The constant painter: a rare interview with Frank Auerbach

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Familiar subjects: painting the same head over and over eventually reveals the raw truth about it, says Frank Auerbach

The Awning

Head of William Feaver II

Reclining Head of Julia II, Auerbach’s wife

At five o'clock in the morning Frank Auerbach is outside a pub in Mornington Crescent.

He is not waiting for opening time, but intensely studying the shape, contour and perspective of the pub's awning. What wheat fields were to Van Gogh or lily ponds to Monet, so the buildings and streets of north London are to this extraordinary 78-year-old artist, who has painted in the same cramped studio in Camden for the past 55 years, sometimes working up to 18 hours a day, even often sleeping the night in his 14ft square, one-room space until dawn, when his schedule restarts.

“I thought there was no possible way I could paint the awning which was why I deliberately chose it,” he says. For Auerbach, painting is all about solving seemingly impossible problems — spacial, physical, psychological and visual ones, creating abstracted images on canvas that convey the sense of the living experience. They must also rival the complexity and presence of the reality.

As he sketches in the dawn light, Polish men, rolling beer barrels, step around him. “I couldn't quite decide if I was in their way or they in mine,” he jests. His subjects are famously narrow in range — as well as the nearby cityscapes, he paints only his wife Julia, son Jake, now aged 51, and one or two other models who take it in turns to come to his studio every day. “I tend to try to paint things with which I have a great familiarity, partly because they mean more to me than anybody else,” he says. His way of working is unique, urgent, seemingly spontaneous but requiring great feats of concentration.

Each day, he destroys what he painted the previous day, scraping off all the paint from the canvas and starting again. It is groundhog day until he decides the picture is finished, sometimes not until years later. He is destroying to create, building levels of knowledge until he has found a point of completion. His world may be small, but the ambition is great. “I'm hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the world like a new species of a living thing,” he says.

This month, a weighty monograph filled with photographs of his life's work, written by William Feaver, is published. Also 20 new paintings will be shown at the Marlborough Gallery in Albemarle Street. Both underscore his position as a Grand Old Man of British Painting.

Except at 78, his monk-like reclusiveness, extraordinary physical stamina and effortless charisma make him seem neither grand or old. He is British because in 1939, aged eight, he was evacuated from Hamburg, which saved him from the fate suffered by his Jewish parents and almost all his family: extermination at the hands of the Nazis.

There will be no party, no razzmatazz for the book or exhibition, as Auerbach chooses to see very few people — and never all at once. He rarely goes out and is usually in bed by nine. He has only travelled abroad from London twice, and feels uneasy leaving his north London neighbourhood. His nightmare is a surprise party. “I used to get invited to things but I don't even go to my friends' funerals — as I kept saying no', it dried up. I don't enjoy art occasions at all, openings and so on.”

Yet he is excellent company: witty, fast-thinking, sometimes a tad acid, quoting Max Wall, Kipling, and always Eliot and Yeats. For a man with a routine appropriate to a monastery, he is also a raconteur, never afraid of speaking his mind.

Auerbach has the mind of a philosopher but the clear practicality and plain vocabulary of an engineer (“This is a feeble form — can I make a connection?” he asks himself, or exhorts, “There needs to be a tautness across the canvas”). Always experimentation and risk take place.

To illustrate what a painter needs to do, he describes a film he saw of Picasso painting — “all sorts of possibilities tested and rejected and some accepted until there his picture stands finished, a very great image.” But where Picasso did his pictures mostly with almost unseemly speed, Auerbach cannot hurry. Many sittings take years. “To paint the same head over and over leads to unfamiliarity; eventually you get near the raw truth about it, just as people only blurt out the raw truth in the middle of a family quarrel.”

Auerbach is obsessive about his work. He cannot imagine not painting all day and every day. His standards for what he must achieve have never lowered. He destroys 19 out of every 20 drawings. Once or twice, he has even bought back his own work at auction because he felt it was not good enough so that he could destroy those too. “It was a feeling of great relief.”

