Modernists and Mavericks Page 12

  FRANK AUERBACH Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, 1962

  It was like a precipitous landscape. As you went in buses you saw the sites of bombed buildings with the pictures still on the walls, the fireplaces and so on, and great craters. As a formal theme it made a marvellous mountainous terrain. One couldn’t help but be affected by it.

  The teenage Auerbach was a wanderer in postwar London because his lodgings were not rooms ‘anyone would want to sit in’. What he saw on his bus rides and walks around the city astonished and inspired him. Something like 110,000 houses in the urban area of London had been destroyed beyond repair; another 2,888,000 were seriously damaged. Virtually every structure between Moorgate and Aldersgate Street in the City had been flattened. Huge areas of housing in the East End were pulverized. The great town looked, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen thought, ‘like the moon’s capital – shallow, cratered, extinct’.

  Auerbach had arrived in London in 1947, aged sixteen. For eight years prior to that, he had been at Bunce Court, ‘a curious Quaker boarding school in the country that was run by idealistic people’. After he took his Higher School Certificate, he wondered, like most young people, what to do with his life. He had left Germany forever when he was seven, one of a group of children who were sponsored by the writer Iris Origo to be sent to school in Britain. He said goodbye to his mother and father on the dock at Hamburg and never saw them again. They were murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. Young Frank had an idea that he wanted to be an artist, and no one warned him that this was a difficult course in life. ‘Parents, I believe, are worried about whether their children will make a living’, but for him, there were none to raise any objection.

  Once in London, he began taking painting classes at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute as well as acting in several plays, taking small parts. In 1948, he had a walk-on role in a play by Peter Ustinov called House of Regrets; one of the more important roles was taken by a young widow – her husband had accidentally drowned in the Serpentine – with three young children. Her name was Estella Olive West, Stella for short, and she was thirty-one years old. She was struck immediately by Auerbach; ‘Frank was a beautiful young man, looking very much older than his years, very mature,’ she thought. ‘If he hadn’t been a painter he would probably have been an actor.’ Auerbach moved into the boarding house she ran at 81 Earl’s Court Road and, before long, they became lovers. Again, there was no one to stop them; their affair fitted the spirit of the times – improvising a new life among the bomb sites. Auerbach remembers: ‘After the war, because everybody who was about had escaped death in some way, there was a curious feeling of liberty. It was sexy in a way, this semi-destroyed London. There was a scavenging feeling of living in a ruined city.’

  Meanwhile, Auerbach was attending St Martin’s School of Art and then the postgraduate Royal College of Art. It was at St Martin’s that he first met and bonded with Leon Kossoff, five years his senior. He soon persuaded Kossoff to come along to Bomberg’s evening classes, as neither felt entirely at home at St Martin’s where the prevailing idiom seemed to them bland, as Auerbach recalls: ‘Leon and I were perhaps a bit rougher and more rebellious than the other students. We wanted something a little less urbane, a little less tea-time, a little less limited and not so linear and illustrative.’ When Kossoff failed the St Martin’s exam at the end of the year, Auerbach was all the more impressed. He hadn’t had an extensive education, but he knew what artists were: they were rebellious; they failed exams. He recognized ‘a certain magnanimity of talent’ in the older student.

  Kossoff, born in 1926, came from a much more settled background. Although Auerbach had a few surviving relations, essentially he had been cut loose by the forces of history. Kossoff, on the other hand, grew up part of an East London Jewish world. His father – an immigrant from the Ukraine – ran a bakery. All of this affected the young Kossoff’s approach to painting: whereas Auerbach became a painter of solitary figures, Kossoff often depicted groups, and when he was painting a crowd on the pavement he would find that – unintentionally and automatically – their faces would take on the features of people he knew.

  Frank Auerbach in his studio with a portrait of Leon Kossoff, c. 1955

  His was not in any way an artistic background. ‘The world I grew up in was fairly medieval,’ he recalls. His father struggled to support the family as a baker, and ‘artists were considered wastrels’. Yet Kossoff was drawn to art by an inner urge; one day, at the age of nine or ten and quite by chance, he found his way into the National Gallery. ‘At first the pictures were frightening for me – the first rooms were hung with religious paintings whose subjects were unfamiliar.’ Then he discovered Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654), which seemed ‘the only alive painting in the gallery and for a long time the only work that had any meaning for me’. For the boy Kossoff Rembrandt’s picture opened up ‘a way of feeling about life that I hadn’t experienced before’. He resolved to teach himself to draw, learning from this painting.

  Later on, in 1943, Kossoff had another epiphany when he stumbled by chance upon a life class in Toynbee Hall, an adult education centre on Commercial Street near Spitalfields. A model was posing and students were seated at easels, drawing her. Immediately and instinctively, convinced that he ought to be part of this, Kossoff joined the class. For him, learning to draw became a lifelong project, an almost unattainable ideal, because the standards he set for himself were so high. Years later, he explained what drawing meant to him in a statement for the catalogue of an exhibition of the work of his friend Frank Auerbach:

  Drawing is making an image which expresses commitment and involvement. This only comes about after seemingly endless activity before the model or subject, rejecting time and again ideas which are possible to preconceive. And, whether by scraping off or rubbing down, it is always beginning again, making new images, destroying images that lie, discarding images that are dead.

