Obsessive natures
Peter Phillips
Call me obsessed if you like, but I feel a strong connection between the paintings of Frank Auerbach (currently on display at the Royal Academy) and the music of G.P. da Palestrina (some might put in J.S. Bach
here, but the parallels are stronger with Palestrina). It's worth mentioning because this connection is not common: the almost perfect idiom from the beginning which changes only by very gradual intensification, coupled to a lifestyle which is profoundly rooted in one place. I can think of very few other artists who have been content to work completely single-mindedly from the inside out as it were for 50 years, disallowing any apparent external influences to redirect them once they were set — and it makes these two awkward customers. To view them is an all-or-nothing experience. If one fails to understand the earliest work, one's problem can only deepen. Subsequent enlightenment is unlikely.
Their biographies are revealing. Auerbach has worked in the same studio in London's Camden Town since 1954. At that time he started to paint the streets and buildings which surrounded him: the Art Deco Carreras cigarette factory; Camden Palace; Primrose Hill; Park Village Fast; Mornington Crescent; the approach to his studio. For nearly 50 years Auerbach has visited and revisited these local scenes in different seasons, intensifying his view of them. The same persistence is true of his approach to portraiture — he has almost never undertaken portrait commissions but painted a few longstanding friends repeatedly, in one case for more than 40 years. In the exhibition a whole room is dedicated to portraits of his wife, Julia.
We are told that Auerbach lives an almost hermitic existence, painting 365 days in the year and rarely leaving his studio. If he was ever known to travel abroad it would tell us nothing about his souces of inspiration. Palestrina also famously made only one journey in his long life — from his native hilltop town outside Rome to Rome itself, to work for the Vatican in various of its foundations, not least the Sistine Chapel. He refused to go even to Florence. His equivalent of Camden Palace and the rest are the texts of the Catholic liturgy, some of which he returned to constantly throughout his life. He set the Mass Ordinary, for example. 107 times, which is probably an all-time record. Ironically there is not quite such good evidence that Palestrina was a hermit: he was thrown out of the Sistine Chapel choir for being married — so the rules were different in those days — and his second wife was a wealthy widow with a fur shop on one of Rome's fashionable streets, over which he is supposed to have written some of his most uplifting masterpieces.
But what is really unusual about these two is their creation of an idiom of composition right at the beginning of their careers, which was so well formed that it didn't need to be overhauled. The first room in the Auerbach exhibition contains early works. With the possible exception of the 1954 grisaille portrait of Leon Kossoff, all these paintings are clearly the work of the man who is represented, several rooms later, by work executed very recently: the same strength, the same authority, the same techniques of impasto and arresting geometric lines, rendered by the palette knife. All that has changed on the surface of this style is the lowering of the impasto and the maturing of the use of colour. In Palestrina's case the perfect style has become a byword for the whole period: he never seemed to falter, or be once young.
By comparison, the first rooms of the recent Bonnard, Van Gogh or Picasso exhibitions gave nothing of this sense of unilateral purpose. The music of Lassus. Byrd and Victoria went through phases and in a sense never came to rest on one stable method (Victoria's Requiem, perfect in itself, is still unique in his output). One can speculate that the perfect method of Auerbach and Palestrina in fact seems so only because they went through with it. They oblige us to rate it highly, or dismiss them utterly. But this obsessive quality in them sets us a particular aesthetic problem. For entertainment purposes we prefer variety. The seriousness of intent, the lack of humour, that is suggested by its absence can seem daunting and not quite human. Palestrina, by virtue of his reputation as a pedagogue, long ago forewent any claims to base humanity. But it is not that they are freaks: it is just that comprehending relentlessness is an effort we do not always want to have to make. It is too easy to say one is bored.
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