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Charcoal and Chiaroscuro: Frank Auerbach’s Graphic Portraits and Post-war Culture — Transcript

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0:00Okay everyone I think we'll begin my name is Mark Hallett I'm the director here at The Courtauld and
0:06really this gives me the greatest of pleasure to to offer you the warmest of welcomes to this
0:11study day and it's really fantastic to see so many of you here and I think that's just
0:15a testament to the power and the success of the the exhibition that we're running at the moment
0:20and I'm I'm so happy to see you here and hope that we'll really be able to offer you really
0:25stimulating exciting day over the next few hours so I just wanted to say that of course this study
0:31day has been organized to accompany our current exhibition Frank Auerbach the portrait heads
0:37which as many of you all know is curated by my colleague our colleague Barney Barney Wright but
0:43unfortunately Barney who would have been doing this introduction in fact um has gone down with
0:48Covid he's fine but he's struggling and he can't join us today so I'm sorry that he won't be able
0:53to be with us but I just wanted to say on his behalf really that this exhibition has been
0:58very long in the making indeed it's been in the making ever since 2010 um because in that year
1:06Barney curated an exhibition at The Courtauld but in some way served as a kind of sequel to
1:11Charcoal Heads and that exhibition 14 years ago or so was entitled Frank Auerbach London Building
1:19Sites 1952 1962 a number of you may have seen that show and as his title suggests that focused on the
1:25kind of imagery that alongside his painted and drawn portraits dominated Auerbach's output in
1:31that postwar period and it focused on the building sites that were such a ubiquitous part of London's
1:37landscape at that moment but even as Barney delivered that display which like the current
1:43exhibition generated widespread critical acclaim he was already thinking about a show of charcoal
1:48heads from the same period and he's now realized that ambition and given us the chance not only to
1:53focus on these astonishing drawings but also to think about for instance the ways in which they
1:58related to the kind of imagery that we exhibited in 2010 to that building site imagery and we'll
2:03be looking at that today to think about how we can think of those kinds of works in relation
2:07to one another it's that kind of question and the fact that there's so many other questions
2:12that we can ask Auerbach's Charcoal Heads that prompted Barney and I to think about organizing
2:17a study day to accompany our show in doing so both of us agreed that it would be great
2:24to involve a new voice in Auerbach studies we're delighted that Altair Brandon Salmon who's doing
2:29some really exciting research on British art of the postwar period agreed to take the lead in
2:33drafting the call for papers for this study day and in working with our wonderful colleague Leyla
2:39Bumbra to organize today's proceedings so huge thanks Altair for all the work you've done in
2:44making today happen so alter Barney and I agreed that the most stimulating format for such study
2:51dates tends to take a form we think of these to a series of short talks written as interventions
2:56and provocations rather than as detailed or polished research papers short talks designed
3:01to prompt good debate and discussion to suggest new and sometimes surprising perspectives on the
3:07artist or the subject at hand that's the form as you all have seen that we've chosen today so the
3:12talks will be around 10 minutes long each so and I'll give you a chance to pack in we've given us
3:18the chance to pack in a whole range of different voices and perspectives too so yeah that's the
3:24format that we've chosen today and I know our list of speakers will constantly ask us to
3:28think afresh that Auerbach's postwar drawings that's their challenge I'm sure they'll rise
3:33to it and in doing so they'll be responding not only to the current exhibition and the
3:38accompany catalogue that Barney's edited I'd thoroughly recommend that you pick up
3:42and buy uh and it contains not only Barney's own introductory text to the to the show but
3:50also an amazing essay in it by Colm the writer Colm Tobin many of again many of you all know
3:56who's written this really extended meditation on looking at a single work by Auerbach in fact the
4:01self-portrait that adorns the catalogues cover and he did it for five or so hours in fact uh
4:06sitting and living with that image in that sort of time writing his notes and then writing them
4:10up and turning them into this pretty profound meditation not only on the work on the appearance
4:15of portraiture in in the novels of people like Henry James Thomas Mann Joseph Conrad writers
4:21at Colm Tobin has himself written about at great length in the past so yeah in terms
4:27of today's talks they'll respond I think to the kind of writing that we that we've incorporated
4:32in this catalogue but also to a recent book that I had the pleasure of co-editing with
4:39the great curator and art historian Catherine Lampert and this this book called Frank Auerbach
4:44Drawings of People that was published by the Paul Mellon Center last year last year or even back in
4:5022 now and that contains a whole range of essays about portrait drawings and so it's extraordinary
4:58in the way that this project developed pretty much entirely in isolation from or without full
5:03recognition of the fact that this exhibition has been developed so it's wonderful that we
5:06have I think both this catalogue and this book to provide some really weighty and interesting
5:11critical commentary on the kind of exhibition and the works that we've got on display at the moment
5:17but this uh book as I said uh tried to provide some new ways of looking at and contextualizing
5:23Auerbach's portrait drawings and I'm delighted that three of the contributors to that book are
5:27going to be speaking in our first session today and offering their newest thoughts on
5:31the artist's works our other sessions meanwhile are going to give us a chance of hearing other
5:35new voices in Auerbach studies and of thinking about his drawings from yet more perspectives
5:40our second session chaired by Sarah Turner who is here somewhere just walking in wonderful former
5:47colleague of mine of course back at the Paul Mellon Center now director of the Paul Mellon
5:50Center that session will ask us to think about how Auerbach's works can be suggestively situated
5:55in relation to that of other artists uh while our third and final session session which I'll
6:00be chairing promises a rich mix of perspectives again ranging from Altair's investigation of one
6:05remarkable strand of Auerbach practice his portraits of Gerda Boehm to the poet Pele Cox's
6:11experiment in painting a portrait in verse to Peter Davidson's investigation of how Auerbach's
6:16works might be placed in productive dialogue with those by his contemporary Mervyn Peake so a really
6:22rich day ahead and crucial to its success though and this is one really point I want to dwell
6:29upon will be your involvement and the discussions we'll be having together across the next few hours
6:35all the talks as I've said will be short at 10 minutes long and then there'll be plenty of time
6:40for questions and observations and conversation so please join in whether through asking questions of
6:45our speakers or offering your own observations and arguments about Auerbach's drawings these drawings
6:51are of course famous for their energy and their depth and their quality and their originality but
6:56let's try and match them or at least try and match them somewhere near and the energy and
7:00the depth and the quality in the conversation the originality of our own conversation but
7:05remember too that Auerbach constantly wiped away his first ideas and started again so don't worry
7:11whatsoever if you about throwing in an idea that seems very speculative or half formed the best
7:18thinking it seems to me always involves trying things out essaying a possible way of looking
7:24making a stab at a productive comparison so let's try and do that together today and it
7:29always involves collaboration and feedback so I think this is a perfect forum in which to start
7:33thinking again really originally about Auerbach's drawings and I really look forward to thinking and
7:39talking together today wonderful so I'm as I said introducing the first chairing the first panel
7:46so I think we'll kick off and we've got uh three speakers they'll be speaking in order and together
7:52in succession rather sorry and I'll quickly introduce them all now and then we'll hear them
7:57in succession and then have a chance to gather them all together at this table and get you to
8:02ask questions of them and to have a conversation with you all about things that they talked about
8:07so our three speakers in this first session are Dr James Finch who's assistant curator 19th century
8:12British Art at Tate Britain Dr Kate Aspinall who's an independent art historian and someone who's a
8:21great expert on drawing and who's PhD focused on that subject and then our third speaker is Alex
8:28Massouras uh both one of those rare people who's both a brilliant artist and a brilliant critic and
8:33writer so it's great to have Alex with us as well and so all three as I mentioned contributed to
8:40the book we produced the PMC it' be great to hear their updated thoughts on Auerbach's drawings so
8:45can I ask begin by asking James to come here and talk about nothing a paper described that
8:52entitled "Nothing one began with but a new fact" Destruction and Creation in Auerbach's drawings
8:57drawings thanks very much indeed thank you
9:04hello everyone thanks Mark and thanks to Altair and everyone involved in organizing this wonderful
9:09event in 1959 at the end of his first decade as an artist Frank Auerbach published his most
9:19extensive artists statement to date Fragments from a Conversation which appeared in the first
9:24issue of the quarterly arts periodical X you can see the title page here as the title suggests the
9:30text is neither a piece of prose written directly by Auerbach nor a conventional
9:34interview but fragments of conversation which were assembled by the author Elizabeth Smart
9:40the choice of both publication and format are noteworthy Auerbach an artist known for his
9:45love of poetry and literature is situated in a primarily literary context in which his text
9:51is followed by Samuel Beckett's L’Image moreover the text itself is fragmentary full of hesitations
9:58and ellipses rejecting immediate legibility in favour of a more complex process all of this
10:04makes it a fitting written analogue to Auerbach's artistic practice contemporary with the heads in
10:09The Courtauld Gallery exhibition perhaps the most striking aspect of the text is the frequency with
10:15which Auerbach uses the word destroy or other conjugations of the verb 12 times in all a few
10:21examples are as follows one must be perpetually willing to destroy in painting one destroys
10:28everything in life one can't do it I've destroyed all the reminders that is of painting to get a
10:34unique thing the thing is to get other people's rules and destroy them and get one's own and the
10:41only possible progress is to destroy then one's left with nothing one began with but a new fact
10:48in this brief paper I want to think about some of the dimensions of this poetics of destruction
10:54the several meanings of the words destroy and destruction vary in the degree to which they
10:59emphasize either the act of undoing or the way in which that process occurs both of which are
11:03relevant in this case to begin with the process by which Auerbach's early charcoal heads were made we
11:09know that this involved repeatedly drawing and erasing a likeness on the sheet of paper until
11:15as the artist later stated the drawing quote had risen out of the battle into being an image that
11:21stands up for itself this was a process of making and unmaking which eventually led to a resolution
11:28in the process of which the effort involved in that process was recorded on the support
11:34Auerbach's Self-portrait of 1958 to which Colm Tobin devoted his catalogue essay and several
11:41hours of direct observation demonstrates with particular clarity the way in which reckoning
11:46with tears and patching into the support is a necessary part of experiencing these works
11:51Tobin describes it in relation to collage and disparate textures stitched together this is
11:58perhaps nothing intentional on Auerbach's part and in several cases Auerbach pre-emptively
12:03reinforced the support by attaching two sheets of paper which somewhat mitigated the need for
12:07patching in at later stages on a recent visit to the exhibition I overheard visitors comparing the
12:13damage to the paper to either skin peeling blistering or even scarring with particular
12:18reference to the Head of Kossoff seen here as if to draw a parallel between the human
12:23body and the paper support but even if we do not subscribe to this particular interpretation the
12:29damage sustained to the support is a record and making visible and making visible of the
12:34intensity and duration in producing these drawings Auerbach's drawings do seem to me to epitomize
12:40Picasso's description of his pictures in 1935 to Christian Zervos as not a sum of additions
12:46but a sum of destructions in Auerbach's early paintings this process is concealed beneath the
12:53accumulation of layer upon layer of paint which lends them an organic living quality perhaps a
12:59sum of additions the drawings however are a sum of destructions not only in the patching in of paper
13:05but also in the erasing of lines in which a hard typewriter rubber becomes a drawing implement in
13:11itself Auerbach's willingness to absorb this damage into the visual experience
13:17of his work rather than seeking to conceal it is something that he shared with artists such
13:22as Lucio Fontana whose first concetto spaziale concepts are contemporary with
13:28Auerbach's earliest charcoal heads and Gustav Metzger who is perhaps particularly relevant
13:33in this regard Metzger studied alongside hour back in David Bomberg's class at the Borough
13:39Polytechnic and was in the early 1950s the occupant of the Camden Studio which passed
13:45to Leon Kossoff before Auerbach took it on the 1950s for Metzger was a decade in
13:50which he moved from making charcoal drawings including drawings of Auerbach some of which
13:54were exhibited in his 1960 Temple Gallery show you can see the list of works for that show here
14:00alongside one of Metzger's drawings of Auerbach before swiftly moving to abstraction and the auto
14:06destructive art which David Mellor in his essay about context for Auerbach's Charcoal
14:11Heads relates to some of Auerbach's drawings he specifically connects the heads of Gerda
14:17Boehm with the South Bank performance in 1959 in which Metzger threw acid
14:24against nylon screens the 1950s were a decade of reconstruction and reckoning
14:29with the aftermath of the second world war which was visible across Auerbach's work of
14:33this period particularly in his series of paintings of London building sites arising
14:38from a fascination with the rebuilding of London after the war this body of work was the subject
14:43of an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery in 2012 in portraiture meanwhile exhibitions of
14:49the 1950s such as New Images of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York surveyed
14:54a strain of portraiture that spoke to ideas of suffering humanity inflected by postwar
14:59anxieties Auerbach's work was not included in this exhibition but one can certainly see
15:05it as in dialogue with those included such as Francis Bacon Jean Dubuffet and Willem
15:10de Kooning a common concern amongst Auerbach's generation encapsulated in those building site
15:18paintings was that of rebuilding or restarting from first principles which in Auerbach's case
15:24applied not only in a material sense but also in asserting his independence as an artist
15:29as he stated in Fragments from a Conversation quote the thing is to get other people's rules
15:34and destroy them and get one's own Auerbach was rigorous in his study of historic art and
15:41in another early artist statement he wrote quote I do not think of myself as a rebel for a year I
15:47drew almost every day at the National Gallery and you can see here one of his studies after
15:52Turner's painting The Parting of Hero and Leander in the National Gallery at the same time Auerbach
15:58wanted to find ways of evading the formula he found in other artists he said for instance
16:04that quote even infinitely more powerful painters than me who do portraiture eventually get into
16:10certain habits so there's a painter who is as magically inexplicably gifted as Gainsborough
16:15or an enormously talented painter like Sargent when they get down to painting a stranger they
16:20get into certain habits end quote Sargent incidentally was also prolific in charcoal
16:27but nothing could be further from Auerbach's charcoal drawings than those that Sargent was
16:31making as recently as 25 years earlier for Sargent the charcoal portrait was a single
16:37sitting exercise in virtuosity a consolation tries for patrons who he no longer wished to
16:42paint in oils for Auerbach rather the intention seems to have been to exhaust the potential of
16:47the charcoal portrait as a medium both in terms of what his medium could sustain and what his sitters
16:53could tolerate and I think here of the clouds of dust gathering in EOW's flat it's as if the
16:59artist wondered what would it be like to pour all of the exertion of an oil painting into a drawing
17:05room destroying other people's rules destroying ideas about how a work of expect how a work of
17:12art is expected to look these were ways for Auerbach to create conditions for him to work
17:18indeed fragments of from a conversation appeared in X alongside the Dream the Sphinx and the
17:24Death of Tea a text by Alberto Giacometti one of Auerbach's artistic heroes who Auerbach said quote offered
17:32hope to can carry on and give everything for a truthful art without any compromises Giacometti as
17:41much as any artist working during this period epitomized for Auerbach the integrity which
17:45he sought to emulate this idea of a new fact which Auerbach wanted to bring into being is
17:52evident in the works themselves but it was equally amplified through the statements
17:56and texts through which he accompanied his emergence as an artist during the postwar period
18:02and through which he set out a manifesto of his ideas and aims as an artist thank
18:09you hello and thank you I am going to talk very casually today about how Auerbach really
18:24used the means and the ideas the notions of what traditional drawing is to return to this notion of
18:31figure and ground revising it reordering it and in doing so how he created a remarkable
18:37sense of underneathness and depth in his materials I chose as the title page this absolutely stunning
18:46moment of a beautiful damage and we've just heard wonderfully about the various ways obstruction
18:51works this is the melting away of Stella's forehead Head of EOW 1957 and I love this one
18:58particularly this is a research photograph I took when we were working on the book because you see
19:03the forcefulness of the charcoal line that talks about the or describes the horizon of her head
19:10and so you see him working weaving through the damage and the real decisions that's made in
19:15that moment but a lot of my research has primarily looked at his later drawings and by later I mean
19:23with his return in 1973 took a brief Hiatus after producing the charcoal on such beautiful display
19:30at The Courtauld and I'm going to come back to these early pieces but just to divert to
19:35explain what I mean by figure and ground and underneath this kind of labour is much more
19:41visible in these later pieces because Auerbach is working and thinking much more linearly he's
19:47using lines and marks on the surface in ways that are easier for us to follow his hand or at least
19:54maybe suggest that they are so when I talk about figure and ground I'm of course referring to the
20:01gestalt psychological notion that we reflexively read something as being in the foreground and
20:08something is being in the background and that it's impossible to overlay these two things we
20:13make an instant visual decision and how Auerbach has played with that in his use of marks and
20:20surfaces this is really beautifully summed up in this wonderful quote that he gave during a talk
20:27at the Royal Drawing School of William Feaver in 2007 where talking about colour he said I think
20:34about it as a form of drawing that is I think this is coming forward and this is making a connection
20:40this is establishing an echo somewhere this is cutting through the morass that I've gotten into
20:47I think that's extremely profound as a way to think about what marks were for Auerbach
20:52that each of these lines is a cutting mark and what I mean by that especially in relation to