  To some extent, this echoes Bomberg’s opinion that art is not a pastime or a decorative addition to life, but a moral imperative, deeply connected with questions of truth and morality. Auerbach, talking about Kossoff’s work in return, makes the point that:

  I think character is far more important than what is called ‘talent’. It’s very difficult for people to learn sensibility, they very rarely do. Leon’s early paintings, done when we were students together, are already full of poetry and real sensibility. And he’d learnt how to work because his father laboured eighteen hours a day in the baker’s shop.

  Military service interrupted Kossoff’s education at St Martin’s, which was one reason why he found himself the contemporary of the younger Auerbach. He had served for three years in the Royal Fusiliers attached to 2nd Battalion Jewish Brigade, although he was not, according to his friend John Lessore, an ideal soldier. ‘He was caught with his rifle upside down on guard duty’, but he displayed his intelligence in other ways; ‘these were Palestine Jews from Sandhurst, speaking Modern Hebrew and Leon picked it up just like that.’

  It took both intelligence and endless application for Kossoff to become the kind of painter he aspired to be. According to Lessore, ‘He’s only really ever been interested in working, with the occasional visit to great paintings. He’s never wanted to do anything social.’ At the National Gallery he had been in the habit of making little pencil sketches of old masters on the newspaper he was carrying. But, ‘much encouraged by the example of Frank Auerbach’, his copies grew so vigorous that the attendants stopped him from drawing as he was making too much mess. Kossoff and Auerbach both chose to use charcoal for their drawings, the critic John Berger describing Kossoff’s as ‘heavily worked and very black’.

  Kossoff’s people, Berger thought, were ‘brooding hunched-up figures’, fitting as tensely into the wooden panels he painted on as ‘mediaeval figures in their niches’. But Kossoff’s paintings also had something in common with Rembrandt. It was as if the people in them had somehow turned into paint: great swir
ls, scoops, ropes and gouts of it, pigment that in Berger’s words was ‘shockingly thick’.

  In the 1950s one of those figures was a woman twenty years Kossoff’s senior called Sonia Husid, but better known by the name she wrote under, N. M. Seedo. Theirs was not a love affair, but nonetheless intimate for that. They watched each other with close attention. Seedo had had a life full of danger and adventure. Before coming to Britain in her mid-twenties, she had been a member of the (illegal) Romanian Communist Party and the socialist Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair, and was a scholar of Yiddish. She reminded Kossoff of a character from Dostoyevsky’s novels; in turn, she found that his interest stimulated in her the ability to tell, as she recalled, ‘the most exciting stories that I had ever read, or heard about; somehow in his presence I would gain the capacity of relating things, and he always listened with such animation’. Meanwhile, Kossoff, for his part, ‘suddenly developed a great love and interest for Yiddish literature, about which he had known nothing previously’.

  Eventually, the reason for Kossoff’s fascination was revealed: he had sensed a suitable subject. One day he approached Seedo and asked her to sit for a picture that he wanted to paint. Having agreed, she found the process of sitting and watching Kossoff at work unsettling, but also inspiring:

  LEON KOSSOFF Head of Seedo, 1959

  The struggle that he was engaged in in his work was nerve-racking; he seemed to go through heaven and hell, falling in love with every happy stroke of the brush, and hating all the obstacles, all the distortions and misleading paths that the canvas, paint and brush put in his way to some unknown goal. The physical discomfort and mental strain of just watching, of just witnessing that spiritual torment, made me feel distressed; but I also envied him.

  Seedo often fell asleep during the sittings, the images of her former life filling her dreams. Kossoff remarked that he would not really call what she was experiencing sleep; to him she had never appeared more awake. In the pictures it can look as if she is quaking with the force of those memories, as if from some seismic shock.

  *

  In 1952, Auerbach, now aged twenty-one, began attending the Royal College of Art and was living a traditional penurious artist’s life in pursuit of achieving something of significance. As penniless students, he and Kossoff ‘simply assumed persistence, obscurity, the making of le chef d’oeuvre inconnu … Poverty is very easily borne when one’s young, but it does take up a lot of time.’ Auerbach sometimes helped in the Kossoff family bakery and ‘did all sorts of jobs – worked at the Festival of Britain, worked at the frame-makers, sold ice-cream on Wimbledon Common’.

  That year, Auerbach became fully himself as an artist. One of his two breakthrough paintings was of a place near Stella’s house (Summer Building Site, 1952); the other was a portrait of her, E.O.W. Nude (1952), though she is named in the title only by her initials, in a sort of discreet private code. Two elements were crucial to the step-change that Auerbach made while painting this nude of Stella: a feeling of intimacy and a sense of crisis. The fact that they were lovers, rather than painter and professional model, brought something to the work. ‘The whole situation was obviously more tense and fraught,’ Auerbach explained, because ‘there was always the feeling that she might get fed up, that there might be a quarrel or something.’

