The name of Frank Auerbach, the British artist who died on November 11 at the age of ninety-three, is little known in the United States. MOM holds five of his works – an oil painting, two drawings and two prints – but none are currently on display. The fame, not to mention infamy, that settled upon his friends and fellow artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud eluded Auerbach, even though he was not the type of guy to seek the attention of the spotlight . Although he was not a hermit, the intensity of his zeal – he took one day of vacation per year – seemed to set him apart and set him apart. He once said: “I think of painting as something that happens to a man working in a room. » He could be talking about a heart attack.

Most of the time, Auerbach was joined and tempered in his solitude by a model. Sitting down regularly for him, as several people have done, feels like a test of endurance and loyalty. One of these models, Estella (Stella) West, often identified as EOW in Auerbach’s portraits, was a widow with three children whom he had met in the late forties. He became her tenant and her lover, and she later recalled putting a piece of meat in the oven, over low heat, and sitting for a few hours while it cooked. (They then sat down with the children to eat it: a well-deserved treat.) Another woman, Julia Yardley Briggs Mills, sat in Auerbach twice a week for forty years. “Painting the same head over and over again leads to misunderstanding,” he said. “Eventually you get closer to the raw truth about it.”

In almost all of Auerbach’s oil paintings, early or late, the crudity is thick on the ground. The pigment is so dense, so coagulated, and so clumped that you don’t know whether to look at it, lick it, chew it, or write a weather report. The best option would be to reach out, with or without permission, to touch the surface of the image, tracing the smeared whorls and grooves. A visually impaired person, searching with their fingertips, could gather as many or more than a viewer with perfect eyesight who just watches. There are full-length and full-length portraits of Auerbach, but in reality the real action begins at the neck. In “Tête de Léon Kossoff” (Kossoff was another painter and a close friend of Auerbach), from 1954, or in “Tête d’EOW”, from the following year, the faces, emerging from the darkness, are turned sideways and down, locked in thought. The eyes are dark holes. The light falls largely on the cheekbones and eyebrows, as if Auerbach was assessing the best access to the brain. Is it in homage to this quest that Freud’s superb portrait of Auerbach (1975-76) should be an image at skull height, peering into the bulging, restless landscape of his skull? And where and when did these concerns begin?

It is correct to call Auerbach a British artist, but it was not always so. To be precise, he has been a British citizen since July 16, 1947, when he received his naturalization papers. Before that, he was German – born in Berlin in April 1931. He was the only child of middle-class Jewish parents; his father, a patent lawyer, was the son of a rabbi. At the age of seven, young Frank was sent by ship to England, for his own safety, to accept the offer of a place at a well-run school in the countryside. His mother sewed little red crosses on the clothes that didn’t yet fit him and that he would grow into later. Auerbach never saw his parents again. They died at Auschwitz.

The paradox is that, treated with kindness and encouraged by sympathetic teachers, the orphan enjoyed the rest of his childhood. “I think I did this thing that psychiatrists frown upon: I was in complete denial,” the adult Auerbach said, adding, “It worked very well for me.” Denial itself, needless to say, may be a driving force, and frowning shrinks might point to the seething energies of an Auerbach painting and his obsessive habit of scraping away the remains of brushwork from one day and start again the next day. Is this intentional or paranoid? “I feel Jewish in the sense of being a person, in every other way exactly like everyone else, who has been made uncomfortable,” Auerbach said. Few modern artists do so much to persuade us that creative endeavor is a struggle – an anxious struggle with the stubborn materials at hand and a determination to move forward.

Auerbach, as a teenager, left school, went to London and put down roots there for the rest of his life. By reading “Frank Auerbach: speaking and painting“, a beautiful book by the curator and art historian Catherine Lampert, who also modeled for Auerbach, the impression we have of him in his youth is that of a thin and hungry character, often poor , but driven by excited despair. (His work, though heavy with shadows, never speaks of submerged minds. You are more likely to feel keenly disconcerted than paralyzed.) The city around him still bore the wounds of war, and the mixture rubble and reconstruction had its lasting effect, as Auerbach recalls:

There was a curious feeling of freedom because everyone who lived there had escaped death in one way or another. It was sexy in a way, this half-destroyed London. There was a devastating feeling of living in a ruined city.