20:59figure and ground is this notion of redrawing which we've already heard about but in these
21:05pieces he would work for 20 or 30 multiple hour sessions on a single piece of paper often erasing
21:12it down to what he called ghost drawings and then starting again letting the mesh and the
21:18lattice of what remained suggest what would come first but when we think about cutting cutting the morass
21:26it's almost as if each mark once made becomes the background it becomes unimportant transparent and
21:34so we review pieces like these too which are some of my favourites of these we've got Catherine Lampert IV
21:40of 1979 and Head of Julia of 1985 we have lines many drawings condensed in the lines creating
21:49almost sedimentary layers meshes that our eye slips between as we try to read the coherent image
21:57especially in Catherine Lampert our urge our reflex to read for humans becomes complicated we almost fall
22:04optically between the layers of these marks into a depth which is where the focus on underneath goes
22:13but this is conceptually relevant for looking at his earlier pieces this process of labour in this
22:21case amassing the labour rather than erasing it is very operative in these pieces partly just the
22:30density of the work that you put here but one of the things that's come to interest me ever
22:35since I started looking at Auerbach is how he is working through this in the more private spaces
22:42not necessarily his presentation drawings which by which I mean the drawings that are intentionally
22:48conceived of as operating in an exhibiting context to be consumed as fine art if you will rather than
22:55research drawings when we look at his very early pieces these are from the life rooms of his
23:02art schools and reclining nude 1955 this is a later piece but this first one the one on the far is
23:09that your left far left was done in the life room at St Martins under Vivian Pitchforth and
23:16we see a much more conventional notion of the body depicted in line the second one standing nude is
23:23reported by Auerbach to have been done at the RCA where we think it's likely he was either taught by
23:29Robert Buhler or by John Minton and here we see him doing again this notion of line and space
23:37figure and ground but almost sort of falling into different ways of conceiving how you can collapse
23:44to and it's worthwhile noting that although these weren't done at the Borough Polytechnic Technic under Bomberg
23:50class this is very much at the same time that he was moonlighting doing what he called the messy
23:56great enduration of grandeur of charcoal that was going on there but what's interesting about
24:03these is this use of the red line the red mark as another early version of him thinking through the
24:09cutting line of the quotation I gave you from 2007 trying to find ways to create a convincing
24:16mass of the surface of these drawings which I think he perfected in the portrait heads in the
24:22exhibition but here in these more private early transitional moments playing with the red as a
24:29way to cut to delegate into the background the otherwise business of these surfaces and what's
24:37interesting is he comes back to this after he does the run of these early heads in the transitional
24:45period right before he gives up drawing for a time and so these early heads they become more
24:52graphically complex in 1958 and he does the last one that doesn't get subsumed to paint in '62 but
24:59before he does this in 1960 1962 he begins to use this red line to experiment with this process of
25:07delegation this cutting redness here it's still very much accent and this is interesting as well
25:15because accents linear accents are something that he very much disavowed this is another quote from
25:211978 in conversation with Catherine Lampert where he said I remember making an effort in his early
25:28works to not make any linear accents but to simply make convincing mass out of these surfaces and in
25:35a way one exhaust an effort one takes a thing as far as it will go and then one does what one can
25:40with another pigment now Auerbach is famous for talking about the transition that he made in the
25:45early 70s to working on much more shallow painted and drawn surfaces and drawing this is largely
25:52transitioning to a much thicker paper which he said asked more of him but it could also take more
25:57abuse and so this he sort of disavowed in a humbling way these aesthetic choices and so this is in some
26:06ways has to be queried as him looking back on an earlier now obsolete way of making very mass
26:12very heavy drawings and disavowing it but in another sense I think this is a really important quotation
26:18in that it shows that what he was reacting against when he creates these massed pictures
26:23was almost a fear of the linearity in drawing that it would speak to people's expectations
26:28of something sketchy auto biographical the little mark the fleeting note and that he
26:35wanted to make something that famously lived on its own in its own terms and yet he clearly was
26:43thinking about linear accents not necessarily about accents as access but how to order his
26:50substances and so to wrap this back into these runs of early heads what I think is important
26:59here is this notion of the figure and ground the surface and the mark the depth the underneathness but
27:05how it manifests here is not only the sense of labouring but it's the emphasis of the materiality
27:12the sculptural object that when we engage with these pieces as we've heard so beautifully from
27:17James we're dealing with the paper as this vulnerable but also thick substance oh and
27:24I should go back here just a moment to say these are some very ways that he does abuse his paper
27:30and interestingly enough I wanted to give you this because he does so often put I think an abundance
27:37of pin holes in the corners and I've been in one private collection where the piece still had
27:41staples in those corners and there's an element of accidental possibly joyful definitely so I
27:49do encourage you always to look at the edge of his pictures because I think those are very much materially
27:55adamant as their own beings but we have also the scars and then the patch and I am very curious
28:02about whether Auerbach conceived the patches before or after he talks about them as patches
28:08but so often they bisect points of particular anatomical vulnerability here Stella's neck is
28:14ripped jaggedly and so the consciousness working backwards and forwards from notions of corporeal
28:20damage is very clear but coming back to what I was talking about with the figure the ground
28:26and the perplexing sense of underneathness this sense of paper as an object paper as laboured really
28:33brings us into an unavoidable confrontation with it as a material fact and yet to read something
28:41like his stunning Self-portrait 1958 we have to look through the various plains of patches that
28:50are in between us and his eyes in order to read this as a human we are making the paper invisible
28:57but we are also because of its adamancy as a feature particularly fixated by it and thus our perceptual
29:04reflex to read something as invisible or visible is intentionally and beautifully confounded we
29:11oscillate in a kind of paradox of legibility in these pieces and so although that is very
29:17evident in the linear works of his later period in this sheer sense of the papery paper the way
29:24paper interposes itself I'd say that it is equally part of the power of these early works thank you [Applause]
29:34so um thank you everyone for the invitation today thank you Altair Mark Sarah
29:44fellow speakers I also wanted a quick note of gratitude and thanks to the late David Mellor
29:51who with whom I enjoyed talking about Auerbach so much and his contributions will be I think
29:56very missed today yeah I'm talking today about resemblance which is a an enormous
30:05idea in in painting and drawing uh so perhaps a very ill chosen subject for a 10-minute talk
30:14you know it is the question in in making marks of what is the thread that binds the the image
30:23that you're inventing anew and the world outside that informs or inspires it what does it mean to
30:32paint what you see or draw what you see it's a question that doesn't go away and that I think
30:38I don't know the answer to but with that in mind so I I'm taking my conceptual framework
30:48from this it's inspired by this Gertrude Stein poem If I Told Him a completed portrait of Picasso
30:56from 1923 why is it so relevant for thinking about resemblance in Auerbach's work well let
31:03me explain it has I won't read it all it has these rhythms of looping almost repetitions are
31:11a sort of leitmotif of the poem it's dance with completion both in the title and completed
31:18portrait of Picasso which is constantly undermined by its distracted fragmentary
31:24qualities and its terminology it alights emphasizes very heavily shutters which for me
31:34takes us to photography the camera shutter or just being shuttered away maybe in Mornington
31:39Crescent but most particularly the way that it lands on the question of resemblance and
31:45I will read this bit so top left is the Vanity Fair publication that it first appeared in then
31:51that's a little excerpt and I shall read from the excerpt there exact resemblance with where
31:57are we almost at the bottom exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as
32:04exact resemblance exactly as resembling exactly resembling exactly in resemblance exactly and
32:11resemblance so I've what does it mean when thinking about resemblance in Auerbach's
32:21drawings I've divided them into five types of resemblance the first one which deserves
32:30parenthesis because it's so such a given in this type of drawing I suppose is it is
32:35resemblance to the sitter a boilerplate aspect of portraiture or head drawing but nonetheless
32:43I think remarkable in Auerbach's work and I speak with a personal experience of having first
32:49recognized two people Catherine Lampert and David Landow from having seen drawings so there
32:57is this discombobulating and weird thing of being able to recognizing someone like a celebrity
33:04through these drawings that are so mediated by abstraction and that look so implausible as
33:14vessels for communicating the resemblance of a person to me so that's resemblance one
33:22resemblance two is a resemblance within the drawing themselves and I've stolen these
33:31slides from the catalogue of the new exhibition and we can see this you know we're looking here
33:38at the finished drawing and then these archival photographs of drawings in earlier atates not that we
33:44can really call them earlier states and I looking at these I wondered is this is this a
33:52legitimate form of resemblance is this always true when you make am I just describing
33:59visual editing essentially as an image evolves that it will always look a little bit like it did
34:05before and a little different can we describe that as resemblance maybe so but I do think
34:13if it is always true for the process of making something it is super true when looking at
34:19Auerbach for reasons that he gives us there's something distinctive going on he doesn't think
34:27of these as we know as earlier states he talks of them as destroyed drawings so there's a reason
34:33to separate these cut them cleanly in time and consider them as individual drawings and then
34:43therefore to think about the resemblance that they might have to their earlier pre pre-drawing self
34:53so that's one example from the catalogue and this is another just making the same
34:58point then of course we have type three of resemblance resemblances between different
35:11drawings of the same sitter sometimes these have such deliberate affinities that they
35:19express a kind of print of the impulse almost of additioning which I think takes us to
35:24back to what Kate was just saying about figure and ground this relationship
35:29cutting as described there in drawing is fundamentally a printerly mode of making marks
35:37and there's you know this resemblance occurs across the drawings and it matches or describes
35:48maybe the process observing people over a very long period of time in every sense aging comes into
35:57play this is like seeing different generations of the same family or perhaps evokes the metaphor
36:04of the Argo with its replaced timbers they point us I think these drawings these series of
36:11drawings to thinking about the continuity of personhood how do we differ from our younger
36:16selves can we think of someone in their 40s 50s or 60s as resembling their 20 or 30 year old self
36:25I think this is a kind of of resemblance that is manifested in these in these
36:31drawings its worth saying no doubt that resemblance of this type happens elsewhere in art
36:49two famous examples there and this wonderful work by Vija Celmins to fix the image in memory
36:57that I always go back to I don't know if you're familiar with it but it sets up the relationship
37:01between the found pebble and the elaborately created mimetic representation or replica of
37:15the pebble created in bronze and then painted afterwards and then displayed as these
37:20confusing pairings where suddenly everything is thrown into question which is the original is
37:27it the work that the artist has carefully made or is it the found object so you know resemblance
37:33we see elsewhere but but I will come back to why it matters more with Auerbach
37:45um no not yet so we can go my fourth type of resemblance is a slightly more abstracted
37:55resemblance it's the it's what we call what we account for in terms of style describing style
38:02one of those willow the wisps which can only mean anything with populations of images or objects
38:11so I think when we go back and look at Auerbach drawings we're seeing the resemblance of the sitter
38:17the resemblance of the sitter across time to themselves in different in different phases
38:25but we're also seeing the resemblance to Auerbach to his work to Auerbach's space you know there is
38:31a arguably these drawings resemble him as much as they can resemble the sitter and they they're sort
38:38of loaded with all these other resemblances that are that surround what is ostensibly the subject
38:46um so yes the four the fifth kind of resemblance is something more mysterious and it's
38:58difficult to articulate so I'm resorting to again slightly questionable metaphors but this
39:05is the film Together which we know from David Mellor Auerbach went to see at the first National
39:16Film Theatre screening in 1956 with Helen Lessore and Francis Bacon actually um and it's I I've
39:26got here because watching this film I don't really see the characters I see uh Michael Andrews and
39:32Eduardo Paolozzi what what is this what do those resemblances mean and it's a film
39:43so it's it can be used to clumsily segue into thinking about another thing that Auerbach always
39:49brings me to uh which is these images of Edward Muybridge and the incremental shift shifting of
39:57image images over time in film rapid regression through still images obscures each individual
40:05image but in return gives the watcher a sense of the film's view in dynamic time this parallel is
40:12useful because moving images inhabit a strange space where the viewer's perception depends on
40:18seeing both what is and what isn't there to use Gombrich's phrase for the collaborative quality of
40:25perception this is the beholder's share the viewer provides the assumptions of continuity
40:33necessary to stitch together sequences unfolding on the screen which is really beautifully evoked
40:40in this film by the artist John Stezaker called Marriage and I've got a a sort of representative
40:47still from it but it is a it's a film where he has assembled head shots from the golden
40:54age of cinema of actors so these are images that are publicity images individualizing
41:03their sitters but by rapidly playing them at film's frequency watching the film
41:12the faces are completely obscured and you're just left with this sort of ghost these ghost
41:16faces that hear but don't really they they they're so divorced from their original purpose
41:27so applied to Auerbach's portrait drawings these properties carry particular
41:35force portraiture confronts the impossibilities of representing a subject as complicated as and
41:42as unfixed as a person which is why an image of a person in stickier time fragmented and
41:50recongealed across multiple moments has such weight in these charcoal heads
41:58so yeah in 1959 as James mentioned he spoke of trying to tie up the fact and the
42:04image offering this kind of time inflected truth I think I've spent 10 minutes already
42:12so I won't I won't talk about that but lastly I just wanted to invite you all to
42:18my private view next Wednesday where you know thinking about Auerbach has sort of made me
42:29think slightly differently about these paintings we've been talking about heads of individuals
42:34in constant spaces that are unchanging and I've been making figures that are anonymous and
42:42that's are nowhere but you'd be more than welcome to come and see them thank you very
42:49much great thanks Alex and thanks all can we just now gather the three speakers here at the
43:01front great well as I said I'd really like to invite questions from the audience and to get
43:07a a good discussion going between the three speakers and our speakers across the day
43:12but also between speakers and all of you and even across and between you as you as you
43:20think about Auerbach's work so any questions that we that that you'd like to ask to kick us off and
43:29to respond to the talks you've heard and and I think what we'll do is we're bringing looks
43:34like we're going to be bringing a mic around thanks Lynn for you first thank thank you very
43:40much and thank you to all three speakers because lots of ideas circulating I was thinking in particular about
43:52James's paper on poetics of destruction of course there's a very long history of philosophy
44:04destruction and I use this uh deliberately penetration of the brush or you know by the
44:11brush and so on but I wonder I mean for me I could imagine that Auerbach was thinking about the gendering of it
44:26the gendering of style and the gendering of the image of the artist and I just wondered if you
44:36could I know that about a different aspect interality but this is about
44:46style the relationship of you know the charcoal the pencil and
44:52surface thankyou yeah no that's a really great point Lynn um I don't have any um I
45:02think that's very true but I don't have any immediate thoughts you have
45:07anything I I do think you made an interesting point about the self-portrait in so many of these
45:16early heads they do have a existence kind of outside of gender they all turn out to
45:21be somehow monolithic looking similar alien forms where I I find it interesting that he fixates more
45:29on the mood of the lips and their closedness and when you said talked about penetration
45:34is sort of curious also that these feel like heads that have no ability to communicate or
45:40to receive they are almost sensory deprivation chamber pieces and so I sort of struck when you
45:47were saying that both about your point of the similarity of what he's reading into this and
45:52perhaps that also speaks to your point about him responding to Gainsborough falling into certain
45:57habits and maybe that's part of a discussion to have about his relationship of sort of regret
46:02but also joy in these early works that he's not returned to work in that style but I also
46:07do think in terms of the gendering there is a curious refusal of refusal is a wrong word but
46:13something needing something from his sitters that he's almost portraying not getting and
46:18whether that could be conceived of in gender perhaps I've often wondered about that as the
46:23friendship relationship as just from a a human perspective it's a very cruel thing to do to
46:29have friendships that are based on sitting for you for hundreds of hours the power of that of
46:36them being locked in position I think is very interesting thing as well so Lynn did you want to
46:43say a word or two more about your perspectives on that on this question now that we've heard
46:49responses interesting I think for all of us to particular it's just um you know having
46:57thought and actually I think these questions are particularly sort of unavoidable when it's the head of a body so
47:10actually also these kind of questions it's not about whether I'm not trying to fix
47:21a meaning it's just that those metaphors have such a long history of gendered association
47:28and the destruction of the surface so visible you know it seemed to me something that one
47:38necessarily had to think about as as a question of of a poetics with Auerbach is partially of style
47:49itself thanks very much indeed any other questions Sarah
48:00I think there's a a thread of connection here and actually Kate just picking up on um something you
48:05mentioned and actually just first of all to say I really enjoyed those presentations actually really