  Equally, knowing her so well, he had ‘a much greater sense of what specifically she was like’ than he would have done a professional model. This, paradoxically, made getting a likeness more difficult, not less. It was ‘like walking a tightrope’, with a ‘far more poignant sense’ of the likeness ‘slipping away’. Auerbach found that painting the same person again and again offered more, not less variety:

  If you were to be introduced to a different person every day, after a few days the experience would have quite striking similarities. But if you see the same person every day, the relationship develops and changes, all sorts of extraordinary things come out, you behave in every possible way that you can. It’s an infinitely deeper and richer experience. And the same is true, I think of subjects. A real sensation of amazement or look of beauty or something comes I think from familiarity – you see a familiar person for a moment as a strange object and it’s immensely moving.

  Not only were the pictures themselves intimate, so was the way in which they were made. ‘E.O.W.’ posed either in an easy chair beside the fireplace or lying on the bed, surrounded by pots of paint, with Auerbach kneeling on the floor and the picture resting on a ‘very, very paint-y chair’. Auerbach could only afford sombre earth colours – so ochres and browns predominated – and was reluctant to scrape off costly pigment; so, as day followed day, the surface became ever more encrusted.

  The first successful nude of E.O.W. began timidly. Auerbach would paint a bit at one session, then add some more at the next. One day, he found the courage to repaint the picture entirely, ‘irrationally and instinctively’, and found he’d achieved a portrait of her. This pattern – the long sittings, the final crisis in which he went beyond what he knew into a realm of intuition – was one he maintained thereafter. The tension in both of them made the atmosphere fraught. She was sometimes in tears; ‘Frank’s painted me with tears streaming down my face because he seemed so cruel and so far removed from me, and I’d think: well, what am I? I’m nothing.’

  He seemed violent, lost in his own world; when she was late for a sitting she would arrive to find him pacing and biting his nails, wound up and, as she remembered, ‘so determined’. But there was an almost telepathic connection between them, such as grows up between people who spend years together. One day she was lost in thoughts of her difficult childhood when ‘suddenly Frank said to me, “Stop thinking that! Stop bloody thinking that!”’

  Painter and model were not just close emotionally, but also physically, and this became part of the fabric of the picture. David Sylvester, reviewing Auerbach’s first exhibition, which was at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956, noted that the pictures gave a sensation ‘curiously like that of running our fingertips over the contours of a head near us in the dark, reassured by its presence, disturbed by its otherness’. This remark might have been derived from conversations with the artist but, in retrospect, Auerbach hinted that he was trying to evoke a sensation more subtle even than touch: ‘If you are in bed with somebody, you are aware of their substance in some way in terms of weight; I actually think that is the difference between good paintings and less good ones in whatever idiom.’

  FRANK AUERBACH E.O.W. Nude, 1952

  *

  Kossoff and Auerbach matured into quite different artists. And their points of comparison even in those fifteen or so years during which they were constantly in and out of each other’s studios were partly incidental. The thickness of the paint, for example, was a by-product of what they were doing. There was, however, agreement about some fundamental points. One was that to create a good painting was immensely hard – like finding a diamond, as Van Gogh had written. Hence the ‘seemingly endless activity before the model’, as Kossoff described it, ‘always beginning again, making new images, destroying images that lie, discarding images that are dead’.

  The essence of the problem, as Auerbach explains, is that ‘only the true’ looks new, otherwise it looks like a picture. But truth is a complicated business; not all that is true is full of sufficient vitality: ‘there are also certain configurations on canvas that feel organic and alive and quivering, and others that seem inert.’ The final picture – and this can be said for Kossoff as well as Auerbach – only comes into being as the result of a crisis. To create such a picture the artist has to go beyond the familiar, beyond what is already known, into a place where he does not know what he is doing. As a result, Auerbach concludes, ‘a good painting always seems a bit of a miracle’.

  Nor, of course, is everybody’s truth the same. Some contemporaries of Kossoff and Auerbach’s found theirs not in an intense struggle to record a familiar face or place, but in American magazines, advertisements, rock
-and-roll and motor cars.

  Chapter nine

  WHAT MAKES THE MODERN HOME SO DIFFERENT?

  Being born just before the outbreak of the Second World War, I just thought things naturally got better and better.

  Allen Jones

  The prevailing poverty in the years immediately following the war could be seen by looking through a window of the art school in Camberwell where, as Gillian Ayres remembers: ‘It was poor, very poor. People didn’t always have socks and shoes, they drank out of jam-jars.’ Yet, perhaps for some, the reality was that western society was gradually becoming more prosperous, especially across the Atlantic in America. To some young and creative people the USA became a sort of real life Shangri-La: the land of plenty and also of the future.

  In the late 1940s, a group of young art students from the Slade that included Richard Hamilton and his friends Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson and William Turnbull would often go to the American Embassy library at No.1 Grosvenor Square. For them, the attraction was that, there, ‘all the best magazines were freely available, spread out over the tables’. In comparison with the delights of Esquire, Life, Good Housekeeping, Time and Scientific American, British publications lacked ‘glamour’. And, in Hamilton’s opinion, ‘there was really very little happening in England. Anything that was at all exciting was likely to be in the American magazines or Hollywood films.’