The new and the true
Martin Gaylord on the meaning behind the mysterious work of Frank Auerbach
The first impression you receive on walking into the stunning Frank Auerbach retrospective at the Royal Academy (until 12 December) is that here are marvellous paintings. The second is that in many cases they are hard to 'read' — meaning that it is not always clear at a glance, or even a long look, what they are pictures of. And this difficulty is a symptom not of Auerbach's failure, but of his success.
Let me explain. It is axiomatic for Auerbach that the true and the new are indivisible when it comes to visual images. 'If it is not new,' he explains, 'it can't be true, because it will look like a picture.' For Auerbach, the world is full of received images that have to be resisted, just as for some writers literature is an unceasing internal battle against cliché. And the truly new image, which is also a novel way of seeing some part of the world, is naturally hard. Hard to achieve for the artist and, initially, hard for the viewer to comprehend.
Auerbach's personal regime is a mixture of these two. He persists in a daily grind that may go on for months or even years (it seems mad, he has said, not to paint every day when you never know whether you are going to wake up the following morning). But this process finally ends in a galvanic burst, when — out of 'desperation' — he succeeds in capturing the image he has been stalking so long.
And what is that? When he set out on the quest half a century ago (he is now 70), he felt that 'there was an area of experience — the haptic, the tangible, what you feel when you touch somebody next to you in the dark — that hadn't perhaps been recorded in painting before'. That explains the feeling that his early pictures give you, as if you were encountering something everyday that had been metamorphosed in some extraordinary fashion.
'Primrose Hill' (1954) is painted entirely in brown, as if with the earth that Primrose Hill is made of (and in a sense, of course, these oil pigments are a kind of mud). 'The Carreras Factory at Mornington Crescent' (1961) is as straightforward a landscape as Auerbach has ever produced, a city scene with — an amazing element in his generally static world — a passing car. But this corner of London has been strangely altered: not just by turning monochrome grey, but as if it were seen underwater, or through some medium much denser than air.
It is a scene reminiscent of Sickert, a predecessor with whom Auerbach has things in common apart from a shared territory in Camden Town. It is hard to think of a picture that so bears out Sickert's dictum that the nude 'is in the nature of a gleam — a gleam of light and warmth and light' as `E.O.W. Nude Lying on Her Back' (1959). In a setting of tenebrous Sickertian olive greys and browns, the human body seems positively to exude light. But Sickert never painted anything so strange and grave as either of these pictures.
There are several ways in which to misunderstand Auerbach's work. One is to confuse the enormous thickness of the paint in some of his early pictures with relief sculpture. It is true that the surface of T.O.W. Head on Her Pillow II' (1965) actually sticks out more than many a basrelief. But they function in a quite orthodox manner as paintings — the light areas protrude, catching the real light; the shadows are lower. Thus the deep shadow beside the nose in 'Head of E.O.W.' (1955) is a positive pit in the surface of the painting, which would make no sense in sculptural terms but functions perfectly in painterly ones.
As a result of this, and of the freedom and vigour of execution, his paintings are sometimes impossible to read close up, at the distance they must have been painted from, but are resolved at ten or twelve feet. This again carries one of the traditional features of oil painting — Rembrandt recommended his work be viewed at a distance — to a new extreme.
Another error would be to think of Auerbach as a mannered manipulator of paint. Admittedly he does extraordinary and extraordinarily varied things with the medium. Fantastically thick in the early days, the paint was being scooped and stroked into marbled dabs and whorls by the time we get to portraits of a decade and a half ago, such as 'Head of J.Y.M.' (1984-5) or 'Head of Catherine Lampert' (1986). In work of the
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