48:11thought provoking and so I'm I don't have a fully formed question because I'm still thinking
48:17through the ideas that you all presented but my thoughts landed on friendship and drawing and
48:25I think how well struck James when you showed Metzger's head of Auerbach and then we also talked
48:35about Kossoff and I was thinking about something about the intimacy of drawing and you about the
48:42the transactional nature of sitting as well but something for Auerbach about charcoal and
48:51friendship and can we make connections between the act of drawing and materiality and using particular
48:59materials as well something that has a a texture of that soft perhaps but you've all talked about
49:06forcefulness as well so I'm not quite so sure whether I'm going with that but I I just want
49:11to kind of pick up on this idea of friendship and drawing and I would actually love to see an
49:15exhibition of these friendship portraits as well I think that could be very powerful
49:21and see those dialogues between maybe people of a certain age drawing each other as well and
49:28there's something there about being a cohort and being in intimate conversation about your
49:32practice so anyway I I'll leave that there and I'm sure something more coherent will form in
49:38conversation yeah yeah thanks Sarah yeah I mean I think definitely in in terms
49:48of that that medium and and the charcoal drawing it's kind of has just this long history of
49:53being associated with more informal and more intimate representations rather than kind of works
50:01of works made specifically for exhibition and the majority of I mean I refer to the charcoal to
50:07Sargent's charcoal drawings which were primarily kind of presentation drawings made to sitters and
50:13they kind of have this kind of yeah they they they do have the kind of this this intimacy
50:18associated with them so I think I think that's that's a that's a part of it definitely and
50:23of course it is that intimacy with sitters that in Auerbach's work he attributes to him being a
50:31able to get away from templates and formula and other people's rules as he describes it to
50:37kind of to reach something that's more specific and that that new fact that he that he talks
50:42about so that's definitely the relationship with the with the sitter is really fundamental
50:47for him and although I don't I haven't really thought this through I think there is something
50:52interesting about as you say the relationship between the the softness of of of drawing and and
50:58the charcoal medium and and and that force and that destructive element that Auerbach wants to
51:06kind of he keeps talking about bringing to it so there's something about kind of the the tension
51:11and the dialectic and the relationship between the hard and the soft in these works which perhaps
51:17gives something of that very unique quality but then isn't the I mean yes the the material
51:24has its own voice of the the softness might encourage intimacy in that way but I think of
51:34would we really describe a Sargent charcoal as intimate I think it's part of the sense of
51:40intimacy comes from the almost I mean I don't really like using the word but the style of it
51:45that the tempestuous laboured appearance of it that um see you know it's it seems to be
51:58more intimate more revealing more honest somehow yeah I mean I think I I wouldn't want to to um
52:08let the material dictate too much the qualities of the image because there are I mean think of silver
52:16point or engraved lines like surely there are some extremely intimate and documents
52:26of an encounter between an artist and a centre in those media as well I would like to I'll say I
52:34think it's interesting I mean just building off your query I mean he talked about I think
52:39this is in his son Jake's one of the films he made interviewing his father about the aggressiveness
52:45of the charcoal especially in the basement of Stella's home where she was posing that there were
52:50just clouds of it everywhere and she described the oppression of it being like cold choked air and
52:57it's also interesting that when he comes back to in the 70s he starts to use more and more pencil
53:03and that being for me the more intimate like friendly medium because charcoal it's messy
53:10it's kind of violent I you agree and I agree with both of you about the the stylistic intimacy
53:16that we get aesthetically from it but I think there is something really interesting about what
53:20you're saying of where and how does politeness perhaps press down on him and when its absence
53:26is perhaps telling because he talks quite a bit also about painting his wife Julia in acrylics
53:33rather than oils to have less mess in the spaces that they're sharing and so there are these sort
53:39of interesting very sort of anti-Mythos like compromises that he makes from love I would say
53:47so can I just following up from Sarah's question I just wanted to ask you all about whether you think
53:53that the actual practice of the way in which he organised his portraits Auerbach and the
53:57sitting is rather different to the conventional sitting in relation to its proximity I've always
54:02got this sense and it's very interesting that David Mellor we have to pay tribute to today
54:09in his essay talked compared Auerbach drawings of this period with Pinter's early film an early
54:15film in which Pinter talks about having filmed it where it was all really close up they didn't
54:20had no money there was you know very cramped quarters in a in a in a in in some kind of house
54:26in the East End of London and it was done very close up very and and it generated a very partic
54:31and from low down generated a very particular perspective and do you get the sense that with
54:36these portraits that actually there's a kind of a closeness it's almost as if if you know painting
54:41James here or there's a there's actually a closeness in relation to where Auerbach was doing
54:46those drawings from in relation to the sitter that's actually rather unusual compared to the traditions
54:51of portraiture and that's partly what generates that sense of closeness and intensity in the work I don't you
54:56know following on from what Claire has said I wonder if you think there's it's almost a kind of reshaping
55:01of the spatial dynamics of portraiture which brings them brings the artist and
55:07the sitter very close up in the actual practice of producing of them I think certainly
55:14and um I wonder that if that relates to lighting as well the proximity and the lighting if it does
55:20have that filmic connection you know I'm thinking of lenses and how a telephoto lens um
55:31requires more light than a than a standard lens so if you're filming further away you would need
55:38a more light-filled situation and maybe there's a a link between the that sort of contrasting lighting
55:48and the proximity as well of course James Hyman in The Battle for Realism talks a lot about the the
55:55trend in the '50s you touched on this as well in your chapter but Freud as well was doing that
56:02very close look the portrait of Garrick Brown is just just the face and that notion of the violence of
56:09proximity I think it's really it's a nice phrase violence of proximity yes a nice phrase again going back
56:16to Stella's basement I mean he talks about on his knees before her and so I think that question of
56:22reconstructing whether you're looking up almost praying to your sitter looking down violently close it's
56:28a nice question yeah then you have those kind of quite unexpected angles of the heads that kind
56:35of vary between sitters which kind of seem to to to speak to that closeness and also kind of
56:41the the lighting might have something to do with that very sharp chiaroscuro and and kind of the
56:47amount of use of the eraser to the eraser to get those very sharp contrasts yes thank you question
56:55there all of you feel encouraged to ask
56:59questions another big question for you Alex you mentioned in resemblance and you show a
57:11picture of different stages and I just wondered if you had any thoughts as to why he actually took
57:18those pictures and I'm also curious as to you know where they were printed the photographs of the stages you know where they for
57:27friends or how did they come about so those ones correct me if I'm wrong but I think they were
57:34found in the in Helen Lessore archive yeah and I think I would have to speculate as to why
57:43they were taken but it must have something to do with destruction uh the possibility of
57:50these drawings being you know drawn away lost completely if no if no satisfactory
58:00drawing came from that process then presumably that photograph was was simply a record of that
58:09failed endeavour but maybe they maybe the documenting of the stage not that we can call it
58:16a stage but maybe that becomes redundant if the drawing is successful in the end I don't know
58:23it does seem like a slightly counterintuitive thing if you're so dissatisfied with the work
58:29that you want to keep going come what may that you should also record it just in case yeah Isobel
58:40well thank you all so much I really enjoyed those papers and I think what each of them
58:49touched on was the sort of the the idea of destruction the kind of violence that came
58:54with that and this sort of idea of erasure and reinstatement and I couldn't help but
59:00think of the you know the postwar landscape in which these artists were living and you
59:06know seeing these transitions between you know the bomb sites the building sites
59:11you know Auerbach also was recording and whether you think or to what extent do you think that this
59:20external world the sort of landscape affected the way that he approach these drawings do you
59:26think that there is a sort of link between that kind of destroyed environment and
59:32the transition between bomb sites and building sites sort of impacted these
59:37works I think I I can't speak of particular experience but certainly
59:46I think fact that he had such a a fecund inspiration from building sites
59:51specifically building sites especially when they they were at that sort of
59:55whole stage where it's all malleability I think speaks to that being a definite
1:00:00consciousness but the building sites often look like ruin-scapes as well yes I yeah I wonder if it comes
1:00:09back to the to charcoal I mean charcoal is such a a burnt material it would be hard to imagine
1:00:17using it in that period without some trace memory or awareness of what burnt out buildings
1:00:28look and felt smelt like actually yeah yeah and and certainly he's talking about the the building
1:00:37sites in that fragment so from a conversation and that's all kind of segued into this
1:00:45needing to needing to start from scratch and get get rid of everything that went before and and
1:00:51and pare everything back and restart so um I think that's that's all part of the the general
1:00:57rhetoric of of Auerbach's artist's statements around this time and I think and I think also just
1:01:06as a side point something that I was thinking of in relation to this talk is that there's kind
1:01:11of like a growth in new artist magazines and forums and catalogues in which artist statements
1:01:20were were solicited and so I think it it's kind of a time when you get this proliferation of artist
1:01:25statements where artists are themselves being invited to kind of project their thoughts into
1:01:31kind of this into this kind of empty space either with or without an interlocutor which I think is
1:01:37in a way that's perhaps slightly different to the the previous generation is kind of asking them
1:01:42to kind of articulate their their thoughts and their vision in a way that kind of is itself
1:01:47kind of a start a form of of of starting anew he speaks a lot about idioms sorry wait for the mic
1:01:57speak quite loudly into the mic that'd be great he speaks a lot about idioms I think the idiom Auerbach
1:02:04chooses was obviously is one he's chosen but I think the the fact he found himself in 1950s
1:02:11London and that that the the idiom that he chose as possibly seems to be predicated by the area
1:02:18he found himself within so the building sites would have had some effect on the way the pictures
1:02:27look but had he found himself somewhere different than the idiom would have been in correspondence
1:02:33and in parallel to where he found himself can I say something to that it it wasn't one second
1:02:41you wait for the we'd love you to say something to it but can you just wait for the mic thank you
1:02:45hello the gentleman's just said something that I was thinking about because that
1:02:52time in London it was very much the smogs and also I believe where Auerbach lived was very
1:02:59near the railway line big railway line coming into Kings Cross lot of
1:03:05you may not remember but there were steam trains it was all dirty and muggy and grey
1:03:12so okay thank you there's more hands coming up as we yeah I wasn't aware of that connection with Pinter
1:03:23but it set me thinking about the way the way that early Pinter plays are very often set in dark
1:03:33cellars in the solitariness and the violence the threat of violence there seems to be
1:03:40thematic connections there no I agree I think there's a really interesting parallel
1:03:45there thank you other questions we've got some from this side now
1:03:49hands are racing up yeah one thing that we haven't mentioned that screams out at me the
1:04:01longer I get to know these amazing pictures by this amazing man there was an interview with
1:04:09Frank Radio 4 This Cultural Life but I hope you if you haven't heard it listen to
1:04:15it it's on BBC Sounds but he said something there that actually quite floored me because
1:04:23I got to know Frank in the 1970s when I'd been pestering him to help me with my dissertation
1:04:29as an undergraduate at Manchester University and he was really kind to me and as time
1:04:36passed I ended up at the National Gallery and curated his 1995 exhibition there made a film
1:04:42with him got to know him pretty well and in this interview he says for the first time I have
1:04:53perhaps been guilty of doing what you're told you really shouldn't do if you've gone through some
1:05:02kind of trauma which is burying it and Frank has always denied when I was a student naively
1:05:09I said so how did that affect you losing your parents waking up in a foreign country not
1:05:15speaking the language and all of that he said it didn't and that he gave he got a Red Cross
1:05:22package with his father's watch in in 1945 and the news that they' all been exterminated and
1:05:29he said it meant nothing to me I went down into a shop and sold it and every time since then when
1:05:36I've seen people try to address that he said no no didn't affect me at all and that statement in
1:05:42the This Cultural Life program I found it really quite ah Frank at last what we can
1:05:53actually see in your paintings that you've been saying isn't there actually is there and we're
1:05:59talking about destruction violence darkness the sight of the city of London that had been
1:06:08flattened how can it not have made this young kind of 20 year old think oh yeah my family were
1:06:18flattened as well and he always denied it until like a month ago and I just see that screaming out of these beautiful
1:06:27beautiful moving pictures that are on show at The Courtauld one one sorry just to say what it's very interesting you said just to follow on from what
1:06:37you just said Colin we've had um a number of emails written to the gallery saying
1:06:43precisely that and saying why isn't more made of that that and and where the writers right the
1:06:49people who write in have been saying look these are images that clearly come out of the Holocaust
1:06:53that clearly come out of that postwar period that are absolutely traumatic and we're in the gallery
1:06:59not making much of that although there are there are Barney's talked to me about this and said yeah
1:07:03there are references to this but it's not a big thematic argument about the show there so many of
1:07:09our visitors walking in responded in the way that you’ve responded and I do think we need to address
1:07:14that whether even if we end up thinking that it's not relevant or or that maybe not relevant but we
1:07:20have to be careful how we make those arguments but I do think we'll need to address that today in
1:07:26our conversation more generally there was a very vivid moment in that interview you described This Cultural
1:07:32Life where he mentioned never seeing their faces again faces of his family you know just
1:07:38getting on the train and this it complete wiping of his own personal history and yeah exactly
1:07:47as you say the the connections with a life that subsequently spent dedicated to describing the
1:07:57encounter with individuals seems so glaringly obvious doesn't it but I suppose the the question
1:08:06remains is it not the artist's prerogative to set out the framework for interpreting their
1:08:15work trust the teller not the tale or I I don't really know where we land on on respecting
1:08:24that desire to control the narrative well I think it's for the next generation to sort that out the
1:08:31same with Lucian Freud sorry it's for the next generation to sort that out and it's the same
1:08:38with Lucian Freud's pictures they are I mean he obviously didn't have a narrow escape like
1:08:45Frank did his family had the means to get out but I see that Jewish history in Freud's pictures and
1:08:52I know that some of his family his daughters do I've discussed it with them I would never have
1:08:58dared bring that up with him while he was alive and what pictures really mean um that's why
1:09:07we're sitting here talking about going round and round in circles well let's try not to go round and round in circles we can make more
1:09:15progress in that he won't say oh yes that's what I mean great okay thanks Colin another hand
1:09:22is raised at the back there it's Andrew's some some of you I know one of the things that occurred to me listening
1:09:30to some of the talks today was the similarity between Auerbach and Walter Sickert and some the pictures
1:09:40that you for example the and the use of shade the portraits expressions and is there any evidence
1:09:50of Auerbach being influenced by Sickert I mean I I think there is there's direct and indirect he had both books
1:10:02of collected writings of Sickert in his collection from pretty much the earliest possible so I had
1:10:07some fun time when I was doing the the chapter trying to compare which pieces of advice were in
1:10:13which edition the the early Sickert or later but then also Sickert was really quite important with
1:10:18Bomberg and interestingly Sargent encouraged the very young Bomberg to take up art when he saw him
1:10:24sketching so all these connections mesh together but there is certainly the connection as I say
1:10:30through the education system but then also I think Auerbach has been very vocal about his love of Sickert
1:10:35and certainly not only the writng not only the art but also the writings and their shared enjoyment and
1:10:42participation in theatre as well yes very much the Camden link and and I and I hadn't thought
1:10:49of La Hollandaise specifically but but since you mention it I think those paintings of EOW on the blue
1:10:56eiderdown that Auerbach made in the early 1960s I think there there's a lot of and of course
1:11:03the long shadow of photography in both in both of their practices it's more direct and literal
1:11:12in Sickert but hopefully I've argued that it's also there in in Auerbach too great other questions
1:11:22from the floor any yes there's one right next to you there great hi um going back to your paper on resemblance
1:11:31I didn't quite get number five I got a little
1:11:36lost film and resemblance so number four and five yeah so so the with each resemblance they get more
1:11:53abstracted and more externalized so three and four were and now I can't even remember
1:12:01but the the point is that resemblance five is this much more diffuse resemblance that requires
1:12:10elements from the audience as well I think resemblance when it's a very dispersed
1:12:20resemblance if you'll allow it I mean I it's an unresolved thought so that's probably why subjectivity yes
1:12:31yes yes question there from oh sorry question I know and that takes me back to resemblance I just wanted
1:12:42to add reading Giacometti also going for that for that thing and in the David Sylvester interview
1:12:54he says this is a translation into English is it like is it like so all we can say about Auerbach
1:13:03Giacometti just got back to that very that very simple point and kind of went round and not like
1:13:11something more
1:13:14hard and precise can I ask a question sorry no we'll come to you no no no your more important
1:13:24point could you speak up a bit is the mic working okay thank you
1:13:35[inaudible]
1:13:58have that proximity with it
1:14:11much more remote than how they're framed
1:14:27that's a really interesting question thanks yeah what that sense of the viewers proximity to
1:14:39or distance from and the engagement with the works yeah I I completely agree I I tend
1:14:45to look at the the paintings and the drawings very differently and that thing of having to