Early on, he created his own abstracted language, sort of expressionism meets abstraction. It used to involve layering paint up to two inches thick. His process always involves struggle, often despair. “When I go on and on with a painting, it seems to me to become more and more apparent that it's simply impossible to resolve. Despair is the thing that leads you to try more or less anything and, of course, the anything is informed by the effort you put into it and the thoughts you've had about it, so that instinctively you sum things up and then put things down on the canvas that the logical mind can't quite reach.”

He talks modestly, more often than not deflecting to another writer or artist to explain his aim. “There's a phrase of Sickert's where he speaks somewhere about something succeeding in that it is like a page torn from the book of life. I'd like what I do not to be Art with a capital A, although it may or may not be incorporated into that concept. What I'd like it to be is a page torn from that book of life, even though it's an abstracted image. My art's never copied: it's regurgitated and re-made or feeds into an abstracted image.”

Auerbach was 10 when he learned his parents were dead and that he was an orphan but has always been remarkably sanguine, even seemingly unaffected by the wipe-out of his family. “During the war there were Red Cross letters which had just 25 words, so all you got was a very brief message, but then these letters ceased coming to me in 1943. It marked an end but I can't even remember someone saying your parents are no longer alive. It was just gradually leaked to me. I think I did this thing which psychiatrists for very good professional reasons frown on: I am in total denial. It's worked very well for me. To be quite honest I came to England and went to a marvellous school, and it truly was a happy time. There's just never been a point in my life where I felt I wish I had parents.

“I don't know why but I have seen the difficulties of other people who wanted to paint because very often there's a unique tension between somebody who wants to do that and their parents. I am aware of a sort of conflict and trouble that I've been spared.”

All that remains of his German past are a few photographs of his parents which he is not even certain he still has; his wife looks after such things. “I don't keep anything. It may be due to my background. I absolutely believe that you keep forging on, forwards, and that if you look back you turn into a pillar of salt,” he says.

A personal history of the Holocaust and an obsessive desire to paint were obvious links with Lucian Freud, who was to become one of his closest friends. Both artists still use each other as the ultimate sounding board on their new work, and have been friends for more than 50 years. Freud owns one of the greatest private Auerbach collections.

“I was interested in Lucian's work and slightly against my will impressed by its intensity because mine was a different idiom and when one is young one tends to think there is a particular virtue in one's own idiom. But as time has gone by — I think perhaps there is something that linked us through our common historical bond. Actually, our backgrounds were intertwined too. A cousin of mine was an assistant to his father, my aunt knew his parents.”

For many years the two artists met weekly for breakfast very early in the morning. And often on Christmas Day they still break from their routines for lunch together. “Lucian is amazing, the only great English artist to go on painting great works just three years short of 90. Constable died in his fifties and Bacon at around 80. He is beating them all and producing masterpieces still.”

Auerbach was often penniless in his early days, spending almost all his money on paint, with barely enough for food. “Until I was 50 I never had a bank account, always lived from hand to mouth. I used to lie awake at night wondering if I'd be able to go on with my paintings or whether the paint would run out.”

Somehow he survived those bleak early days and now, while there are always other worries (“I am always anxious”), his works have fetched as much as £1.9 million and he does not have to worry that he can't afford the next pot of paint. And should his models lose patience with the heroic lengths to which they have to sit, he always has himself: “I've done a few [self-portraits] and if I live long enough I might do more. When I was young you used to think, Oh this is pretty boring, no bags under the eyes,' — but it begins to become more interesting.”

Frank Auerbach by William Feaver is published today (Rizzoli, £100). Frank Auerbach: Recent Paintings will be at Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, W1 (020 7629 5161, www.marlboroughfineart.com) 23 Sept-24 Oct. Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952–62 will be at the Courtauld Gallery, WC2 (020 7872 0220, www.courtauld.ac.uk ) 16 Oct–17 Jan 2010.

 

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