Steve_Bamlett_blog

This is a follow-up blog to one introducing my day trip: https://livesteven.com/2024/02/21/a-day-visit-to-visit-on-21st-february-2024-to-london-to-the-courtaulds-charcoal-heads-by-frank-auerbach-to-the-haywards-when-forms-come-alive/

It will itself be followed up by one on When Forms Come Alive, an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank. https://livesteven.com/2024/02/24/this-is-blog-is-about-seeing-the-hayward-gallerys-sculpture-exhibition-on-21st-january-2024-when-forms-come-alive/

7‘… evocative of a wider post-war society emerging from a long period of death and destruction, had left Auerbach himself an orphan of the Holocaust creating a new life … . The very medium of charcoal connects to these themes, a product of fire, its fragile and friable nature so easily broken down or smudged into a formless mass of black dust’.[1] So writes Barnaby Wright of Auerbach’s ‘Charcoal Heads’. This is blog about seeing Auerbach’s ‘Charcoal Heads’ exhibition on 21st January 2024 at the Courtauld Gallery.

The Courtauld , in its fine catalogue of the exhibition (worth buying on its own merits and for a tremendous essay by Colm Tóibín) has made a virtue of its exemplary small exhibition, designed to combat the ‘unmanageable and even overwhelming’ effect of otherwise ‘extremely impressive and rewarding’ blockbuster shows that we are used to at The National Gallery, The Royal Academy and The London Tate Galleries, or so says its Director, Professor Mark Hallett in the Preface to the catalogue.[2]

I have to say that despite Hallett, this exhibition, small as it is, felt to me, both ‘extremely impressive and rewarding’ and ‘overwhelming’, if not ‘unmanageable’, because of the questions it raised in me at all kinds of level. I actually wrote in my written-on-the-trot blog (this sentence generated in the wind and rain in the middle of Waterloo Bridge): ‘Having seen the exhibition,  I feel very overwhelmed’.[3]  This feeling was caused not least by a process that seemed strongly perceptible in the works that was, it seems as I read a catalogue that was kindly provided in the rooms, largely created by the processes of erasure in the making and the secondary application of charcoal to the layered paper, to my innocent vision like paper singed by fire (the images from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding seemed present to me: ‘Ash on an old man’s sleeve / Is all the dust burnt roses leave’).

As a result however of this exhibition’s select methods of curation, the theme of renewal after destruction that sings through the exhibits in the exhibition, or I think more obviously and pertinently the conflation of destruction and creation as a a process that is BOTH psychosocial AND aesthetic-technical implied by the drawings and paintings, has to be left as hints to the keen viewer. Auerbach himself said, although of his practice with early states of the drawing that were then “destroyed” according to Wright, that the ‘”only possible progress was to destroy”.[4] Surely that limpid phrase had wider resonance for both destruction and making speak volubly from the extant and undestroyed final states  of the drawings I saw in their own right.

Forehead detail of Head of Leon Kossof (1957): my photograph

The actual process of creation is explained by Wright in terms of ‘the scars of their making’ in the portraits:

… in the form of broken-through and damaged area, patched, sometimes from the front but often from the back, and worked over. Indeed Auerbach soon realised that he was regularly breaking the surface of his paper, so he began sticking two Imperial-sized sheets together from the outset to create a thicker drawing surface, If an area of the top layer wore through, the sheet beneath provided a further support to continue working and, if this was not sufficient, he might patch again from the front. Sometimes these tears appear in poignant places, ….[5]

These poignant places are where I perceived the illusions of singeing, but I wonder if this was intended. And this for two reasons. First, the reference to post-war reconstruction and the nuance involved in the recreation of life from patches of the dead and murdered land and town scapes, which I will deal with hereafter. Second, the notion that though Auerbach valued individual lives, he knew those recreated in artifice were not the ‘fact’ or ‘truth’ of life itself, but its ‘image’ (a dialectic Wright speaks about in terms of the practice of other members of what used to be called ‘The London Group’: especially Francis Bacon, Leon Kossof, and Lucian Freud. Auerbach himself said: ‘Truth will always be different from what one’s already achieved’. Even, more interestingly he says (and I think it true of the others too, though more occulted in Freud): “What I’m trying to make is a stonking, independent, coherent image that has never been seen before … stalking int the world like a new monster”. ^[6] Whilst in London, I thought of Frankenstein’s monster here, but surely, as I now see the reference is to, also in the background of Mary Shelley’s creation too, the Jewish stories of the Golem, that would have been well known to Kossof and Auerbach.