1:14:49step back for the image to cohere in the paintings versus the way that that Kate spoke about so
1:14:55beautifully about what what you're rewarded with from looking kind of extremely close up to
1:15:00the drawings and really kind of getting getting up close to them and I think as as someone
1:15:06who kind of spends a lot of time with Auerbach's statements and and interviews I think it's it's
1:15:13always interesting for me to try and because there for me there is that kind of dichotomy in the way
1:15:18that these two aspects of his work fit together and when when he's talking about his work I
1:15:22often find myself wondering whether he's thinking specifically about the paintings or specifically
1:15:27about the drawings and how how they're reconciled within his own practice because yeah he does to
1:15:33me seem to be an artist of of these of these kind of parallel practices which yeah the
1:15:40way that they they coexist is is very interesting I I would say that I obviously in my perspective
1:15:46with my paper I see a lot of what he talks as being a similar mechanism but as you say what
1:15:51that asks of us is very different and I think that the level of material interposition asks
1:15:57different things of us is is very clear because that paint like you say it's extraordinary to
1:16:03get up close and to feel the empathy the haptic viscerality of it but then you can't see anything
1:16:09whereas I do love that aspect I think it's very astute for you to say that with the charcoal so
1:16:13you have to get very close and it sort of reminds me of the Rothko saying that you should view all
1:16:18of his paintings from five your nose five inches from the canvas and just let it swallow you up
1:16:24and so yeah it's an interesting dimension great thanks I realize that we're running out of
1:16:32well not running out of time but the session is now closed so I think we're due to now have a
1:16:37break for lunch so can I ask you all to have a lovely lunch and come back for 1:45 we have
1:16:45a wonderful cafe upstairs Frequency that you're very welcome to attend and to have
1:16:52your lunch at but can I ask you before we go to thank James and Kate and Alex for their great
1:16:58start hello everyone welcome back I hope you are feeling refreshed and ready for another
1:17:10lively session of it was wonderful how the conversation and ideas flowed from the
1:17:16first panel so I think we will take that forward into this panel after lunch and also I think be
1:17:22surprised and energized by the directions in which our three speakers will take us my name
1:17:28is Sarah I'm Sarah Turner the Director of the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British art
1:17:33and worked very closely with Mark when he was the Director there and also on that wonderful book
1:17:39project we published and which Mark and Katherine Lampert edited which he held up previously and
1:17:46I also encourage you to have a look at the PMC website where we have a wonderful film made by
1:17:51John Moore as well which develops on that book as well so do take a look at that I'm
1:17:58going to follow the same format that Mark had in the session before lunch and we'll
1:18:04have our three speakers present their short presentations together and then we'll have
1:18:10our discussion and questions and conversation after that so I'll introduce our three speakers
1:18:16to you briefly first we will hear from Dr Isabelle Jain she's recently completed a PhD
1:18:24in Art History at the University of St Andrews and her thesis was entitled Calligraphies of
1:18:30Time: The Bomb Site in the Cultural Imaginary of Postwar Britain and that investigated the
1:18:36cultural significance of the bomb site in art and visual culture produced between 1945 and
1:18:431969 in Britain then we'll hear from Dr Richard Johns who is a senior lecturer in the history of
1:18:51art at the University of York Richard has co-curated exhibitions and published widely on
1:18:56various aspects of British art from the 17th to the 21st century with a particular focus on the
1:19:03long 18th century he joined the department in York in 2013 having previously worked
1:19:10as a curator of art at the National Maritime Museum in London and then we'll hear from Dr
1:19:16Gregory Salter Greg's an Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of
1:19:22Birmingham and he's a specialist in British Art after 1945 with his research to date focused on
1:19:29home and masculinity during this period and he's currently researching a transnational history of
1:19:35art in Britain 1957 to '88 very interesting dates there Greg I started wondering about '57 and '88
1:19:46but we'll get into that another time um so really looking forward to the presentations like I say
1:19:52I think this this spirit of exchange transaction conviviality conversation that flow from these
1:20:00kind of incredible works that we're looking at I think it is interesting how some images
1:20:05as well are open to interpretation and and looking closely and and how that um translates
1:20:13into our ideas and our conversation I'm I'm interested to pick that up with our speakers
1:20:18and with you as an audience but first Isabelle I'm gonna hand over to you to start us off so
1:20:24welcome thank you so much Sarah before I begin I would just like to thank Altair and also Leyla
1:20:35for the invitation to contribute to this study day to talk about Philip Holmes an
1:20:41artist who many of you may not have heard of Holmes was a student alongside Frank
1:20:46Auerbach and Leon Kossoff at both St Martin's School of Arts and of the Borough Polytechnic in
1:20:52the post war years together the three of them formed a kind of trio describing themselves as
1:20:58a gang of three my presentation today aims to do three things the first is to briefly
1:21:05introduce Holmes and situate him as an artist alongside his contemporaries Auerbach and
1:21:10Kossoff the second is to look at a collection of charcoal portraits that Holmes did in the
1:21:16late 50s and early 60s of his wife Barbara Holmes who was also a student at St Martin's
1:21:23focusing specifically on a series of portraits that Holmes did of her during her pregnancies
1:21:29the third thing I'd like to do is to show how these works provide an insight into the visual
1:21:34imagination of postwar Britain and I suggest that although they depict a very private and
1:21:39interior subject they speak more broadly to the collective anxieties and uncertainties of this
1:21:45period Holmes was born in Bermondsey in South London in 1924 into a working class family
1:21:55in 1942 at the age of 18 he joined the RAF as a wireless operator when he was discharged from the
1:22:03Armed Forces he secured a place at St Martin's School of Art in 1948 which is where he met
1:22:09Auerbach and Kossoff it was Auerbach who helped Holmes move from the design course to the Fine Art
1:22:15program and encouraged him to join David Bomberg's evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic when
1:22:22I was writing my undergraduate thesis on Holmes in 2017 I wrote to Auerbach to ask him about his
1:22:29relationship with Holmes and he responded writing that the three of them I quote didn't quite fit in
1:22:36with the more respectable students and were for some time the only St Martin students to attend
1:22:41Bomberg's evening classes in this letter Auerbach also said that although he visited building sites
1:22:48more frequently in the company of Kossoff that the three of them did sketch these sites
1:22:53together on occasion either as part of a St Martin's sketching trip or working on their own individual
1:22:59projects the three artists also exhibited together in
1:23:051952 at the Studio Club on Swallow Street and Holmes had several solo
1:23:10exhibitions during the 1950s and 60s at the RBA galleries the ICA and the Studio
1:23:17Club Holmes worked with charcoal throughout his career following David Bomberg's instruction here
1:23:27we have an example of one of Holmes's early charcoal self-portraits that he did around
1:23:33the time he started at the Borough Polytechnic where we can really start to see Bomberg's
1:23:38influence on him the use of charcoal feels slightly hesitant and restricted as if he's
1:23:44testing out how to achieve the depth and the shadows of the face through shading something
1:23:49which he seems to get to grips with in his later work like this self-portrait on the
1:23:55left where you can see the very free and confident strokes of charcoal that create
1:24:00this chiarascuro effect Holmes's use of charcoal was prolific and these drawings
1:24:06can be separated into two categories the landscapes which included drawings of the
1:24:12building sites that he did both on his own and in the company of Auerbach and Kossoff and the
1:24:18second category is his charcoal portraits mainly of his wife Barbara although they were often used
1:24:25as preliminary studies for his paintings Holmes's charcoal drawings are standalone
1:24:30works of art in themselves demonstrating how integral this medium was for his own
1:24:35practice Barbara known as Barbara Bixby before she married Holmes in
1:24:421959 was a student at St Martin's on the Art and Design course and she also
1:24:47studied textiles she was born in 1931 in Islington and was the the daughter
1:24:52of a green grocer straight after art school Barbara worked as a seamstress for Hartnell and
1:24:58other fashion houses before becoming an art technician at a school in the
1:25:031970s in this charcoal drawing of Barbara on the left Holmes depicts her heavily pregnant
1:25:13her eyes are closed and she rests her head in her hands slumped back into the chair this work was
1:25:20produced either in 1960 when she was pregnant with her son Simon or in 1961 with her daughter Lisa
1:25:28what initially struck me about this drawing was how tired she looks she's she's quite far along
1:25:33in her pregnancy and holding these poses often for very long periods of time as a life model
1:25:39adds an extra layer of strain in 1961 Auerbach did this multimedia drawing of what looks like
1:25:47a pregnant woman sitting on a chair she's upright her legs twisting to one side and
1:25:54around her figure Auerbach applied this dark charcoal shading I wondered if the model could
1:26:00have been Barbara given that she was pregnant with her daughter Lisa who was born in 1961
1:26:06the year Auerbach did this work Barbara had modelled for Auerbach in the past in one of
1:26:12her letters to Holmes in 1953 she writes and I quote Frank is going to work with me on
1:26:18Saturday which meant that she was going to model for him and Barbara's family have also shared
1:26:23with me that she told them she did model for Auerbach on occasion and may have done so whilst
1:26:28pregnant Holmes's charcoal drawings of the figure are stylistically very
1:26:35different to Auerbachs some are much softer and detailed focusing on the texture of the
1:26:41skin and the facial expression and others are a lot more angular and sharp like we
1:26:47see here where Holmes creates a definitive outline of the body with red chalk which
1:26:52really accentuates the curve of Barbara's stomach but some of these works do show
1:26:58with Auerbach's the extreme contrast between light and dark to create this chiaroscuro
1:27:03effect Holmes's studies of Barbara depict the very intimate subject of pregnancy and
1:27:11the prospect of child birth and motherhood and I feel that it is important to mention at this
1:27:16point that when these charcoal portraits were made Barbara had by this time suffered three
1:27:22miscarriages and after finally giving birth to her son Simon in 1960 he tragically died
1:27:28at 6 weeks old knowing this and looking at this portrait seeing her deep set eyes
1:27:35which are heavily shaded to give this angular tense look as she gazes away from the viewer
1:27:40it is clear by her facial expression that there is a palpable sense of anxiety and
1:27:45apprehension in this drawing of Barbara breastfeeding being one of her children
1:27:53most likely Simon who died at 6 weeks old Holmes depicts her lovingly looking down at
1:27:58him she seems content and relaxed it is a tender intimate moment between the mother and her child
1:28:06captured by a proud father yet whilst her facial features and her body are clear and
1:28:12present the baby she holds seems absent suggested only by the outline of the head the body and the
1:28:19legs that lean towards his mother this drawing is either an unfinished work or Holmes deliberately
1:28:27chose to depict only the outline of the baby suggesting both its presence and at the same
1:28:32time its ghostly absence given the history of the couple's loss and the struggles they face to
1:28:39become parents this work speaks to a shared sense of immense pain and suffering experienced by the
1:28:45couple expressed in charcoal it is important to view these drawings as not only deeply intimate
1:28:52subjects but also place them within the wider social context in which they were made in postwar
1:28:58Britain in the early 1960s during the war women had assumed a role in the public space working
1:29:07outside of the home environment in both military and non-military related jobs however when the
1:29:13war ended women were expected to return to their domestic roles in the home this was evident in
1:29:19how child care was limited through the closing of nurseries in the postwar period and how the
1:29:24working mother was condemned and villainized in the media the welfare state pushed the idea
1:29:31of the reestablishment of the nuclear family when so many had been broken during the war
1:29:36and Britain had a very low birth rate and so the burden fell on women to prioritize family life
1:29:43Barbara herself who was from quite a traditional family did not pursue a career as an artist or
1:29:48designer but went on to become an art technician as a school exemplifying a very common reality
1:29:54for many women during this time who assumed roles in art education so for her becoming a mother was
1:30:02hugely important and represented a kind of binary choice that many women faced whether
1:30:07to pursue a career as an artist or prioritize family life by making the pregnant mother and
1:30:14the mother and child subject the focus of his charcoal drawings Holmes demonstrates how
1:30:19centralized the subject matter was documenting in charcoal a kind of life cycle that follows
1:30:25different stages of pregnancy the prospect of new life in the image of the newborn and of
1:30:31loss this sense of loss is most evident in this charcoal portrait of Barbara where she's
1:30:40depicted curled up with her knees to her chest her eyes are closed and downcast her arms limply
1:30:47hugging her body as she turns away from the viewer there is a sense of shame and sorrow
1:30:53in her expression and in her body language rendering her in this way and knowing the
1:30:59pressures she may have faced to become a mother and the emotional and psychological impact that
1:31:04had that her miscarriages and the death of her son Simon had on her and Holmes this is
1:31:09a harrowing image of trauma and loss it is through the medium of charcoal that Holmes
1:31:16is able to render such an emotionally charged form of image the contrast between light and
1:31:22dark the monochromatic tones that make the body look as if it is emerging from a dark hole the
1:31:28angular shapes of the shoulders and the neck the whiteness of the limbs like bones together
1:31:35create an image that reflects this ongoing post-war feeling of loss and recovery this
1:31:41sense of emerging from the rubble and dust of bomb sites is echoed in the marks made in
1:31:46charcoal on the paper and the layers of charcoal dust that form these post war subjects thank
1:31:53you I'd like to begin with sincere thanks to Altair and everyone else involved in organizing today's event
1:32:04for allowing me to come and speak in some ways I'm an impostor today because I'm not going
1:32:10to be talking about portraits but I hope that what I have to say will contribute in some way
1:32:14to the wider discussion about Auerbach's portraits which has already begun to emerge and
1:32:21that it might help to forma bridge between the current exhibition and the 2009 exhibition of Auerbach's
1:32:29building site paintings at Somerset House which Mark mentioned earlier my talk today alternates
1:32:39between two very different drawings one the result of studious measured observation of a location
1:32:47known to the artist rendered in heavy monochrome with charcoal the other a seemingly carefree even
1:32:55playful impression of an unfamiliar City partially coloured in with a handful of crayons as such they
1:33:02represent two very different modes of drawing which in turn seem to encapsulate the contrasting
1:33:08artistic identities of their makers Frank Auerbach and David Hockney each captured here at the beginning
1:33:15of what we now know as a long and productive career over the next few minutes I want to
1:33:21expand on those obvious formal differences looking more closely at each work in turn but in doing so
1:33:29I also want to think quite speculatively about what they share in common and about what that
1:33:34might tell us about the function and possibilities of drawing for British artists working in the late
1:33:40'50s and early '60s that is in the decade after the decade after the end of the Second World
1:33:47War on the left of Auerbach's charcoal drawing we see the steel skeleton and scaffolding of
1:33:56the New Change buildings a large office complex intended for the Bank of England's
1:34:01accountant department on the right are remains of a bomb damaged or partially demolished building
1:34:08and some hoarding that marks the boundary between the New Change site and Cheapside from inside the
1:34:15hoarding we look across what could be a builder's hut and assorted building materials to the dome
1:34:22and north transept of St Paul's Cathedral there is a suggestion of a few people builders at work
1:34:29but not many looking at the drawing in another way less topographically I'm struck by the accidental
1:34:36smudges and oil stains at the top of the page that read as encroaching clouds or billows of smoke and
1:34:43by the formal echo of the steel girders of the emerging building in the support sorry and by the
1:34:50formal echo of the steel girders of the emerging building and the supporting grid of yellow
1:34:57lines that attempt to hold the picture together this merging of substance and subject is pushed
1:35:04to the limit in some of Auerbach's other drawings and in his paintings but even in this charcoal
1:35:11drawing which is highly legible for Auerbach it's difficult to read the pictorial space with
1:35:17any certainty it's hard to judge where the street level is is or was and where we stand in relation
1:35:24to it what is new and rising and what is shored up bomb damage when does a hole in the ground become
1:35:32the foundations of a new building Auerbach's post war city is an unstable up and down place still
1:35:39reverberating from the shock of war except that in this drawing St Paul's Cathedral rooms large
1:35:48the prominence of St Paul's invites a visual comparison an obvious one perhaps with Herbert
1:35:54Mason's celebrated and much manipulated photograph of the cathedral towering above a silhouette of
1:36:00ruins following a bombing raid in December 1940 a photograph that became a defining image of London
1:36:08at war following its publication by The Daily Mail in the excellent catalogue to his 2009
1:36:15exhibition of Auerbach’s building site paintings Barnaby Wright is persuasive in distinguishing
1:36:21Auerbach’s building site works from the presumed moral certainty of such images and from the cliche
1:36:27of resilience that they continue to represent Auerbach's London is more difficult it's been said what
1:36:36would happen though if we were to position Auerbach's drawing within a longer visual history of
1:36:41St Paul's in the 20th century one that extends beyond the experience and iconography of the
1:36:47Second World War one image that comes to mind a large painting is Neils Moller Lund's soaring bird's
1:36:55eye view of the city from the roof of the Royal Exchange from 1904 centred on St Paul's and titled
1:37:03The Heart of Empire remember that title to bring such an image into play is to cast a specific and
1:37:11different light on Auerbach's building site works and on this drawing in particular by identifying
1:37:17the towering dome of St Paul's as a beacon of late Imperial identity in a city determined to reaffirm
1:37:25its status as a global financial metropolis it's in this light that we might read other marks on
1:37:33Auerbach's drawing including the annotation at the very at centre of the page very
1:37:39dark at once a simple observation of a narrow street thrown into shadow by the enormous bulk
1:37:46of the cathedral and an ominous downward marker of an uncertain future if those two words point
1:37:54towards the dark heart of empire to invoke Moller's painting another less conspicuous mark on the page
1:38:02inadvertently situates Auerbach's prospect of St Paul's and the emerging New Change building
1:38:08at a particular moment of imperial crisis and reprisal and on the cusp of another war
