2/100 Frank Auerbach, deposition and erosion

or the body as landscape

The Auerbach exhibition is tucked away at the back of the Courtauld, itself folded into a corner of Somerset House. I like this gallery, like how it’s something of an enigma even among Londoners, it’s not shouty like say the Tates can be, it’s solid, reeks now of old money even though it was built with a fortune amassed by new, its founders having made their money in Rayon and synthetics. A short lived fortune but a legacy now all the same.

I am possibly, almost certainly hungover after last night’s party. It ended sometime around 1, or at least that’s when we left, me clutching a stolen poster, why is stealing things from parties still so much fun, and us standing in the middle of the street waiting for a Uber, why is it Ubers always take so long after a certain time of night? It’s a lie that London’s a 24 hour city, is about 14 hours at best, and most of the time I can’t work out exactly which of those it’s awake for. The hangover is a key detail, the certain increased vulnerability it lends essential to how it feels to encounter Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads for the first time. Some art it helps to be a little out your body for.

I speed through the preceding rooms, only having eyes and interest in Auerbach. I first encountered his work in person and not in print which adds to the expectation. I visited the painting I first saw many times over the course of a disconcerting summer, believing it to be a kind of anchor. It wasn’t. What it became was a barometer. The first time I saw it I felt much like I imagine my daughter felt when I took her to see Rothko, aged 3. Too much she exclaimed and she fell, prostrate on the floor. Too much, I thought as my heart raced and I feared I would also fall to the floor. I have since read about Stendhal syndrome, I am convinced I might have it. I will not say suffer from it since suffering is the last thing it feels to experience art this viscerally. The second time I saw it, it felt worse than the first. I could barely bring myself to look at it that day. I felt fearful of its surface, the layered paint seemed grotesque. The third time, it seemed a comfort. And so it went, all summer.

Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads is a small exhibition of unsurprisingly, given the name, mostly his charcoal heads and a few paintings rendered from them. Immediately, on entering, I am no longer worried charcoal will lessen the effect of the work; seeing it I want to cry. I have no idea why I want to cry other than it makes me want to cry. The same thing happens in front of each. There is a kind of ecstatic experience to be had in viewing them, as if Auerbach has reached into the beyond I wrote about here, and brought back something as transcendent as he has hideous. And make no mistake, these are hideous and beautiful faces, it would both be shocking and flattering to be observed in this way. Auerbach’s eye spares nothing.

Although charcoal is often favoured for its fastness in sketching, these are not sketches. The paper is damaged and patched from repeated erasure and redrawing, Auerbach would erase and recapture the same sitter sometimes up to 40 or 50 times to create a face that finally had its own independence. As the accompanying notes observe, what is created is a hauntingly beautiful, raw form of modern portraiture capable of conveying great depths of human experience and emotion. This is only made possible through the near obsessive reworking, revealing a new facet of the face. Auerbach said of the process, to paint the same head over and over leads to an unfamiliarity; eventually you get near the raw truth of it. Auerbach doesn’t reveal what this raw truth might be, although it is not a leap to infer that in the sculpted nature the charcoal assumes when it’s used in this way, that it’s mortality that lurks under the surface.

There is a moment, often around midnight but certainly never before, when people’s faces assume a different contour, a falsity seems to fall away revealing something true about a person. Perhaps this is why I prefer late night conversations. There is something of this in Auerbach’s heads. There is also something of the geological, in that these heads that at times seem almost not to exist at all, becoming instead the product of deposition and erosion through the method Auerbach employs. I have been thinking recently of geological time and how we might make sense of it. Largely this seems like an impossible task; we are too little, it is too big. I have been thinking too of the body as a geological artefact, subject erosion and deposition as we age. In exploring the effects of this through the method Auerbach favours, a certain truth other portraiture largely avoids is also revealed, he is not attempting to capture the appearance of a person but rather their construction, revealing what the skin conceals. Perhaps in erasing so repeatedly and persistently, some of this skin was removed, the veneer we all carry, also erased.