But before pursuing this concern with the animation of the dead, we can look at the examples of London Landscapes that the Courtauld provided for us in another room, which I did in my overwhelmed state, to think about what post-destruction reconstruction meant to Auerbach in all its nuance. I will pick out Auerbach most famous post-war landscapes there show: Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (1962) wherein the painter revelled in the holes made in the fabric of lived experience itself in the cusp of being that opened up between the fact of a thing destroyed and its remaking. I think it a great mistake to see this in terms of the renewal and freshening of the world alone, for I think it bears within it much of the old destruction, a sense that creation and destruction are not opposites but one and the same thing, as in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind:

The Courtauld’s online notes about the painting say:

The artist recalled passing the outside of the cinema and looking in to discover a scene of frenetic activity, which he sketched immediately: “I did the drawing with a very considerable feeling of urgency… I knew what I saw there would no longer be there perhaps a fortnight later… The composition in a way was a gift… you looked through and saw something marvellous.”

His sketch of the scene resulted in this dramatic painting. The thick red lines that structure the composition are beams or scaffolding spanning a gaping chasm in the foreground. As viewers, we stand at the very edge of this dark void, the confined space as a whole lit by a few patches of light towards the bottom and top of the picture. The painting offers a disorienting scene of partially constructed floor levels, jutting beams and extremes of light and dark. Auerbach’s use of red throughout the work gives fiery intensity to the painting, as if we are witness to an intense, almost hellish, vision.

Available at: https://courtauld.ac.uk/highlights/rebuilding-the-empire-cinema-leicester-square/

The infernal note is important and is another meaning of the reads and browns. To build up, the reconstruction dug deeper than the bombs that occasioned its need. The feeling of speed to combat a renewal that was also an obliteration remains through the process of composing the painting itself was slow and involved the artist’s usual processes of painting, erasure (sometimes on the wet oil, sometimes when dry) that were the ones he used (adapted to a different medium in the charcoal drawings. As Wright points out the two processes were thought to be both complementary by Auerbach: “Occasionally paint with its infinite implications, seems too inchoate and elaborate and one turns to more specifically legible marks of drawing, then drawing begins to seem limited and one turns to painting”.[7] Comparing the two modes is instructive, as Wright does with bust portraits in oil of Leon Kossoff, but it can be misleading and create opposition in the modes of realising the art object, which don’t exist, for there are also important points of contact and similarity, that don’t just resolve into the fact that paintings were always prompted by Auerbach’s on-site sketches.[8] In the Leicester Square painting lines in red have the function of drawn lines, scaffolding (which is what these represent in a physical sense, an ‘inchoateness that almost feels as if it is a confrontation with the void or a black hole – spaces where matter has not yet taken form. Auerbach’s art is very much about the processes of its own creation – about absence and presence, negation and positivity, the empty and the full, amongst other binaries which get hopelessly conflated (including light / dark, surface / depth, thinness and thickness).

The use of layering formed by digging into a surface the process is central that has some relation to the layers of an excavated building (with a hard typewriter eraser in the charcoal drawings, a palette knife in the later paintings (when he could afford a richer palette) , and digging tools in the reality, that is somewhat imitated, in Leicester Square (and other excavated central London building sites in the post-war series) and building up (by layering and patching variously according to medium. Wright says that ‘accumulating layers must be a part of Auerbach’s paintings as well – at least we can imagine them to be – but the coagulating action of oil paint subsumes them into a single mass’.  The case is over-stated, for although Catherine Lambert points out the early paintings did not use erasure as much because of the cost of oil paint for a starting artist, she also says that the intention was not to create a ‘primal’ chaos’ of stuff in formation but what he called ‘a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountains and crags’.[9] Colour, like the red scaffolding structures the painting’s depth and other dimensions (both the actual depth of layers and the illusion of depth) as well as the same for other dimensions. Wright provides a page from The Journal of the Royal College of Art for 1958, where Auch says (of his oils and his charcoal heads – all pictured on the page:

I owe a great deal to David Bomberg’s teaching and, among my contemporaries, to Leon Kossoff’s example. I regard colour, thickness of paint, etc. as incidentals in a continuous and continually unsuccessful struggle to grasp the tonality of form.[10]

Yet all of this technical process is not only that. Lampert points out that at the time the association curators made was to way of seeing associated with the phenomenology but also the existential philosophies of Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir – as she quotes Auerbach putting it ‘to catch something that is mobile’ wherein marks and colours (and layers) ‘reconstitute themselves if they’re any good into a sort of experience that has very little to do with paint’.[11] The point is that the painting  is neither capturing an external scene as such, nor abstract shapes but the flow of experienced life itself, making something out of the waste of that which otherwise has no meaning.