1:38:16I'm referring to the date inscribed on the lower left edge of the page August
1:38:211956 days earlier on the 26th of July that year the president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser
1:38:31announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal company it was the latest in a series of decisive
1:38:37anti-colonial measures introduced since the Egyptian revolution of 1952 which temporarily
1:38:44at least brought to an end to British economic and military interests in Egypt loss of control over
1:38:50the canal was met with anger and indignation from the British establishment and immediate
1:38:56preparations for a military response as well as popular demonstrations against the impending
1:39:01War the Suez crisis culminated three months later when Britain together with France and
1:39:07Israel invaded Egypt in a short lived and as far as the aggressor countries were concerned a
1:39:14disastrous attempt to shore up colonial influence in the region hold that thought for a moment with
1:39:23Auerbach's drawing in mind while we turn our attention to the second drawing David Hackney's
1:39:30view of Tahrir Square in Cairo is one of around 40 crayon drawings the artist made during his
1:39:36first visit to Egypt in October 1963 seven years after the Suez Crisis or tripartite aggression
1:39:46an inscription at the bottom of the page tells us that this is a view from the Nile Hilton a
1:39:52new hotel constructed on the site of the former British Army barracks on the west side of the
1:39:57square Hockney it seems is not overly concerned with mapping the square with any great
1:40:05accuracy although his drawing broadly echoes the topography of the roads gardens and walkways that
1:40:11were laid out when the site formerly known as Ismailia Square was redeveloped after the 1952
1:40:18Revolution and renamed Tahrir Square or Liberation Square there's a bus and the beginnings of a car
1:40:26and the suggestion of a few people but not many more prominent than all of this is the abstract
1:40:34iconography of Arab Liberation in the flag of the United Arab Republic short-lived political union
1:40:41of Egypt and Syria that Nasser hoped would become the basis for a wider Arab Republic lining up
1:40:49behind the oversized flag is the international style tower of the Cleopatra Hotel newly opened
1:40:57topped by a giant rooftop billboard for Ethiopian Airlines though singled out in
1:41:04Hockney's drawing the airline advertisement was one of many oversized electric billboards
1:41:10that defined the skyline of Tahrir square in the early 1960s most effective at night they promoted
1:41:18all manner of goods and services around driving from both sides of the Cold War divide cars from
1:41:24Czechoslovakia watches from Switzerland Egyptian made tires and most prominent of all several of
1:41:31the world's leading airlines that connected the new Arab Republic to four continents and which
1:41:38defined Cairo as a global center of the new jet age Hockney's view from the Nile Hilton is noteworthy
1:41:46for many reasons not least because it departs so resoundingly from Hilton's own vision of the
1:41:53touristic experience it was selling exemplified I think by this advertisement announcing announcing
1:42:00the opening of the hotel in 1958 the new Hilton building is superimposed onto a sandy view of
1:42:08the pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza and framed by the new TWA jetstream the longest ranged airliner
1:42:17in the world today the accompanying text invites guests to enjoy the pharaonic splendour
1:42:24of Egypt's ancient civilization from the air conditioned comfort of one of the hotel's 400
1:42:29rooms although he was embedded within the same building the hotel's high-rise design accounts
1:42:36for the artist's elevated view Hockney's disregard for the Western tourist gaze is striking in this and
1:42:44in other drawings in the series and is matched by his evident attraction to the sites of Egyptian modernity
1:42:51and African Unity apparently turning his back on a western orientalising vision of Egypt Hockney's eye for
1:43:00Ethiopian Airlines logo foregrounds a pan-African network that connected Cairo via Khartoum and Addis
1:43:08Ababa to Nairobi in the South and to Accra in the west one profound effect of the airline's
1:43:15continental reach in the 1960s according to the Ethiopian historian Bahru Zewde was to quote
1:43:23to cut the umbilical cord that had tied colony and ex colony to the metropolis and so back to
1:43:31the metropolis to Auerbach's image of London seven years earlier both artists document a
1:43:39city in flux where Auerbach witnesses a city in search of a new architecture of empire as
1:43:46the New Change and the Shell building on the south bank or out of the ruin of the Empire Cinema in
1:43:52Leicester Square Hockney encounters Cairo as a competitive and contested postcolonial
1:43:58space where international alliances and Cold War rivalries play out between the modernist
1:44:05buildings and neon lights of Tahrir Square so the connection I'm making between these two works on
1:44:12paper is loose but it's concerned with drawing as a form of ground witness in which to pay attention
1:44:22to the local is also to register the global sometimes in unexpected or unintended ways thank
1:44:31you hello just to echo my thanks to Altair and everyone for the opportunity to be involved today
1:44:43so the aim of my paper today is to bring Frank Auerbach’s charcoal drawings
1:44:52into dialogue with a slightly later set of works by Philippines born and at that point
1:44:57Britain-based artist David Medalla these are his Cloud Canyons bubble machines works which
1:45:02we'll see shortly these were a series of kinetic sculptures where a mechanical system
1:45:07draws bubbles out of a base of detergent and water to create growing and dissipating foam
1:45:14forms so if you're not familiar with them I'll show you a picture shortly the two
1:45:19artists are quite different but I'm going to suggest that the comparisons around their
1:45:24materials their processes and their approaches to personhood and gender can be illuminating for
1:45:30placing Auerbach's drawings in a wider social and cultural context in the late 1950s and the early
1:45:361960s so first up material Auerbach's choice to use charcoal for these drawings came in part
1:45:46from the material's cheapness Barnaby Wright notes in the exhibition catalogue that it was
1:45:52it was difficult for Auerbach to afford the vast quantities of paint required for his preferred
1:45:57way of working at this relatively early point in his career and while the thick coagulated
1:46:04paint of his building site paintings uh which are contemporaneous with these drawings has been
1:46:11read as evoking the kind of earth and mud moved in the process of postwar reconstruction the black
1:46:18dust and soot of the charcoal of these evokes another public sphere of labour linked to postwar
1:46:25national fortunes and this is the coal industry domestic coal production reached its peak in
1:46:31the mid 1950s just as Auerbach was embarking on these drawings but of course it also evokes
1:46:38um the smaller scale realms of domestic and the ubiquitous yet increasingly contested vision of
1:46:44the open coal fire which Linda Nead has written about I'm taking this image from those articles
1:46:54nostalgic attachments to the open coal fire persisted into the 1950s though legislation and
1:47:00new technologies relating to domestic heating were beginning to dislodge its centrality in the
1:47:06home what's more open coal fires were dirty and hard work by and large women fetched and prepared
1:47:15well fetched coal and prepared fires for returning husbands if their husbands were returning
1:47:21and dealt with dust and grime afterwards so this evokes the description of the circumstances
1:47:28Auerbach's earliest charcoal drawings where Stella West sat with him in a chair in her
1:47:33bedroom often next to the fireplace over repeated evening sessions with Auerbach kneeling on the
1:47:39floor to work as we've heard so this to make an obvious point locates them in the domestic sphere
1:47:45and roots them too in a heterosexual relationship as well and as I think has been mentioned
1:47:52we know that one of the reasons that Auerbach stopped working in West's home was the mess caused
1:47:56by using charcoal Robert Hughes in the 1980s described Auerbach’s studio as like a colliery as
1:48:04well so there's much um of course to link these drawings to a certain recognizable post-war
1:48:13atmosphere though we might also emphasize change here that's something I want to think about
1:48:18across this paper uh Auerbach takes up charcoal as a medium as the government as manufacturers are
1:48:26seeking to eradicate the dust and grime of coal from ordinary homes Medalla's Cloud Canyons which
1:48:33you can finally see here these are from Signals News Bulletin a publication that he made
1:48:40as part of his gallery Signals uh this is issue two from the summer of 1964 so here you can see
1:48:47these works which seem to bubble and froth with what comes next almost their elongated
1:48:54box forms recall top loading washing machines which had become increasingly cheap in the late
1:49:001950s and early 1960s they still weren't automatic at this point and you get automatic machines kind
1:49:06of arriving in the early 1960s but not taken up as widely until much later uh Medalla's
1:49:15chosen medium as well detergent was aggressively marketed to housewives you could get offers of
1:49:23very flimsy free gifts or heavy discounts and these gave detergent marketing a particular era of
1:49:29dishonesty and became things that women uh had to navigate with a certain kind of discerning skill so
1:49:36you're not seeing a detergent advert here you're seeing a washing machine advert but I just want
1:49:39to note that Medalla's presentation of the bubble machines in the News Bulletin seemed to utilize
1:49:44the layouts and the imagery of contemporary newspaper washing adverts so you can see the
1:49:50kind of different viewpoints and Medalla almost as kind of the housewife alongside the machine in
1:49:57these images so in this way Auerbach and Medalla meet perhaps unexpectedly around the changing
1:50:03materials of domestic labour so labour brings me to the second theme to think about which is
1:50:11process and and Kate talked about this morning has talked about this and many other people have
1:50:17really nicely again as we hear in the exhibition catalogue uh as we've discussed
1:50:24Auerbach would complete an image the sitter's head in one sitting but then dissatisfied with it would
1:50:29erase it down to a ghost begin again on top of this this repeated drawing and erasing process
1:50:36means the paper he would used would often begin to fray and tear and as we know we can see these kind
1:50:42of worn areas that been patched up to reinforce them the these drawings so it's not too much of
1:50:51a stretch um as James mentioned as David David Mellor has as well um to see connections with artists
1:50:59like Gustav Metzger and his autodestructive works I also want to think about the connections with
1:51:04Medalla’s kineticism and Metzger's called Medalla's works auto-creative as well so I want to kind of
1:51:12offer creation alongside destruction here as well so this comparison is a way of drawing
1:51:20Auerbach into the wider field of British art in this late 1950s early 1960s moment it's also
1:51:26a way of thinking about their mutual concerns with labour as well with the physically and
1:51:31mentally demanding labour of Auerbach’s practice for the artist and for the sitters meeting the
1:51:39kind of glimpses of labour saving automation in Medalla's work all the albeit this is automation gone wrong in his bubble
1:51:49machines almost so that relationship between process and labour brings us to uh personhood
1:51:58and gender so I'm going to start by thinking about that with a small part of Medalla's presentation
1:52:06of these works in the News Bulletin where he kind of bolds this quote in the middle I'm kind
1:52:12of obsessed with this this it's quote a little bit so this is from a Russian poet Vladimir
1:52:17Mayakovsky and it says if you like I shall grow irreproachably gentle not a man but a cloud in trousers
1:52:24this is a line from one of his poems where the speaker is addressing a lover and offering
1:52:29to kind at transform their behest so it's a way it's been a way for me to think about these
1:52:35kinetic sculptures as connected to desire and the transformations of gender the body and the person
1:52:41as well we might note the effects of kind of using this alongside a word made out detergent the
1:52:48material that's very much linked particularly in the advertising I've been thinking about to the
1:52:53maintenance and support of gender in the nuclear family uh but Medalla's works seem to be about excess
1:53:01and transformation the ability of the very things designed to kind of shape gender in very narrow
1:53:06ways to go wrong or to open up new and exciting potentials um as well so I'm using Medalla
1:53:16to spotlight the ways in which the visual effects of Auerbach’s drawings create their subject create
1:53:21this effect of their subjects both coming into being but also on the brink of becoming undone as
1:53:28well and this is conveyed through the mixture of the kind of looming emerging presence created by
1:53:33the chiaroscuro effects and the fragility of the medium and their substance in privileging presence
1:53:40over likeness Auerbach's heads we should acknowledge are rarely graspable as gendered
1:53:46bodies as well I think Kate mentioned this this morning but as beings both present uh and in
1:53:51emergence so to close I want to suggest that Medalla and Auerbach share something of
1:53:59a provisional approach to personhood and even gender here and that this can be understood
1:54:05in relation to materials to process and to labour both artists utilize materials that
1:54:11evoke the shifting everyday space of the domestic a renewed site of labour and personhood in the
1:54:17postwar decades from here they envision states of unsteady becoming states which we may want to
1:54:24link to their mutual backgrounds as migrants and of course exile for Auerbach absolutely
1:54:29uh but which we also might connect to shifts in class think of the rising kind of consumer boom
1:54:36the transformation of domestic life signalled by the shifting attitudes to coal and miracles of
1:54:41detergent that we talked about there are ways then of pulling Auerbach and Medalla away from their
1:54:46respective mythologies and uniting them here around the everyday dramas the domestic but
1:54:51making a life for yourself of envisioning the unsteady state of personhood amid the
1:54:56small yet overwhelming shifts of the ordinary in this moment so thank you for listening
1:55:01[Applause]
1:55:14thank you so much to our three speakers such powerfully provocative presentations I love
1:55:22them I really what I was just thinking of there was as well of a interesting contrast actually
1:55:27between the first panel where we were sort of very intimately looking at Auerbach's practice sort of
1:55:34in the room in the studio and I think these papers as well you you sort of for me anyway
1:55:42turned me to look at the cultural landscape of the postwar moments as well so that how through
1:55:49Auerbach's practice there's both that possibility to do the sort of inward looking work but also this
1:55:56outward thinking about this period and time of incredible transformation socially politically
1:56:08but artistically as well again thinking about that those relationships and I also really enjoyed
1:56:15these fruitful and sometimes very surprising comparisons you know I've never I don't know
1:56:22much about Holmes I haven't ever thought about Auerbach and Medalla together I've thought a lot
1:56:28about Medalla separately you know so again it's interesting to think how we categorize artists
1:56:34and the kinds of work we do with some artists and I I think there's an interesting thing we
1:56:40could get into here about how some artists are sort of monograph-ised I don't think that's a
1:56:47word but you know sort of kept in their monographic moment what happens then when we put them in
1:56:53into conversations with artists that actually they didn't share much of a social life with but there
1:56:59is a a cultural comparison and landscape to share there and I think again um the relationship
1:57:06with Hockney I've never thought you know never you you you asked as there rich just again to I think
1:57:11think about in surprising ways about connections around themes of creation and construction
1:57:18there so I think thank you to you all and again I I with these short presentations I'm always sort
1:57:26of on the on the cusp of you know that you you've given us so much to think about so much so many
1:57:32provocations and I think that's the beauty of them the the these ideas are not resolved so I'm going
1:57:38to ask and in in view of our time as well we've got quite a a tight panel to open it up to the
1:57:44floor as well to to see if other people would like to ask questions and join this open practice of
1:57:50thinking with you and Luke has got his hand up at the back so we're straight into thinking with
1:57:56you hi I just wanted to ask quite a literal question about the Auerbach's drawings of St Paul's Cathedral it's squared
1:58:09up um which is something thinking back to Walter Sickert came up in the earlier panel something that Walter Sickert
1:58:18instructed his students to do make a drawing square it up make make a painting of the drawing
1:58:25or using the drawing and I'm pretty certain Auerbach never made a painting from that particular
1:58:32work though it is does seem to be preparatory in some way I just wondered if you could speak to that
1:58:38the yeah I mean I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that question you're right I also
1:58:47understand that there's no painting resulting from that drawing although there was a painting
1:58:52of same subject which was exhibited in the Beaux Arts gallery the year before it's one of several
1:59:00drawings that are squared up there are others in the room who would be more qualified to situate
1:59:08that in relation to Auerbach's practice than me right yeah I was seeing it as a as a kind of you know
1:59:17formal interaction with the the the the subject what its practical purpose was and whether that
1:59:22is part of Auerbach's process of turning drawings into the beginnings of a painting I'm afraid I
1:59:31don't know does anyone else there's a question there and then a question here I don't know whether it
1:59:38is to add to that in some way which is that when I think of squaring up and the chart I think of William Coldstream and that very very forensic approach to landscape
1:59:49and the city scape of London and I think that Auerbach in some ways was dealing with these sites and seeing them as pretty expressive in some way
2:00:06suppose there's that distinction between the two
2:00:09there's another theme around education and art education I think floating across
2:00:18today as well which we might bring out more there's a question down here Linda Nead
2:00:23thank you um that was just such a terrific panel thank you so much um but I just wanted
2:00:34to use a phrase that Greg introduced I think it just seems to raise so many issues the three papers
2:00:43about coming into being and coming undone and it seemed to me that that image of St Paul's was very
2:00:53much I mean you know '56 just about the end of and yet so much uncertainty about what's going
2:01:02to come into into being and I wondered if you could say a bit more about that sort of you
2:01:10know what is going on in that image because it's not just about reconstruction because
2:01:16you know there's so much uncertainty there and I think you could almost think about I
2:01:21those tragic images of Gaza which just to imagine that situation the idea of expecting to come
2:01:30into being and yet coming completely undone so I Greg thank you for that phrase because it just
2:01:38seemed to me to perhaps capture something about the '50s and early '60s which isn't
2:01:46just about affluence and confidence but actually about really profound on both personal and national
2:01:55terms do you want to pick up on that I can do yeah yeah thank you I I think what occurred
2:02:05to me kind of listening to the papers as well which which brilliant I think is to speak to that
2:02:12kind of coming into being and coming undone situation is actually absence in a lot of these
2:02:19works I was thinking about the empty spaces really powerfully the child but also kind of Hockney
2:02:26used empty space Auerbach as well in those drawings too and yeah I think I just echo what Lynn said
2:02:35really is is just that it seems to get I think there's an interesting kind of use in absence
2:02:40or emptiness in some of these images and you can even see it in the charcoal drawings I think
2:02:46to an extent to convey a sense of provisionality a sense of uncertainty something shifting
2:02:57this moment which may be to do with the war in lots of ways but also kind of raised other really
