FRANK AUERBACH (1931–2024) By Jutta Koether

Frank Auerbach in his studio, 2015
Frank Auerbach is everywhere. The subject is: the seeing of feeling and the kind of knowledge that only seeing can give rise to. Be a counterexample to everything.
FA: “My vision of painting was of an explosion.” [1] Yes … I’m finding these quotes while plowing through all kinds of texts regarding Painting (inside, beyond, after) itself.
They asked me to write an obituary for FA, who passed away last November in London. But as it turns out, I find it impossible … cannot sum it up like that … but more than that, there is the observation that a beginning is occurring. FA’s legacy is one for painters. To paint oneself into that format … of being an artist. Where are you now? Painting is both image and material instrument mediating between different levels of reality.
The act of painting is always a discovery of painting and its histories, capacities, emotions. To never leave the realm of painting. The painter that seeks to transform and be transformed by the medium; versions of the “now I see” moment!
It would be a bit like writing an obituary for painting itself, for a specific method of being an artist. All these years I have looked at his work not to find story, meaning, gossip, but the possibility of a painter doing 100 percent painting, as Existential Matter. As a way to keep on keeping on. Practicing it day after day.
How to keep questioning, turning your fate inside out, working your way through it in the performance of paint. To keep carving out that path and see it through. FA is the model for me – a place, an ongoing event, past death – for learning all that. His oeuvre now acts as the sitter for other painters … So, this is a small text presenting some thoughts regarding “Learning from Frank Auerbach.”
FA: “Painting for me is a set of connections, a set of sensations of conflicting movements and experiences, which somehow, one hopes, has congealed or cohered or risen out of the battle into being an image that stands up for itself.”
“One’s trying to get some work done before one dies.” This was in 1998. And it sums it all up. (Well … perhaps I’m touched by it so much because he was about the age I am now when he said that.) It also confirms that he never gave up that thread: a fundamental work ethic in the closest connection to painting. That which has been described as an insistence on working until the picture emerges, free of all “possible explanations.”
I only began getting to know FA’s paintings in an era that was, for me, all about learning to become a painter, and I discovered him in the “A New Spirit in Painting” show at the Royal Academy in London, in 1981, and then, five years later, I encountered him as the counterpart to Sigmar Polke, both painters sharing the Golden Lion prize at the 42nd Venice Biennale.
The beginning of this learning: that painting should done be in a way that never ends and never dulls; that there is a vocational core that needs to be activated every day; every day there is primal matter, and every day there is destruction and difference. Looking at FA’s work means learning to be fascinated and shocked by painting, to develop a fearless connection to one’s own material. FA’s work and life (in that order) is that of an auteur.
De-installing preconceived thought construction. It is in its moment … the “spirit in the mass,” as stated in David Bomberg’s teaching. FA learned from him, but he also learned from Bomberg’s predecessors, Walter Sickert, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He then learned from Willem de Kooning, Chaïm Soutine, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt. Through FA, one finds routes of learning (and quite a few of these routes are revealed in the biographical monograph of FA by Catherine Lampert).
“The desire to paint makes one fairly ruthless.”
Researching him and his formative friendship with Lucian Freud … the one that lasted until the latter’s death in 2011 … I learn that Freud often asked FA to assess whether a work was truly completed. Freud collected FA’s work and, through that, a specific expression of intelligence. Freud mostly collected FA’s city/landscape work. (That which Freud could not paint: the outside.) FA did not attend his funeral. Painting makes you go to the studio instead and keep doing your work.
Perhaps this is how myths can be created, those myths that one often finds traveling in poetry. FA had certainly tapped into that … and T. J. Clark picked up on it in his text from 2015:
But in this ironic (and therefore unabated) hedonism Auerbach stays true to his French masters. Nothing could be more sumptuous, after all – sonically, metaphorically – than the tasteless desert of Rimbaud’s “Ville” and “Métropolitain.” No poetry has ever been more in love with the feeling of English overcast – the rustling of interminable grey vowels – than Verlaine’s ‘Il pleure dans mon coeur / comme il pleut sur la ville.’ Verlaine in Docklands, we may come to think, is Auerbach’s unfailing Virgil:
Toits qui dégouttent, murs suintants, pavé qui glisse,
Bitume défoncé, ruisseaux comblant l’égout,
Voilà ma route – avec le paradis au bout.
That harsher symbolism, a kind of insistence in taking it and making it part of your painting life, those many walking-stick structures and crutches, and that destruction … As a way to seek help, allies, for what is generally that feeling that whatever one does, there will be misreading, or tagging, or being in or out of something.
In 2015: “The two things I hope for now are to do more pictures and an easy death.” The only way to belong somewhere is through the work. It’s simply like that. While I was reading and rereading FA, I was between big cities, and attempting to make NYC my home as an artist … here I was with Tom Verlaine near the Strand:
You know, it’s all like some new drug,
my senses are sharp, my hands are like gloves
Broadway looked so medieval, it seemed to flap like little pages
I fell sideways laughing with a friend of many stages.
Regarding learning from FA: I’m not alone. I have been in conversation with other painters, like Cecily Brown; found great insights and remarks in the writings of Celia Paul; and there was the Peter Doig–curated show “The Street” in late 2024, which was based on the Balthus painting but presented FA’s Rimbaud (1975–76) right next to it. While I look into the piercing light-blue dots that are the eyes in this painting in the midst of painterly turbulence, agitation, a perpetual unrest … I know it will carry me onward; it will keep addressing people who respond to painting, who are interested and willing to deal with extreme demands placed on the paint and on a viewer.
From Madison Ave., I returned to the Met and (while hoping that someday they will have a go-to Auerbach painting there). I connected to a painting by Jean Clouet (16th century). Similarly piercing blue eyes there, a foundational skepticism/resistance, and the memo-to-self to continue: “While it seems to be good to get what one desires, the greatest good is not to desire what one does not need.”
FA was an artist who went to places to see painting with the main purpose to go back to the studio to do painting. There were only a few words FA ever painted inside a painting, but some of them were: “to the studios.”
FA: “Everything I finish has been a surprise, not what I intended or hoped for. It’s when you run out of conscious things, something takes it over, and one has done something that can stand up for itself.”
Jutta Koether is an artist.
Image credits: © Nicola Bensley, courtesy of Piano Nobile
Notes
[1] | Quotations from Frank Auerbach were sourced from the Guardian, Meer, Catherine Lampert’s Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, the Luhring Augustine Gallery, the London Review of Books, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and ArtReview. |