And hence the myth of the Golem /Frankenstein’s monster – a life made up of patched up dead materials and brought to life as it has never been seen before. In 1953 the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) held a show called The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head.[12] Nothing could contextualise the approach of both the Charcoal Heads and bust portraits better as Auerbach did them, remade from the horrors of war, Nazism and trauma – they recall the pictures of shattered and reconstructed faces of the artist and Slade Professor, Henry Tonks, after the First World War, except, in this case the wounds and scares were deeper – on the cusp between the inner and outer person:

And this is where the catalogue essay ‘Frank Auerbach: Self-Portrait 1958’ by Colm Tóibín comes into its own because it continually looks, for what it doubts may be truly there, some literary reference in that self-portrait to the literary examples he appends analysis thereof to his essay from, respectively, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Henry James’ The Jolly Corner, and Josph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer. It may be, he speculates that Auerbach was concern solely by image-making as an aesthetic project  but his interest in this portrait is in disturbing the symmetry of the face, in contrasting the effects in a face of things done by ‘chance’ or ‘design’, caught as it were realistically or with artifice, in metaphors of collage (cut-and-paste), patching and stitching against the sense of a ‘realised face’, a face where light is not ‘cast’ on a thing but an ‘excavation of light’ found by over-erasing the dark. The main metaphor is ‘fracture’ or ‘wound’. Look at the portrait yourself:

And look at these wondrous two paragraphs on the ambiguity which displaces the integrity we except of captured individuality:

The ambiguity comes from the gap between, on the one hand, a sort of control or self-control or a lack of easy emotion in the expression on the face and, on the other hand, the struggle it took to make the image, the amount of tearing, puncturing, erasing, pasting-up.

The self, when put under the pressure of self-scrutiny, contains fracture, uneasiness, uncertainty, struggle. If the drawing is a metaphor for anything – and it probably isn’t – it is a metaphor of the problems of image-making, how much clarity and singleness of vision it is possible to maintain against the power and excitement and untidiness of the process.[13]

But before we feel Colm is throwing in the towel by saying, it probably isn’t a metaphor, look at what he does thereafter. Image-making is not something only artists do. We all do it. We call it living – and sometimes we care if that is done with integrity or not.

The rest of this blog attempts merely to illustrate from my photographs, more often of details, even shots with angles perspective on the picture ‘surface’ to show how wound emerges differentially, in oil through thickness of paint and colour as in the following:

Thee colours are simple but the valleys in the paintings are carved deep as if from some process of fracture – that might even by a ‘flow’ but in geological time, or at least of lava. There is breakage in the face, where lower surfaces, even the skull break through.

When the colour is reaching, an eye appears to be detached (see the detail on the right) or detaching. Paint slashes the picture – notably red. The texture ought to be hard but seems that of fabric, increasing the layered collage illusion.

But even in ear monochrome, a paintings fracture become so internal, they are like screams, as below. But note just how thick the layering in the handled shot on the picture, and how stripping of the structure is the effect of the angling. We are on a construction site again, but one of bodies in time and the soul by compromise.

Now, I don’t pretend that this is not about technique at all, for wright points out that Bomberg taught his learners ‘to find an image for the structure at a pretty deep level’, but to think that a brilliant artist like Bomberg, as literary and philosophical as Bacon, Kossoff and Auerbach, is incorrect. In The Charcoal Heads, fractures of layering are done in damage, overlaid and overmarked (with charcoal damaged edges – but they are Tonks-like images of damaged bodies, or just that – though the damage is existential- but of the cusp of inner/outer selves. See these, where beauty and the horrible, pleasure and pain mingle and become one:

Even gender is a kind of surface illusion:

And sometimes layering of colour takes over and makes the whole richly complex in its type of layers.

I have deliberately removed names and titles above, for I want you to get the catalogue and enjoy the same learning I did. There may be horror in the human head as ICA set out to test in 1953 as I said above, but I think of horrid in its earlier sense here, where it suggested the wild set against the polished and smooth – the craggy or bristly feral. It fits with a certain raw sublimity and with Auerbach’s belief in the grandeur of the ‘individual human being’ as an entity’. Grand, yes, but not always noble and purposive – sometimes ruptured and racked with bot pain and something lesser than good intent.

I think there is so much to say more. But thankfully I can ask you to say it to and for yourself – or to me, why not. I need a friend to help me love art again much more.

All love

Steven xxxxx

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[1] Barnaby Wright (2024: 48) ‘Frank Auerbach’s Post-War Charcoal Heads’ in Barnaby Wright (Ed.) Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads London, Paul Holberton Publishing. `19 – 54.

[2] In Barnaby Wright (Ed.) (2024: 7) Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads London, Paul Holberton Publishing.

[3] https://livesteven.com/2024/02/21/a-day-visit-to-visit-on-21st-february-2024-to-london-to-the-courtaulds-charcoal-heads-by-frank-auerbach-to-the-haywards-when-forms-come-alive/

[4] Ibid: 38

[5] Wright, op.cit: 30

[6] Ibid: 48

[7] Ibid: 40

[8] Ibid: 42

[9] Catherine Lampert (2015: 60) Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting London, Thames & Hudson

[10]Wright, op.cit: 20f.

[11] Lambert op. cit: 60

[12] Wright op.cit: 49

[13] Colm Tóibín (2024: 61) ‘Frank Auerbach: Self-Portrait 1958’ in Barnaby Wright (ed.) op.cit. 55 – 71.