2:03:01interesting kind of things this kind of global context in as well in really interesting ways
2:03:07yeah thank you for for your question when you asked what's going on in St Paul's drawing and I
2:03:14suppose I one way of attempting to answer that question was to to make a comparison of the sort I
2:03:24think Mark described in the introduction today as as a stab at an unlikely comparison partly I did
2:03:30that as a way of reorienting Auerbach's building site drawings away from the destruction of the
2:03:38Second World War and into a a moment of attempted reconstruction of of of Empire in the '50s and and
2:03:51'60s and so I'm trying to begin to explore the space that's created between those drawings and I
2:03:59I did wonder actually when first thinking about the subject whether to focus not on that St Paul's
2:04:06drawing but on the many drawings about on of the Shell building under construction which like the
2:04:13New Change building which was designed and used as an extension of the Bank of England can be seen as
2:04:20in the context of an architecture of of of empire an attempt to kind of rebuild empire new money
2:04:28yeah yeah so in in a way that that isn't seeing rebuilding as as a narrative of resurgence but
2:04:36of of of imperial entrenchment in a way yeah just just to build on that I think what I sort of
2:04:47what I what I noticed that was something working across all three papers is this idea of labour so
2:04:54you know reconstructing London and in many ways reconstructing forms of empire and the labour
2:05:01that that sort of is is bound up with that and then what Greg was talking about in terms of
2:05:07domestic labour and and sort of what's going on in the home and then um with the the Holmes drawings
2:05:15Barbara this sort of labour itself of of child birth and how that was sort of working across
2:05:21all sort of facets of life in a way across papers yeah yeah the another thing that's um
2:05:28again these are these these presentations are kind of working so evocatively together and I
2:05:33think Isabelle you raised it first about class and that also that feeling of Outsider-dom
2:05:40as well and I think again it's interesting to think through the presentations Hockney as
2:05:46well um that you know Northern working class status that he explores very much in as well
2:05:52the London art school context that movement his own kind of regional migration and obviously and
2:06:00Greg you you brought it up with Medalla as well the kind of interesting relationships in the
2:06:06post-war moment of end of Empire decolonization and but the Philippines has an but you know an
2:06:13interesting relationship to that it's not kind of a straightforward mapping onto British Empire
2:06:17but just a broader conversation about and I think Isabelle you you raised it again in
2:06:23relationship to drawing and and those practices and processes so I don't know that we could kind
2:06:28of pick that theme up and and this outsider-dom status and maybe a different kind of artist or
2:06:35different um possibilities open to artists in this this postwar moment after the second world war and
2:06:42what's happening in arts education as well do you want to is there anything you can reflect further
2:06:46on there yeah I mean it it was obviously you know for women in particular if they were in
2:06:54art education they often went to teaching because this was sort of something that could be balanced
2:07:00with family life and things like that and so you have so many women artists who you know are just
2:07:05completely overlooked because that's the the route they've gone down but Philip Holmes
2:07:10was also a teacher he was he was head of the department it was it Havering College I think
2:07:17and yeah so and they were very much focus on you know having this traditional life in a
2:07:24sense of you know earning money and looking after themselves and you know their children and things
2:07:29like that so it wasn't the sort of um you know straightforward thing for for them as a family
2:07:35so yeah that the priority was to you know hold down solid jobs in education yeah and there
2:07:43yeah exactly yeah I think what I like about Medalla's work in terms of outside-dom is is
2:07:52the slightly idiosyncratic way that he looks at ordinary stuff I guess so um these works
2:08:01kind of sort of like washing machines but not and and kind of taking on a life of their own
2:08:05in that kind of way it was interesting bringing him into dialogue with Auerbach for numerous reasons
2:08:10but I think it's struck me is that comparison that I finished with which yes so the um the
2:08:19Gerda Boehm uortraits which um are really nicely really beautifully kind of interpreted in the
2:08:26exhibition in in terms of exile and migration and and kind of making a life for yourself um uh
2:08:33in in in Britain in the post-war years uh I think as um it's not just these I guess it's
2:08:41not just these artists who are thinking about outsider-dom but these subjects which
2:08:44are drawing us to the presence of outsider-dom in British culture more generally I
2:08:52think yeah thanks um just thinking about Hockney I it might seem a bit strange to present Hockney
2:09:03as someone who's interested in Arab Liberation and African unity and I don't know whether he was or
2:09:10not but that in that's some of the drawings that he produced in in Egypt in 1963 that is
2:09:16what he observes and that might be something to do with his own Outsider status or or not
2:09:26and I it certain I certainly wouldn't call it an innocent eye that he has but I think it is
2:09:32an eye that is unencumbered by expectation to a certain extent and in the drawing that I I showed
2:09:38it's interesting on the bottom is inscribed View from the Nile Hilton and I can I can imagine
2:09:46Hockney saying I won't try and mimic his accent yeah I I can imagine him saying well that's what I drew
2:09:52because that was the view from my my window and I think I'm not really concerned
2:10:00at all what Hockney thought he was doing but I am interested in in what's registered through the
2:10:07process of his observations yeah which might be something to do with the way he's situating
2:10:13himself in relation to the art world that what I think is quite a radical moment in his his that's
2:10:18it's definitely like such a shifting moment isn't it there's a question at the
2:10:27back will you just speak up a little bit connection display
2:10:41and also think about affirmation of power of global context and also of the second
2:10:47war and shadows remnants things in the background you can just human presences
2:10:55and it shadow of nuclear threat is haunting over me a quite a lot at the moment Russia all these things seems maybe
2:11:13seems a possible situation
2:11:20yes um well I agree completely so that that with the Medalla works he he did speak
2:11:28about them in terms of both what happened in the Philippines during the Second World War
2:11:34um and the nuclear threat as well and and those things are inescapable with Auerbach as
2:11:40well from the conversations this morning which made very clear as well and they're present
2:11:46here I think absolutely I think what's really interesting about both these works is that they
2:11:52those those larger historical contexts kind of linger they are shadows to these works as well but
2:12:00they're about the everyday just live going on and living after after that I think in some ways and
2:12:07and and kind of building lives in some ways so I did kind of reflect as I was writing this about
2:12:14thinking about Auerbach and and relationship to the Kinder transport and Holocaust and whatever this comes
2:12:18into this and it wasn't there for time slightly but also I'm interested in in in keeping that
2:12:30connection between between moving forward but also the presence of the past in the present I
2:12:36guess in the same way I'm not sure I'm putting that very eloquently but I think what you it
2:12:40is interesting as well the kind of problematics around periodization so Auerbach that we keep saying
2:12:46postwar a war that you know ended in 1945 and but we're looking at works made in the '60s and
2:12:55you know so and other works that we we'll kind of more comfortably like Hockney you know place
2:13:00in the the '60s you know so I think it's quite interesting how again we use these terms and
2:13:06how we periodize artists and their relationship to seismic and cultural events both of the past
2:13:14that are haunting but also their relationship with their present of nuclear war of the arms race
2:13:22of space exploration you know those things so I think again the relationship of these
2:13:26works to to history just to put it really bluntly I think is really fascinating and then how as historians we
2:13:34periodize them feels really really pertinent I think can I squeeze in another question I
2:13:41think we can spend a few more minutes good right we're off Mark do you want to ask your question
2:13:48a question for Isabelle really I have to say I didn't know anything about Phillip Holmes
2:13:53and I think that's the case for a good number of us in the audience and I was I think it's
2:13:58so helpful brilliant you've shown us the work by this artists who obviously so closely intimate with
2:14:05both Auerbach and Leon Kossoff and working in the same circle and very into but there's two interesting kind of conclusions
2:14:18I've drawn or or observations I've made about that comparison one is when you look at the
2:14:23Holmes drawings you really start recognizing that pictorial vocabulary that Auerbach is using is not distinct only to him
2:14:31one very broad way it's clearly something that's been shared by a number of artists and I think the juxtaposition
2:14:38of of the works of Holmes and makes you realize that rather trying to understand pictorial vocabulary
2:14:46and rhetoric purely to Auerbach and Kossoff and rather loosely related to Bomberg you know that you can really see powerful
2:14:53narratives which is very helpful rethinking Auerbach I think but what's also helpful to me at least and this might
2:14:59sound rather connoisseurial and might be a bit harsh it seemed that Auerbach in doing
2:15:05the same kind of subjects is operating at a very very different level of complexity and
2:15:09sophistication of the imagery and not just of the imagery potentially that use of the model who might have been Barbara
2:15:20that just the just shows you in a sense that Auerbach seems to be operating artistically very very different maybe
2:15:27more sounds like connoisseurship I wonder yes I mean you know I I think for me it's you know for me what
2:15:42they sort of show is how different really you know art education is affecting people and what um you
2:15:50know I think obviously what Holmes is doing is very different to Auerbach you can sort of see how you
2:15:56know the the Bomberg influence is coming in but I completely agree with you Mark that there is this
2:16:01sort of there's something else going on in the Auerbach portraits particularly the heads of Leon
2:16:06Kossoff the layering you know there's it seems like there is almost a a different methodology going
2:16:13on in a way and I think for Holmes there was a sense that although they were the charcoals
2:16:22were standalone works in some cases in in the majority of them they were sort of preparatory
2:16:29studies for paintings and he was also more sort of working more towards landscape as
2:16:40well and you know you can really you know for the purposes of this talk I wanted to talk about the
2:16:44charcoal portraits but you can see how he's doing something completely different in the in in the
2:16:50Shell building site sketches he did in the the sketches of the the building of the Festival of
2:16:56Britain it's a completely different approach um and that's also reflected in the painting so I
2:17:01think it's interesting what you've said about how you know different people are responding
2:17:07in different ways to you know the same same thing they were all there with Bomberg but
2:17:12yet people are doing different things and getting something different from the the teaching so yeah
2:17:19great well thank you such so such powerful presentations and so you've given us so
2:17:25much to think with and I feel like we you sort of um there's lots of threads to follow up in
2:17:32conversation and and and further research so thank you for such a really wonderful and productive
2:17:38panel I'm having a really good time I should we just stay in it
2:17:49want no we'll have a cup of tea and I think we're back in the room at
2:17:533.15 Great okay I'm sure you'll agree with me it's been a really stimulating day thanks so much for
2:18:06all speakers for the last panel a scintillating panel I thought and those of new ways of thinking about
2:18:11how that notion that I'm really equally thrilled to be introducing and chairing final panel today
2:18:17and again as as has been the case over the last two sessions we've got three speakers and
2:18:22I'll quickly introduce them in turn so our first speaker is Altair Brandon-Salmon is I said earlier has
2:18:28been really instrumental in organizing the whole day and many of the things have been
2:18:31so very brilliant about it are really down to alter thanks to him uh and he's a PhD candidate
2:18:37at Stanford University he's going to be talking about the void portraits after the Holocaust
2:18:42then I'm thrilled to be introducing Pele Cox who is a poet and an artist and her her talk
2:18:47is Auerbach and the Poets at the Colony Rooms then finally last but not least we have Professor Peter Davidson
2:18:53who's a Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall at the University of Oxford really pleased to
2:18:57leave you to the to the day and his paper title is The darkness moves between the characters Auerbach,
2:19:06Peake and Ayerton after the war so that sounds a very advertising trio of papers so we we'll
2:19:11we'll kick off right away can I ask you all give all the warmest of welcome thank you [Applause]
2:19:27thank you a turn of the head the tear of paper a streak of blue Gerda Boehm's head looms out of
2:19:37the darkness the first of three drawings of completed by Frank Auerbach in 1961 the work is
2:19:44encrusted with chalk and coal disintegrating under its own weight how does a holocaust
2:19:51survivor Auerbach represent another survivor his Jewish cousin Gerda Boehm the trio of drawings
2:19:58Auerbach produced of her that year suggests how he responded to the unique challenge of
2:20:03acknowledging his past while situating portraiture as an inherently political act in that moment these
2:20:11drawings through their deployment of chiaroscuro surface facture and striking use of colour acted
2:20:18as provocations to break what James Hyman has called a collusion of silence on the legacies
2:20:24of the Holocaust in Britain yet Auerbach does not shout into the void but finds the darkness itself
2:20:31as a potential zone of creation Auerbach's early life had been shaped by war he was born in Berlin in
2:20:391931 but his parents sent him to Britain in 1939 under the auspices of Iris Origo who created a program to
2:20:48send Jewish children out of Germany this was the same year that his much older cousin Gerda Boehm born
2:20:55in 1907 also left Germany with her husband leaving behind her life as a fashion designer Auerbach's
2:21:03parents the patent lawyer Max Auerbach and the former art student Charlotte Nora Burchardt both
2:21:09died in the camps probably around 1943 Auerbach would later tell William Fever that I quote I
2:21:18was at no point shocked or overwhelmed by my parents deaths it was gradually leaked to me that
2:21:23they had been killed I don't know which one Auschwitz probably propelled across Europe by the
2:21:31Holocaust as a young man in London the after effects of the blitz were visible all around
2:21:36him he processed the conflict through his series of building site paintings directly confronting
2:21:42spaces of destruction this world provided its own form of inspiration Auerbach later noting
2:21:49that quote after the war because everybody who was around had escaped death in some way there
2:21:56was a curious feeling of liberty it was sexy in a way this semi- destroyed London there was
2:22:02a scavenging feeling of living in a ruined city he developed his approach to representation alongside
2:22:10Leon Kossoff and the network of other artists he met throughout the 1950s many of whom were Jewish the
2:22:181961 Boehm series represents a powerful assertion of Jewish individuality Auerbach's drawings came
2:22:25at the end of over a decade of experimentation in charcoal works which had begun under David Bomberg
2:22:31at Borough Poly Technic in 1948 Boehm's husband had died in 1956 and so she represented one
2:22:39of the few strands of Auerbach's family still living when these portraits emerged the Holocaust was suddenly
2:22:46more visible than than usual in British culture Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem that year
2:22:52for being one of the key logistical organizers of the Holocaust while in Hollywood Stanny Kramer's film
2:22:59Judgment at Nuremberg dramatized the trials of Nazi war criminals it is doubtful that these currents
2:23:06stimulated his heads of Boehm more important was that this was a moment when Auerbach was
2:23:11expanding his coterie of sitter to include Julia Wolstenholme and Helen Gillespie still it meant that Jewish
2:23:18subjectivity was no longer a private issue Auerbach's tactics of representation sought to pin
2:23:27down another person's existence the first head shows Boehm looking down to her left away from
2:23:33the viewer her sharp nose and large mass of hair are immediately graspable providing coordinates
2:23:39to a drawing which is otherwise in the process of collapsing layers of paper have been gummed
2:23:45together to form a laminate support cracked and chipped the repeated erosion and accretion of
2:23:53chalk and charcoal destabilizing the image's ground Auerbach as so often with these drawings captures
2:24:00an in between moment when the head is angled away with the two sharp slits for her mouth Boehm is
2:24:07shown to be silent the crepuscular environments of the portraits usually suggest a deathly hush but
2:24:14here the swirls or mark making around the head of full of action Auerbach's gestures and the streaks of
2:24:20charcoal he leaves behind activates the surface into a fury of restless presence Boehm here emreges
2:24:28as an individual she was 54 at this point really she belongs to Auerbach's parents' generation for
2:24:36unlike him she could remember the world she had left behind in Berlin the liveliness of the
2:24:43image is underlined by the inclusion of a single stroke of blue charcoal on the far right perhaps to
2:24:48delineate Boehm's shoulder it means that figure and ground are flattened into one so that perceptually
2:24:55the drawing lies below the blue streak form and content cannot be separated a powerful idea when
2:25:02representing another human presence is achieved by the refusal of illusionism it announces I am
2:25:10here the viewer is made aware of both Auerbach and Boehm simultaneously this cry breaks the images
2:25:18silence so that I the viewer am confronted by two people two survivors who could have just as easily
2:25:25not lived and not made it to Auerbach’s studio in Mornington Cresent as Barnaby Wright has noted the
2:25:33heads quote reveal through their reworkings and destructions how close that presence came to not
2:25:40existing at all this is never clearer than when Auerbach is drawing Boehm Auerbach was drawing
2:25:48after a decade where the surface of things was put under enormous strain in art and photography
2:25:54a brutalist photograph like Nigel Henderson's Wall emphasized the inadvertently arresting textures
2:26:00of a chipped and damaged brick wall in Bow the surface of Auerbach's drawings resembles the urban
2:26:07detritus of the East End in Auerbach's second head of Boehm the paper is scarred with violent swipes
2:26:15of black and white charcoal and chalk to create an intense chiaroscuro breaking the subtle
2:26:22gradations of the first drawing Boehm's head is level modelled in 3/4 profile both seeing the
2:26:29viewer and looking past them the image is built over an intense black ground with the red white and
2:26:36blue charcoal registering as accretions pressed on like a brass rubbing of her head this is
2:26:43where the fragmentation of Auerbach's process of destroying and creating simultaneously realizes
2:26:50a metaphorical power Boehm is not reduced to an essentialized archetypal vision but rather
2:26:57is built up formed by the accumulation on the paper the sense of a slow accretion reflects the
2:27:04processes that formed the London Jewish diaspora created over the centuries by waves of European
2:27:10pogroms there is no imagined unity of form or figure in the drawing only the one image itself standing
2:27:18as a testament to Boehm the accrewal of marks becomes a delaying strategy for Auerbach to stop himself
2:27:26falling into a schematic rendering of the human head as TJ Clark wrote about his impasto it is
2:27:33quote a way of not seeing or not seeing clearly or not straight away there is a sense that each
