Auerbach: Obsesive

Frank Auerbach

Small Head of E.O.W., 1957-8 , Oil paint on board

 

Frank Auerbach

Head of E.O.W. I, 1960, Oil paint on wood

 

 

Frank Helmut Auerbach born in 1931 in Germany he then became a British citizen in 1947. In 1939 Auerbach arrived in Southampton leaving behind his parents who later died in a concentration camp in 1942. Having to fend for himself and the death of his parents from such a young age can affect a child and this could be the reasoning to why he paints in such thick and dominant brush strokes because he has become a strong and independent man. His paintings have a very recognisable style due to the heavy application of paint.

"If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you." – Frank Auerbach 2001

The statement above suggests that Auerbach creates this intense relationship with his subjects and what he paints; the more he views and understands what he paints the more intriguing the object gets. This intense relationship in demonstrated though the way that all the Auerbach has used layers and layers of paint it is still obvious what he is painting, and the subjects features are prominent though the painting. While Auerbach is creating this relationship with the subject, he becomes obsessed with the creating the ‘right’ imitation of the subject, this desire to create the perfect image is due to the obsessive nature of a lifeless subject. This is similar to the work of Leon Kossoff and his process to create the perfect image. This leads Auerbach to paint an image and then scrape it off the canvas at the end of each day, repeating this process time and again, not primarily to create a layering of images but because of a sense of dissatisfaction with the image leading him to try to paint it again. A select number of regularly appearing subjects in his paintings include his wife Julia, a professional model, and his friend and former lover Stella.

 

Auerbach is a figurative painter meaning that what he paints is clearly derived from real life objects, however he manipulates what he sees with the over use of thickly applied paint, creating this impasto and sculptural affect on the paints, and this is why most of his portraits caused such a controversy due to the raised surface creating a sculptural affect and, yet still psychologically from the artists point of view has the impact of a painting. Auerbach has visual similarities as Leon Kossoff, Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville, however the layers and layers of impasto paint is to an extreme that even Kossoff struggles to achieve, the way the colours of each paint blend into each other with this visual gradient from colour to colour is something that Kossoff attempts to achieve but fails due to not constantly trying to achieve the perfect image of the sitter, a gruelling process Auerbach does, creating a thick layer of paint making the canvas hard to hang up due to there excessive weight.

Frank Auerbach in his north London studio

Is this obsessive relationship Auerbach creates with the subject the evolution in the repeated layers of paint impasto?