.
As aesthetic form becomes content
it creates a more profound truth
– one which is antithetical to superficial description standing in for truth
(as so often photographic portraits are)
and one which is threatening to established truths.

I suspect that Auerbach asked himself over and over,
‘what is it that troubles the roots of my being
and how, at those roots, the concepts of the world and myself
have been manipulated and indeed stunted by conventions’
which, in his modest way, he rebelled against.

If Auerbach had been affected by Da Vinci’s portraits,
I suggest he was affected by Caravaggio
who also was influenced by Da Vinci.
There are three key features in Caravaggio’s work that are in Auerbach’s.

•The first is painting the subject as if illuminated by single source lighting,
the dramatic moulding light and shadow on each head
which gives roundness, solidity and pulls the subject out of the gloom.

•The second is that the shadows, as in Caravaggio’s paintings,
are filled with portent
as though the darkness has as much a claim on the sitter as the light.

•The third is that he used humble street people as his subjects
rather than the rich nobs who were used to appearing in paintings for alter pieces or in the church’s stained glass windows.

Caravaggio’s The Sacrifice of Isaac with its single source lighting, deep shadows and with humble sitters posing.

Art produces a world imagined
as it cries out to tell the unseen truths of life and the world,
then perhaps the transformation of day-by-day reality
via artful creation
invents a world which is more real
than the average person’s clouded take of reality.

The raw material of art is found in the events of conscious and unconscious being,
which seem to be surfacing through struggle
in the layers of these charcoal portraits.
Conditions and events constitute everyday struggles,
which also continually form who we become.
To me, this is one of the powerful currents in Auerbach’s work;
the sense of continual transformation in the portraits
as well as his continual search for the actual truth.

As a photographer I have long been conscious
that I am fixing a fragment of the sitter’s personality at 1/250^th of a second.
I have always practiced two things while making portraits:

•the first is setting a quiet, still and serious mood for myself and the sitter;

•the second is coaxing decisive moments
in which the thoughts and feelings of the sitter
transform from one moment to another.

Portrait of Mother and Child, Srebrenica, Bosnia by Robert Golden

One can see it in the eyes as though there is a movie going on behind them.
But, as I learned from the work
of the famous American photographer, Alfred Stieglitz,
a series across years is perhaps a more balanced and beautiful way to picture someone’s complex life.

Portrait of Danilo during a Complete Freedom of Truth pan European event in Srebrenica, Bosnia by Robert Golden

Auerbach found a way in a single image.

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NOTES
Auerbach was a painter of his time
who broke many rules to create something new and exceptionally humane
after the tragedy of World WAR II in which his Jewish parents were murdered
in one of the concentrations camps.
He was able to rise above the pressures to conform
to the new in vogue abstract expressionism, although to be informed by it.

To see a contemporary painter of the same stature go here:
Ricky Romain’s work should be constantly on display in galleries
and sought after by museums.

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•I highly recommend Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads exhibition
at the Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, London until 27 May 2024.