2:27:41image is constantly surprised by the head and that surprise carries over to the viewer I must adjust
2:27:48my vision properly to register her this interval between vision and perception is crucial for it
2:27:54defamiliarizes the human form which the viewer takes too often for granted in our and life
2:28:01the individuality of the head the sharpness of Boehm's neck rhyming with her nose shows Auerbach
2:28:08working out how each feature connects to the other by attempting to sidestep conventional
2:28:13modes of representation Auerbach arrives at a head which which is harsh and elusive at the same
2:28:20time Auerbach wrote in 1958 in his article 7 portraits for Art that I quote I paint the
2:28:30places and the people I know well in order to find their unique image this uniqueness was all
2:28:37the more significant when he had lived through an epoch where people Jewish people were reduced to
2:28:43numbers the numbers tattooed on their skin in the numbers of dead almost beyond count the numbers
2:28:51left as refugees in his final drawing of Gerda Boehm in 1961 he returns to the first composition her
2:29:00head turned downwards to the left the darkness is softer here leavened with white and blue her eyes
2:29:06almost closed Auerbach started with the empty void of his own life after the Holocaust and saw not
2:29:13the end but a beginning a chance to reassert himself and the people around him he did not want to erase
2:29:21what had happened but rather understand how the past of a person could coagulate across their
2:29:26face to form what Leon Kossoff later called a gleam of light and warmth and life thank you [Applause]
2:29:38I decided to write a poem Altair said something about pinning down a person's existence I suppose this poem
2:29:53my poem was an attempt to pin down this artist or an artist's existence in words the poem is
2:30:02called The Colony Room after the club and bar which many of you might know Auerbach
2:30:10frequented in the 1960s alongside his friends Lucien Freud Francis Bacon Leon Kossoff but also
2:30:21some significant poets including Patrick Kavanagh and the great George Barker while a
2:30:30border at Bunce Court his boarding school in Kent and of course while he was a refugee Auerbach
2:30:38learned English poetry from the anthology compiled by W.H. Auden A Poet's Tongue or The
2:30:47Poets Tongue in later years Auerbach often recited and maybe still does poems to his sitters he
2:30:59knows all of Keats’ Odes off by heart my poem is conceived as a conversation between Auerbach
2:31:09and The Poets he learned as a child and those he drank with at the Colony Room the poem also
2:31:18echoes the interview for X magazine that James referred to this morning so beautifully in
2:31:25which he was interviewed by Elizabeth Smart and and proclaimed painting is a serious theme like
2:31:34religion like love one does the persistent thing and then the really remarkable happens
2:31:43when something is there that wasn't there before the consciousness the strictness and then the
2:31:51image never used one of these before
2:31:55if I write this studio will you sit for me blind Homer painted what he could not see
2:32:15and your ambition is bounded by these walls that have no echo in my gaze brick by brick
2:32:28phrase by phrase I build about your hermit hollow the dark embryo I add a ceiling to
2:32:39this page some walls at the margins hold this sheet to a window and it becomes a
2:32:50skylight tossing the page it flutters to the floor where like notes from lips the
2:33:05greats stare from their plates and say this it's how one behaves in a crisis
2:33:18graphite is more intellectual than slinging colours around but have too much charm of
2:33:26their own in 1939 they sent you abroad and in the library at Bunce Court your
2:33:36fingers scored the charcoal texts as your parents endured the chambers of their slow
2:33:47expirations how should I trace you imitate your strokes shape my words to the figure
2:33:56of your thoughts it is as difficult to finish this verse as it is for you to stop
2:34:06painting you said you changed the lino three times in 10 years chiselled a thousand
2:34:20faces from the paint caked on your studio floor are they the blooms of a petrified
2:34:29meadow this collage of faces the debris becoming contours a chest a
2:34:40collarbone a landscape a street the white circles you draw around the
2:34:49feet the easel grows like a hawing tree and bends its limb towards me tireless you
2:35:13paint the muted tones while choirs colour tip from the wireless you
2:35:22gather paint and polaroids trample headlines columns fallen bilines
2:35:32a single brush stroke turns slaps becomes a sign now you have the linament of the face the
2:35:44chin an eyeline I squeeze out words burnt umber lapis my scribble and tattered manuscript the
2:35:58scaffold in the street to paint the same head over and over again leads to unfamiliarity I have been
2:36:09standing over a week from the aeroplane of my mind the words fall like bombs look for something that
2:36:20corresponds create an unfamiliar landscape that's difficult to grasp try looking up from under the
2:36:31chin here here over here says Barker sit down and have a drink the literature that
2:36:45I prized was anything to do with the new spirit of creative art who whispered to
2:36:53me don't be queasy simply write about a tart and there she is the rest is
2:37:01easy Cezanne found climate in form recited Virgil o formose puer nimium ne crede colori
2:37:16oh handsome boy don't believe too much in colour early loss may favour later leaps in
2:37:30the dark Cezanne said the goal of all art is the human face you say now I am older my
2:37:42face has become more interesting to me with one foot in your studio the other in mine I
2:37:51am like the child astride the meridian line this studio never leaves makes no sound and cannot be
2:38:05written
2:38:21I've been thinking about charcoal and darkness and how they are so important in the art of the
2:38:27mid 20th century in the years after the war I've been thinking too about what we might call dark
2:38:34portraits but I'll end with those so charcoal portraits first and their vulnerability to
2:38:41smudging and damage their complicated relation to the sense of touch much infinitely more complicated
2:38:49and soiling if the charcoal is used as densely as in Auerbach’s selfportrait an image which
2:38:56seems so intensely formed by its media that it is haunted by the anticipation of its own
2:39:03smudging erasion as here with the ghost right on which is and is not present already washing
2:39:12out in the ambiguous flood of light which seems to fall starkly from the top right of the image
2:39:20and I've been thinking about charcoal itself a humble medium for bad times a dirty pigment made out
2:39:28of fire and the darkness charcoal sibling of chalk dark sibling of chalk prepared traditionally
2:39:37in solitude deep into the forest by slow burning in covered plants like the fire which smoulders on
2:39:46in the buried beams of a bombed house now Friedrich's charcoal burners are proverbially lonely figures
2:39:54deep in those continental forests which folk tales fill with demons and the spirits of the
2:40:01murderous ancestors how like luckless treasure seekers ghost seers Friedrich's charcoal burners are and
2:40:11how vulnerable to earthly and unearthly misfortunes before the war the chief association of charcoal
2:40:20portraiture in British tradition had been John Singer Sargent's ravishing technically wonderful
2:40:26charcoal portraits as with the turn of the century portrait of the poet Yates a counterpart to Auerbach's
2:40:361958 self-portrait a reverse of its darkness with the fewest charcoal lines set down on
2:40:44the white expanse of the paper to show the poet in a pale jacket on a bright day similarly
2:40:53Sargent's portrait of Gertrude Kingston darker in tonality than the Yates but pale against a richly
2:41:01dark background like a cameo uses the charcoal to dramatize a flood of light which washes over the
2:41:11sitter from the right now again this is almost the antithesis of Auerbach's
2:41:18tender Gerda Boehm where the shadow falls over the sitter's shoulder and runs ahead
2:41:23or antithesis again to Auerbach's 1960 portrait of EOW where the pale sombre faced sitter is leaning almost out of the picture plane to the right
2:41:39as if compelled by the wash of charcoal darkness which is moving across from the left charcoal never
2:41:49quite loses its origin as burnt wood dust and stain and darkness on the page I can remember the
2:41:57charred timber the staining marking burnt timber of the bomb sites which was still a major part
2:42:04of all townscapes when I was a child in the years in which Auerbach made his charcoal portraits years
2:42:13in which the war was still acutely visually present Altair reminded me recently that Francis Bacon
2:42:21took the seeping acrid blitz dust from the studio floor to stain his canvas for Eric Hall's grey
2:42:30suit it is vital to these charcoal heads that they are post war works of art the darkness
2:42:38of the blackout the metaphorical darkness of the disasters of war wants and forms them as in Sylvia
2:42:46Townsend Warner's narrative of the darkness of wartime London it is indescribably moving
2:42:53to see that city abandoning itself to darkness as though it were any country landscape meekly
2:43:02settling down in the dust shutters going up in windows walkers pattering home here and there a
2:43:10few modest medieval little lanterns being fetched out and set at the threshold of subway entrances
2:43:19and the darkness the darkness falling Auerbach's charcoals carry such a strong feeling of postwar though in time
2:43:29they are edging into the late 50s and 60s though we remember these decades were still a time of
2:43:36bomb sites and prefabricated houses charcoal or the dark strokes of the lithographers crayon or
2:43:44black pastels are the medium of the 1940s and 50s darkness and dark places characterized postwar
2:43:54art as the last creation of the paradigmatic pre-war artist Rex Whistler had been a Madonna
2:44:03scribbled in charcoal on the wall of a bombed church in a moment's pause in the advance
2:44:09after the Normandy landings the postwar war shaped artist I am thinking on here are Alan
2:44:16Sorrel Mervin Peak Michael Ayrton Sorrel first so much of his nocturnal painting is reconstruction of the
2:44:27conflicts and fortifications of the British past sometimes the very remote British past as with
2:44:35this image of the evening signal the curfew cannon fired from a star fortified city over
2:44:43a sad and darkening landscape of the Napoleonic Wars the past as so often echoing and sounding in
2:44:51the present Sorrel's imaginations of the English past the earth works the causewayed camps
2:44:59and the wooden castles are always seen under a blacken sky night or a storm coming on as though
2:45:06the movement of history is ever retrograde all was into the dark Mervin Peake's Titus Groan of 1946 is a
2:45:17fantastical novel of absolute desolation and more than anything else it and its successors Gormenghast
2:45:27and Titus Alone are fictions of darkness the darkness of the Piranesian castle which encompasses
2:45:36and dominates the narrative but what world does the fiction inhabit the isolated castle
2:45:47in a desolate land of mountain and forest where one noble family lives out lives dominated by a
2:45:56ritual set of observances whose purpose has long been forgotten surely this is a monstrous remnant
2:46:05of some empire destroyed the luckless air Titus is nourished on nothing suckled on shadow and
2:46:15it shadowy places and at the beginning of the second volume a shadow shifts its l a spider
2:46:25stirs and darkness winds between the characters some readers contrive to read Gormenghast as archly
2:46:35Dickensian reassuringly Gothic ignoring its reality as a terrifying post disaster world an old world
2:46:45running down into the unimaginable dust Michael Ayrton's two post war illustrated fictions
2:46:53are both set in invented worlds below the Earth the Subterranean maze which is the habitat of the
2:46:59Minotaur and his own surreal version of Hell which is the setting for the rise of the small
2:47:07but intensely malign demon Tittivulus the last words of Michael Ayrton's contrafaction of Caravaggio in his later
2:47:18fabrications in 1974 indicate that he was very much seeing the prevailing art of his youth as dark as
2:47:27under the long dark shadow of Caravaggio and death there is perhaps a limited value in
2:47:39saying a thing is like another thing but having been thinking a little of the tradition of the
2:47:43dark portrait the portrait that emerges from deep shadow Rembrandt comes first to mind number of his
2:47:52self-portraits are nothing more than playful tronies Dutch character heads exercises in dressing up but
2:48:00the works which seem to speak to Auerbach are the darkest etchings where the ink lines run so close
2:48:07together that the blackness almost floods the page and the artist's head is modeled in so far
2:48:14as the left hand side of it is modled at all out of that flood water darkness with Kathe Kollwitz
2:48:22the pressing sorrow of even herself portrait from the turn of the 20th century is already looking
2:48:30towards the sorrows of the next 40 years by the time of her 1934 self-portrait the
2:48:38charcoal self who stares out at the viewer is already contemplating infinite sorrow and if we think
2:48:46also of the worn quality of Auerbach's charcoal heads the patch torn palimpsestic repaired paper in his
2:48:54great self-portrait we perhaps see his response to an area of patched up building patched up and
2:49:02made over clothes but if we follow him here perhaps it is right to think about torn and
2:49:10patched paper itself as a support of an image is if darkness is one vital component of these
2:49:18portrait heads the other aspect is fragility the sheer vulnerability of things of marks on
2:49:27paper which leads the mind inevitably back to the 1820s to the decade after another vast destructive
2:49:36European war and to Samuel Palmer's aching invulnerable self-portrait twice as poignant
2:49:44for the splashes and water damage on the surface of the paper a little known work that seems to
2:49:53me to bring many of these elements together is Albert Heutheusen's Blindfolded Christ it's in my own
2:50:01colleges collection in Oxford it edges the charcoal head almost as a genre the charcoal head close to
2:50:09the paradigmatic work of the end of the war from Bacon's three figures the blitz crucifixion
2:50:19the sun darkened of the third hour there's a confluence of circles here Francis Bacon Albert Heutheusen
2:50:31here we have in the Heutheusen charcoal head an extraordinary play on portrait and on literal
2:50:39and perceived darkness God blind folded thank you [Applause] fantastic thanks so much all three for
2:50:51bringing together such a a really interesting range of perspectives on Auerbach and giving
2:50:57us a very interesting end of day mixture different different kinds of text different kinds of reading so
2:51:07can I ask for questions from our audience again for any of our speakers or for some of
2:51:13the or response to any of the broader issues that have emerged through this last panel and then
2:51:18maybe towards the end we'll think about ways in which we might try and connect all the things
2:51:22we've been listening to today and to get your thoughts on some of the themes that you see as
2:51:27most important and most relevant as we take our thinking about Auerbach forward so any initial
2:51:33responses or questions to anything you've heard over this last panel would be very welcome yes
2:51:38Luke
2:51:47hi I wanted to ask about that an up the relationship Holocaust and I want to mention
2:52:01Max Sebald and I think you know what I'm going to say that in his novel Die Ausgewanderten he reproduced
2:52:14some of Auerbach's work and attributed it to a character who was called Max Aurach Auerbach
2:52:22subsequently refused to allow the reproduction of these drawings in the English translation of
2:52:28The Emigrants and which is I take it to be a pretty firm act of refusal to you know relate
2:52:39his work to the history of the Holocaust I wondered what you had to say to that your own the theme of your
2:52:47paper yes thank you for that and and thank you also for introducing Sebald into this discussion
2:52:54because I think his writing speaks so powerfully to what Peter has been talking about also Pele's
2:53:01invocation of these overlapping kind of Worlds and Sebald's sort of fictionalization of Auerbach's
2:53:11migrant narrative it shows in a way that you know what we've talked about earlier on in the way
2:53:19that perhaps the way Auerbach has been written about from only a certain select and approved
2:53:25vantage points here this fictionalization was a way for for Sebald to kind of think uh in
2:53:32different ways about how Auerbach had been formed and use him for his own purposes as well as a novelist
2:53:39as an as an artist or in his own right um but I I think more specifically around Holocaust it shows
2:53:47two the kind of very difficult ways that people who lives have been profoundly marked by this
2:53:56incredible awful destruction of European Jewish World had to come to terms with it whether that
2:54:04was through silence whether that was through assertion of survival whether that was through
2:54:10a kind of assertion too of not being marked by it right I think that was we've talked about how
2:54:17Auerbach's strategy of dealing with the deaths of his family and and other relations uh was
2:54:25by claiming that you know this hadn't marked him right that this is nothing to do with you
2:54:32know who he is as an artist subsequently and we might contest that Sebald has contested that I you
2:54:40know perhaps contest that in my paper as well but not to say that you know he is an artist
2:54:48because of this although very dramatically he is in Britain precisely because of you know
2:54:54Iris Origo and his parents' decision in 1939 but as so many artists Jewish and non-Jewish and
2:55:02as Peter I think was also pointing to how do we make sense how do we create art after this kind
2:55:09of conflict you know to sort of paraphrase Adorno what kind of responses would be appropriate in
2:55:15this moment and it's perhaps not surprising that suddenly portraiture was suddenly an urgent question in
2:55:22'50s British art uh whether representational or through the assertion of the artist;s presence
2:55:29such as Metzger you know throwing acid at sheets right saying I am here I'm creating this uh artwork in
2:55:37process which we could understand as a form of self-portrait uh and this claiming of subjectivity
2:55:44of individuality seemed like an essential uh existential question uh in this moment in '50s
2:55:52Britain broadly the cultural experience of the second world war thanks Altair would you like to add I think
2:56:08that question was quite clearly directed at you I do have something to say about and
2:56:16also Auerbach and poetic response u you may all know about Keats's um theory of negative
2:56:26capability which is an investigation into an artwork and the creative process
2:56:34being allowed to be unfinished and broken and uncertain and of course of course as
2:56:41I said Keats' Auerbach new all Keats' odes off by heart and he must have embraced that idea
2:56:49and also the Romantic Poets of course the write about um our important down
2:56:58Auerbach but also Shelley left England because he'd been exiled self-imposed or not because
2:57:06of his of atheism and went round to Italy and wrote um Julian and Maddalo which was a humanist
2:57:14poem and it was Shelley who coined the phrase the paradise of exiles in his poem and also
2:57:20of course while he was in it in exile um he wrote The Mask of Anarchy which was one of the
2:57:26great protest poems of our time and maybe could only have written that while he was away from
2:57:33that I I think that's both of you being so eloquent I have little to add actually okay that's
2:57:45good thanks Peter any other questions that uh come up in response to that final panel in
2:57:52particular yes
2:57:56Richard thank you thank you all for your papers this is a question for Pele really but maybe
2:58:08something that the others might want to respond to as well I'd be interested to learn more about
2:58:14your working process how you work with word and image together whether you are
2:58:19kind of writing and compiling those images as one piece of work or whether you write
2:58:24the poem and then find the images or the other way around oh the images yeah so how integral
2:58:29are the images that you showed to the to the work that you presented they were actually
2:58:35an after thought probably wouldn't have been able to muster or dig for the the words that I did if
2:58:44I had been knowing that these would have been supporting me I tried to it was a question
2:58:53writing this poem was a question is it possible to you know find this magic in words of Auerbach
2:59:00and I only saw the exhibition this morning and um it was wonderful and it was good I only saw the
2:59:06exhibition this morning but yeah I I hope the images helped I don't know if they were a good
