Frank Auerbach by Catherine Lampert

Author:Catherine Lampert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780500772768
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2015-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

Head of Bruce Bernard, 1975

In subsequent years, Lucian was in the habit of telephoning to ask Frank to look at one of his paintings nearing completion. To accommodate Auerbach’s exacting timetable they would meet very early and Freud would cook a lavish breakfast. Auerbach recalls: ‘He didn’t, to put it mildly, always do what I suggested, but he’d incorporate it in his own process. Bill Coldstream used to get Euan [Uglow] to come over and look at his pictures, but I think their work is more cerebral or something … my idiom is so different, I repaint the whole picture so if someone said why don’t you, whatever … [such] advice would be of little use to me.’ On rare occasions Frank found comments from others welcome, ‘perhaps, once or twice’, and he sometimes asks the sitter, ‘“do you think it’s finished” and if they say “no” (often coming from Julia) that’s useful and if “yes”, they might be right’, but as I know from my own experience it would not matter if he himself had any doubt.

Freud envied Auerbach his ability to work from the outdoors and the way that Frank’s pictures were ‘decisive’. One senses this perspective in his choice of paintings when he began buying Auerbach’s work in the 1980s. He lived, for example, with works that were masterpieces of landscape painting: Primrose Hill – Winter (1981–82), Mornington Place (1973) and The Chimney, Mornington Crescent (1987–88).29 When Auerbach was invited to exhibit paintings and quick sketches related to the old masters at the National Gallery in 1995, Freud supplied a short catalogue introduction. ‘It is the architecture that gives his paintings such authority. They dominate their given space: the space always the size of the idea, while the composition is as right as walking down the street … The weather changes, so does the light. The times of day and night are recorded, the mood is one of high-spirited drama. In fact his work is brimming with information conveyed with an underlying delicacy and humour that puts me in mind of the last days of Socrates.’ 30

The bond between the two artists was special; it possessed something of the relationship of two friends in a novel: both charismatic and driven, both born in Berlin (the Freuds living in the more upmarket neighbourhood of Charlottenburg, near the edge of the Tiergarten). As children they read some of the same German books, their English was spoken with precision and with, as the journalist Andrew Billen observed, ‘a dash of German dissonance’, and, as the same interviewer said of Frank’s stories, ‘executed with deliciously cutting turns of phrase’.31 Frank described Lucian as ‘inherently glamorous, first because of his heredity and then because he was extraordinarily attractive, quick-witted, energetic and daring, with his own morality’. 32 At the end of Freud’s life, Auerbach wondered over and over, as his friend became distracted and weaker, whether a particular painting already begun would be finished, and was relieved when the nude of Perienne was taken away in April 2011, three months before Freud died.

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