Painting every day, painting the everyday
Seven things I learned about Frank Auerbach (1931-2024)
“One’s trying to get some work done before one dies.”
Frank Auerbach, 1998
I.
Although I often pass Güntzelstraße 49 in Berlin Wilmersdorf on my daily routes, I only learned recently that the childhood home of the painter Frank Auerbach is located there. Auerbach – probably the most important figurative painter in Great Britain in the 20th century alongside Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, cousin of the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and (against his will) the model for the painter character in W.G. Sebald's book "The Emigrants" – left his parents' home in 1939 as a seven-year-old because his parents sent him to England for protection from the Nazis. Auerbach never saw them again. They were murdered in Auschwitz.
II.
I learned about Auerbach’s and his family’s fate at the Michael Werner Gallery in Berlin. This Spring, you could see Auerbach’s first show since his passing last year, spread across two floors on Hardenbergstraße. It was also the first-ever Auerbach exhibition in his hometown.
The main building of the University of the Arts, where I'm a professor, is right near the gallery. I wanted to squeeze in a look at the exhibition between appointments. After a few minutes, it became clear to me that I would have to throw all my day's plans overboard and spend hours in the gallery rooms. Auerbach's painting had captivated me.
III.
One of my favorite records as a teenager was the double album "Oil on Canvas" by the English synth-pop band Japan, released in 1983. I recall looking up the expression "oil on canvas" in a now old-fashioned-looking English-German dictionary. The album cover, featuring a distinctive dark green frame, showcased a portrait: Head of JYM II, 1980, by Frank Auerbach. So it was a painting by Frank Auerbach that enriched my English vocabulary with the phrase "oil on canvas." In retrospect, this anecdote makes perfect sense, as I can hardly imagine any painter who embodied the essence of painting more than Frank Auerbach. Crafting an obituary for him, the artist Jutta Koether wrote, "would be a bit like writing an obituary for painting itself."
IV.
Likewise, it seems „right“ (one of the painter's favorite words) to me that I did not encounter Frank Auerbach in a museum, but in my everyday life as a teenager, on an LP cover, because Auerbach was a painter of the everyday on several levels: his daily routine, his subjects, and his approach to painting:
„The life he created for himself in Britain seemed to be one of regularity and quiet diligence – what might be called ‘slow’. Governed by routine and an obsessive commitment to his work (...), he tended to see the same sitters at regular weekly intervals, rising early to get the papers when the newsagent opened at 6:30am, spending long hours in his studio,“ Emily Dinsdale reports.
Auerbach worked, as I gather from the catalog of the Berlin exhibition, from Monday to Sunday, for well over half a century, and took only one day off per year. Then he went to Brighton Beach, took a walk, and had a good meal. The Economist characterizes Auerbach's North London world of motifs as follows:
„Its radius was perhaps a mile and a half, but it contained all the things he most liked painting, over and over again.“
He drew his motives from his immediate surroundings: his wife Julia, his son Jake, the streets of Camden Town, and the studio in Mornington Crescent where he worked from 1954 until his death last year. The crucial point of Auerbach's "everydayness“, however, is neither his obsessive work routine nor his choice of mundane subjects, but his painting technique–a practice of repetition, revision, iteration, and circling back around.
„Characteristic of Auerbach’s early work,“ Invar-Torre Hollaus observes, „is a thick, impasto, multilayered paint application (...) The surface of the motifs is built up and relief-like, evoking a visually and physically dynamic tactile texture (...) In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he decisively changed his technique. Instead of successively adding countless layers of paint, he started scraping off the material after each session, beginning anew on those remnants in the next. What remained in this process is a palimpsest of traces of color and of the composition (...) His concentrated, slow, and painstaking way of working meant he took months, sometimes years, to complete a picture.“
95% of his paint, Auerbach once estimated, didn’t end up on the canvas but on the floor of his studio.
V.
Fascinated by the expansive application of color in the early works, it took me a while to understand that Auerbach's art can only be grasped through a reception movement that alternates between closeness and distance. The up to five kilograms of paint on a single canvas, which took months to dry, made me assume that Auerbach was primarily concerned with a sculptural gesture, the material protruding into the world. But Auerbach's paintings, especially the middle and later ones, only really hit you when you step back. Then, contours emerge from the seemingly messy, almost smeared application of color, shapes become distinct, recognizable entities appear. It becomes clear: these images have been wrested from a disturbance; they are an attempt to banish the unrest of existence through recurrence, to find form through routine, just barely. Auerbach on Turner:
„One of the things I’ve noticed (...) is how unsmooth the surface is; how very much the working is still in the painting, so that as one looks at it more and more, one almost feels the breath of the artist as he‘s wrestling with the picture and, of course, the extraordinary sense of elation when it all comes together.“
VI.
Unfortunately, using an image search engine hardly helps if you want to get impressions of Auerbach’s work. Additionally, as I now know, Japan's album cover fell short compared to the real experience. Even in the recent exhibition, a part remained unapproachable for the viewers because the paintings were presented framed behind reflective glass, and the gallery rooms were bathed in a peculiar, scattered light, as if trying to protect the pictures from a time that has become more glaring.
Auerbach's works contain a plea for the original, the elaborate journey to the object, long contemplation in front of the picture-as-a-thing. Digital images, unlike paintings and even analog photography, have lost every contiguity to the depicted world (the type of contact Roland Barthes noted in La chambre claire) and will never provide experiences like material painting can, not even remotely. The gesture captured in the brushstroke, the energy embedded in the paint connect the viewers almost tangibly with the artist's body, the reality of his subjects, and the dirt of his studio. Auerbach's paintings, in a very sober sense, reach their viewers, touch them quite literally, even when the surprisingly free application of color in his last self-portraits approaches a "shimmering translucency."
Auerbach’s art would never consider taking shortcuts. It’s an art that doesn't need ‚creative ideas‘ but works its way into the world, grinds its way to the truth. It is a lifelong physical effort, repeatedly exercised transformation of material.
VII.
“Perhaps for biographical reasons, I felt that was life slipping by and, however many glimpses of glory one got, the mere fact that time was devouring it and it was all slipping away made it terribly sad unless one did something to pin it down.”
The change of the seasons and the weather, the light of northern London, the movement of passersby on the street, and the people who posed for him week after week: capturing all of this without betraying its vibrancy and evanescence—that is the emphatically modern yet deeply human art of Frank Auerbach. His painting leaves a naturalistic representation behind, keeping what is depicted alive, but it doesn't disappear into impenetrable abstraction either.
Painting every day, painting the everyday. Any aesthetic of the ordinary must measure itself against Frank Auerbach's art.
What a fascinating story!