2:59:15Yeah question right sorry question right at the
2:59:19back hi thank you a question for Peter I'm really interested in the connection between Kollwitz
2:59:38and Auerbach and I just wondered whether you might know said more
2:59:45about and yeah I guess I'm interested in Kollwitz's journey from paining to drawing and how she of graduated
2:59:59to drawing connections there she does actually draw quite quite early um as part of her practice in the 1900s um she
3:00:12lived a kind of withdrawn life for a good bit of the middle of the century she she she's
3:00:18retreated to a small house by a lake and didn't really as far as I can see didn't didn't much
3:00:26interact with her contemporaries but I think after the war her work got got very much into
3:00:31circulation and though you know as I said there is a limited utility in saying a thing is like
3:00:36another thing I was very pleased to see what the postcards in Auerbach's studio were so
3:00:41not all one's guesses are bad guesses um but I would be very surprised if he hadn't seen particularly
3:00:49those mid-century charcoals because it seems to me that in something in those something almost
3:00:55prophetic is happening that there is a sense of the the person urgently I think the only
3:01:02word is warning you know I don't want tropes of prophetesses but that there is a that those eyes
3:01:09that stare at you from the 1934 charcoal self-portrait are just sort of extraordinary
3:01:16having seen and warning and I think he he picks up some possibilities of charcoal from what she does
3:01:23with darkness I think that's your answer I think there was also a lady just here who's sorry it
3:01:31was I've got three hands or two four hands suddenly there's one quite close to you Maddy
3:01:36on your left thank you thank you all very much I wanted to pick up on the use of the word accrewal and
3:01:44incremental of and this morning we talk a lot about destruction but actually that's a lot
3:01:52about creation and about the ways in which even the erasure is actually a bringing of light into
3:01:58some of these dark spaces the way which these these areas of darkness have built up so heavily
3:02:04I wonder if you felt that there was something in that about the layering of memory and the layering
3:02:10of happening you mentioned existentialism as well and that great exertion of existence over
3:02:16evokes existence in the immediate and whether that is something that's on with that yes thank you I think certainly with
3:02:28these drawings where you can um as we saw earlier this morning you know previous states of these
3:02:35drawings and how they change quite radically but the darkness is also almost hiding what had come
3:02:41before and sometimes you get these hints of ghosts almost of previous versions that have been patched
3:02:48over or hidden or allowed to to come out but and this is also all about Auerbach right we feel his
3:02:57presence because we can see his surface mark making so visibly and you know we see images of
3:03:05Auerbach you know portraits in his studio it's all about labour it's all about work his
3:03:10paint splattered he's in overalls you know um that postwar moment of the artist as labourer you know
3:03:17we can also think about abstract expressionist self-representation of of that moment too
3:03:24that art was hard work and that it was hard work moreover in capturing the presence of a
3:03:32of another person and it should be hard work as well right and that the process for Auerbach of
3:03:38scraping back redrawing patching on allowing us to see this kind of process taking place is also what
3:03:47allows him to you know again use that line a hard won image right it's it's all about the effort
3:03:55because if art's easy I think Auerbach I think has that almost um you know almost German sense that
3:04:01if something's easy maybe it's not worth doing at all right uh and that part of the effort is also
3:04:09acknowledging someone else's individuality and subjectivity and that's hard work that's not easy
3:04:15it's easy to dismiss someone or look past them or not understand them as another person separate
3:04:21from one's own ego and one's own perspective and that's what Auerbach is perhaps trying
3:04:26to do with these drawings these portraits that he's returning to repeatedly in this
3:04:33moment can I ask a question which is more about I'm just reflecting starting to reflect on the day and
3:04:41the way which we've had three different panels that one way or another have had three very
3:04:46different kinds of character and tone actually and it's very interesting this last panel feels very
3:04:51poetic and impassionate if you if you see what I mean it's quite interesting that all the ways
3:04:56you've been reading your scripts talking about the work and engaging with it in a very in a
3:05:02very in with a particular kind of rhetoric and a particular kind of language for the most part
3:05:09and then I was thinking about the middle panel where there was some there was a very different
3:05:13side of I mean interesting to get a sense from all of you whether you can sort of see what I'm
3:05:17talking about here that there was about something where people it was almost like three speakers who
3:05:21stepped back a bit cooled down as it were and we're looking a bit and and then making comparisons
3:05:28between Auerbach and other artists or yeah in all cases in a way that felt not so invested in that
3:05:34sense of the close reading and the poetic reading and then if you think about the first panel that
3:05:40felt something different again I don't know again best to describe it but something that
3:05:45was very analytical there was a l literary and philosophical kind of aspect to it and that
3:05:50again felt wasn't so much about history but it was a certain kind of certain kind of analytical
3:05:56framework that felt different from panel two and different from panel three and I do wonder about
3:06:01what that suggests about Auerbach studies about the way we might take it forward or about the
3:06:05way in which the ways that we respond to his work in kind of slightly separate or compartmentalized
3:06:11ways I just throwing that out there to does that make does that resonate with both the three
3:06:18of you and with members of our audience I'm just trying to sort of pick up a sense of the
3:06:21day I think you know as as one of the organizers that was definitely my
3:06:31intent to to group together speakers and papers that I thought were going to chime with
3:06:42one another and have their own distinct tone and so that we we didn't have nine people
3:06:49singing the same hymn sheet so to speak but bringing very different perspectives to bear
3:06:54and I think you know Isabelle's paper on Philip Holmes right presents us also another kind of
3:07:01almost existential meditation on what it means to engage so intimately with the presence of
3:07:07someone else you know or of other people right mother and child there such foundational image
3:07:14of Western Art and yet here it's particularized it's individualized it's not an archetype it's
3:07:21not a generic invocation of innocence far from it it's about the corporeal reality of that other
3:07:27person emerging in a in a particular space and so we can see how these ideas are in circulation
3:07:34and far you know they're not unique to Auerbach right it goes about saying Kossoff is obviously a
3:07:40significant figure here who perhaps hasn't been mentioned as much perhaps because we all we all
3:07:46understand that relationship or are aware of it uh but it perhaps says something about what
3:07:50is happening in '50s and early '60s Britain too that is not so reflected upon this other strain
3:07:58of British art that's standing parallel to what's happening with pop art and Richard Hamilton uh this
3:08:04is tomorrow exhibition and so on that is more commonly remarked upon uh and these are all
3:08:10people marked by the war in various ways and are trying to work through that yes yes people are
3:08:16still working on yeah I mean the people are still working on the past the slightly generational I
3:08:22mean dates of birth are slightly in there as in with the poets he's in dialogue with but I think
3:08:28you do have as so often as always I mean you have two or three strands actually moving in
3:08:34parallel at the same time and the chronology is a very well as we've seen this afternoon chronology
3:08:39is is a very strange thing when did postwar end I would love any views on when postwar did end
3:08:46right Linda you next I'd just like to say I've known Pele since she was a very very young girl
3:08:53and I'd just like to say congratulations
3:09:05[Applause] a so presented following on that it was really quite seamless
3:09:19to me I was just so fascinated if we were going to end up using the same assonances
3:09:24so one the next such a beauty well thank you I think a hard act to follow it's nice to get a round
3:09:36of applause like that day thank you any there was some more yes a question here from the front
3:09:42I'm sorry I know you've been waiting as well so should we go to you first sorry and then I know
3:09:46you've been waiting to but we'll make sure we get both of you in thank you for your presentation
3:09:51um I came from abroad as you maybe can hear but I really um general question for you because um I wanted
3:10:01to ask how much is Frank Auerbach considered as a postwar artist here in Britain because in my consciousness was
3:10:08always considered as an artist simply related to aspects or maybe like the aspects of energy line
3:10:17composition and the effect of the sensation of the the person the object in front of him but here I
3:10:26can really hear that it's really related with the postwar moment in Britain and I wanted to
3:10:33ask how is he considered here aspect as to present it and what about later works not from the '60s
3:10:45any thoughts on how he's typically perceived here well I think some of the the key themes
3:10:52that have been touched upon but maybe not so much emphasized has been the you know Auerbach's relation
3:10:56to the Old Masters you know he's always talked very powerfully about going to National Gallery
3:11:02and looking at Rembrandt and we saw I think earlier today you know one of the drawings
3:11:07that he made from Hero and Leander uh and Auerbach's often also presented as a portraitist as because
3:11:14that's a through line throughout his entire career you know he had an exhibition of self-portraits only
3:11:19last year uh in a gallery so this is you know fundamental to him and I think this formalist
3:11:26understanding of Auerbach and his relation to art history has been you know perhaps 15 years ago
3:11:32might well have been a predominant one but I think more recent times from exhibitions
3:11:38from what Paul Mellon Center has done you know what Barnaby Wright's exhibition at The Courtauld
3:11:43have done with building sites and now these portraits had is presenting a different kind of
3:11:48critical uh position a different point of view to take in you know it shouldn't be the only one by
3:11:55any means I think you know we shouldn't reduce Auerbach to just where he came from it's also
3:12:00important where he goes you know particularly from the '60s onwards um but just so the kind
3:12:07of reflection on you know these aspects of Auerbach's art that previously were de emphasized most of all
3:12:13by Auerbach himself and just to add to that just to respond to your question I think and
3:12:19I guess interested to see what other people agree with this I think the very an alternative way
3:12:25of looking at Auerbach in broader culture is around the School of London grouping and so often he's
3:12:32exhibited alongside or taugh alongside Freud Lucien Freud Francis Bacon sometimes Michael Andrews and
3:12:38that's a very typical way in which he's he's understood in relation all of them got these
3:12:43individual mythologies as it were but there are kind of a constellation that are continually
3:12:48invoked when talking about Auerbach or in relation to one another so I think in some ways what's
3:12:53been really interesting about today is that that that that network or that set of points
3:12:58of reference has been broken away from it and we've been hearing you know been given some
3:13:03very new and some way surprising but in some ways more powerful and convincing which just equally
3:13:09powerful and convincing comparators as well today I think sorry at last I've been waiting to come to
3:13:15you just two things first Altair wanted to say about the relationship with Leon Kossoff I saw those three
3:13:30charcoal drawings together I've never seen all three and I've never seen them together and the
3:13:35quality of them that's sort of angelical look so feminine and it made me the something that
3:13:42made me want to know more about that relationship and uncover more about that and and the other
3:13:48thing I wanted to say was I can understand uh an artist not wanting to make a a very direct
3:13:56link between their their own life history and their work and I think we we know other artists
3:14:03who who who balk at that as well they don't want that sort of straightforward explanation about
3:14:10why they do that contextualizing of what they do in that straightforward way I'm thinking
3:14:16of the artist Muhammad Sami who's come here from Iraq and does such beautiful work and I think the
3:14:23important thing is that artists come here and they do have that opportunity to work in this
3:14:28country and to work as reducing a lifetime of work here because they can't do it where they come
3:14:37from yes and just to go off that point so many artists of that generation were refugees whether
3:14:44that you know or had come from Germany like Freud or Bacon who was born in colonial Ireland um you
3:14:52know they had to all come from different parts of the world even Leon Kossof who was
3:14:57born in East London and grew up there you know subsequently was part of the Jewish brigades in
3:15:03the British Army and administered the Bergen Belsen uh concentration camp in 1946 so he was right
3:15:11there uh you know administering and processing survivors from those camps um in the immediate
3:15:18aftermath of the second world war so so many of these artists you know have come from other
3:15:23places or have gone out into the world and then come back to London maybe this is a moment to
3:15:28retire the School of London as a Monica in some senses because it kind of implies that they
3:15:34all the you know that they just lived in Soho their entire lives and that was the extent of
3:15:40that cultural reference and framework which was totally not the case I think there's a
3:15:47wider thing in '50s art that you might find also in particularly music in America at that time
3:15:54and the way that W.H. Auden articulates himself as an exiled or semi-exiled poet in the 1940s
3:16:03and 50s that there is a whole sense that I'm thinking of such works as Audens the Age of
3:16:11Anxiety or Samuel Barber's opera Vanessa that these really are all works where exile is the
3:16:18theme and in some ways they're all works generated by people immensely excited by
3:16:24where they are wonderful point and to some extent also aware that they are in fact exiles um but I
3:16:33think that this goes wider than Britain and there's actually it's a very interesting way
3:16:38of looking at quite a lot of the best art Nabakov's Pale Fire America in the 1950s as well I'm not
3:16:45sure that's strictly relevant no I thought that that's that's a really interesting point and I
3:16:51think I think it again resonated I could just see from the audience response that that felt there
3:16:56was something really powerful in that so thank you very much other questions at all yes man in
3:17:01blue sorry we were talking today it's the um the charcoal drawings kind of period
3:17:15style technique I was wondering if William Kentridge some of doing something
3:17:22very similar big big charcoal drawings one after the other rub down each one
3:17:28actually in recent time becoming still video but I know more connection technique
3:17:37interest any thoughts about Kentridge and Auerbach in dialogue some kind it was interesting that point
3:17:49that that that reference or that comparison is made is made in our book yeah so
3:17:57and I would just add onto that the sort of resurgence of black figurative art in both
3:18:02Britain and America you know whether that's Claudette Johnson using incredibly gestural um
3:18:10application of paint and charcoal or at Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is you know clearly informed by Sargent portraits
3:18:17emerging out of these crepuscular environments is building upon and in dialogue with this uh if
3:18:26we want to call it tradition of representation and then doing something different with it but
3:18:32I mean I take your point entirely I don't think uh you know charcoal portraits are kind of dated
3:18:37or or period but in fact very much part of the live artistic material available to people
3:18:44today thank you for that any other questions to round our session of no
3:18:54okay well look that's been such a rich day can we begin by thanking our three
3:18:59speakers and yeah I just want I mean I just want to wrap up by thanking all of you for
3:19:11coming I it's interesting when we when we generated and published the book and Sarah
3:19:17was very involved in that at the PMC um on the portrait heads I wondered whether not
3:19:23that we' said the last word but I wondered how many more things one could say about Auerbach's drawings but
3:19:27always thinking that was plenty more to be said I think today's really proved that that there's
3:19:32um this feels like a field that's opening up and one that somehow gives us both uh the ability
3:19:39or the potential ability to come to a really really close understanding of the works from
3:19:44closeup and that's one of the things I think from Kate's paper this morning through to your poem
3:19:51uh uh this afternoon Pele that there's that ability to really work closely with the surfaces and and
3:19:59the individual textures and details of the of these works but it also feels like there's a
3:20:03simultaneous pull to move our perspective outwards and to have a sense of the broader
3:20:10picture and I think again the sessions where we were able to whether it was Peter just now or um
3:20:17our middle sessions of speakers as it were making those comparisons some of which uh were totally
3:20:22revelatory in the sense of not knowing this artist and it's wonderful that we've got some of Holmes's
3:20:27family here today which is a great um tribute I think and a great way to pay tribute to his
3:20:33contribution to that work uh but also uh artists that we know we feel we know well but have been
3:20:39rarely brought into dialogue with Auerbach like Hockney for instance and and then the Medalla comparison
3:20:47it felt left field beginning by the end I was utterly convinced I I was had one hand in the
3:20:53fireplace and one hand in the dishwasher strange feeling I have to say I did feel good so um that
3:20:59you know so that's so it feels like it does feel like we're in a process of really rethinking and
3:21:04reimagining the postwar period or that period of the '50s and '60s and as Sarah need you maybe
3:21:10breaking down some of the clear boundaries that we tend to have in our heads between those two
3:21:14decades and about the kinds of practice that went on in within them so huge thanks to you all huge
3:21:21thanks to our speakers this has been by far more than the sum of its parts I think and that's always
3:21:25what you hope for on a day like today um I want to say thank Leyla and Maddy who's been racing
3:21:30around this is your 10,000 steps moment Maddy helping us with the mics and all the Research
3:21:36Forum team but uh most of all thanks all of you for coming and for making such positive
3:21:41and regular contributions to the discussion and to give us a sense of a real sense of spirit and
3:21:46of energy and of art historical inquiry which is what the Courtauld is all about so it's wonderful that
3:21:51we can do that uh and please can I ask you not just to come to this event if you're new to The
3:21:57Courtauld and I know some of you are please come we have an extraordinary program of events here in
3:22:02the Research Forum I think this week we had four if not more really major research events fascinating
3:22:08ones taking place here so please sign up and sign in and come along to our events you'll see that huge
3:22:14they're they're all this character on a regular basis and you'll find lots to stimulate and and
3:22:19I think relatively most of them are free or entirely all of them are free I should know that by now very
3:22:27few barriers for coming and enjoying them um okay we've got some drinks now next door in our Research
3:22:33Forum room so please stay with us and join us and carry on the conversations we've got some soft
3:22:38drinks and some wine next door if we can all squeeze in and and uh and thanks again but can I
3:22:45ask you one before you all quite stand up one last round of applause for all our speakers

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