As with many poets and painters, you hear the whisper of a hard heart in their willing talent for examining a crisis, or breakdown, for artistic opportunity. Auerbach admitted as much. “If we say that the man next door was poisoned, or that someone was knocked down in the street, we try to behave decently but the real reflex is to return to the studio and the brushes to make sense “I doubt many Londoners, faced with a razed house, found anything sexy in the loss, but Auerbach took advantage of it, in an effort to find out what it was. he called “an internal geometry “You encounter results in unexpected places. Like Freud, he used the National Gallery in London as a constant resource, drawing there year after year and striving to create something new from the old masters. ‘where “Study after the deposition of Rembrandt II” (1961), in which the space – much larger than that occupied by the original compact “The Lamentation over the Dead Christ” – is dominated by the cross and the ladders which rely on it. Golgotha ​​infiltrates London. Calvary is being reconfigured under construction. It takes courage.

For decades Auerbach had a studio in Mornington Crescent, north of the British Museum, east of Regent’s Park. It was his parish. He rarely stopped traversing it, reconstructing its routes and slopes, as evidenced by “Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London”, an exhibition which opened at the Offer Waterman gallery, in Mayfair, the month before his death. The first painting on display, “Primrose Hill, High Summer,” dates from 1959; the latest, “Way Out,” from 2019-20. The exhibition provides a bracing contrast to ‘Frank Auerbach: the Charcoal Heads’, which last year brought together a series of his monumental drawings at the Courtauld Gallery, off the Strand on the north bank of the Thames. Painted exteriors or drawn interiors, cityscapes or cityscapes: take your pick.

At the risk of perversity, even heresy, I admit that, if I had the choice between the Auerbachs, I would prefer a charcoal drawing to an oil painting any day. (Be careful, I have the same attitude towards Seurat. It’s really perverse.) Once, I almost did it. In the 1990s I came across one of the charcoal heads for sale and calculated that if I sold all the paintings I owned, plus my car, and gave up vacations for a few years, I could just about afford to buy. he. Wiser advice prevailed and the project was abandoned: an act of cowardice that I now regret, not because the work would have gained value as an investment (although it would have done so on several occasions) but because I would have invested in Auerbach’s Act of Courage, the testimony of his tireless efforts to capture what caught his eye.

The impact of these efforts can be seen in the completed work. Just as Auerbach wiped away daily deposits of oil paint in anticipation of the next onslaught, so he used an eraser (often hard, like that used by typists) to erase most of a drawing, leaving little more than the relic of a drawing. picture. The difference is that paper, being friable, tends to fray and tear – a problem partly solved by Auerbach when he glued two sheets of paper together, so that piercing the top sheet would allow it to persist in its task with the lower sheet. Elsewhere, as in a self-portrait from 1958, he repairs the damage by applying rectangles of fresh paper, often with irregular edges; what emerges is more than a palimpsest, too brutally there be ghostly. It’s like a portrait of a wounded man who had to improvise his own healing as he went along. Charcoal, remember, follows combustion. Strangest of all are the late-blooming grace notes: the sudden strokes of pink chalk, among other things, that jut into the frame at the foot of “Head of Julia II” (1960). As Auerbach wrote, with commendable simplicity, in a statement accompanying six of the charcoal leaders: “I find it all very difficult.”

This is what Auerbach did and does: he reaches you. The angle from which he looks at the world and the dark light he casts on it become contagious. Last year, at the National Museum in Stockholm, I was stopped in my tracks by another Rembrandt, one of the last things he painted – “Simeon in the Temple,” from around 1669 – and I wondered. says: “Auerbach”. Focus on the bald dome of the saint’s forehead and the slits of the half-closed eyes; the painting is not piled up by Rembrandt as by Auerbach, but it is worked and roughly reworked, by both men, until the last breath. As for the hollow of the mouth, it must be open, because, thanks to the Gospel of Saint Luke, we know the words that Simeon is about to pronounce, while he holds the child Jesus in his arms: “Lord , now let you, your servant, depart in peace. After staying alive and waiting for this moment, he is now free to die. Frank Auerbach also made what is hoped to be a peaceful departure. Every struggle finds its end.