Frank Auerbach

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which I talk to some of the world's leading creative people about the influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is Frank Arbach, one of the world's greatest living painters who, at 92 years old, is still working every day. A child refugee from Nazi Germany, whose parents were killed in Auschwitz. He made his name alongside his friends and fellow painters Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Leon Kossoff in the 1950s. He's well known for the thick layers of paint used to create his portraits and images of London street scenes.

0:49Frank Auerbach rarely gives interviews, so I was thrilled to be invited to his flat to talk about his life and work. A few words from Frank, I'll adjust that. I'll show off. Because we love bare hills and stunted trees, and were the last to choose a settled ground at the boredom of the desk of the spade. Because so many years companioned by a hound, our voices carryeth that enough. And the slumber bound, some few half-wake and half-renew their choice. Give tongue, proclaim the hidden name, Hound Voice. The women that I picked spoke sweet and slow, and yet gave tongue. Hound Voice, as were they all.

1:26We choose each other from afar know what hidden terror has come to test the soul and in the terror's name obeyed the call we understand what none have understood those images that quicken in the blood one day we shall get up this last verse one day we shall get up before the dawn and find our ancient hounds before the dawn wide awake know that the hunt is on then stumbling on the blood dark track once more and stumbling to the kill beside the shore and cleaning out and bandaging of wounds and chants of victory amid then circling hounds right? Wow, that's a very poetic sound check. I can do some more but I won't.

2:06Frank Auerbach, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much, I'll do my best. Is it just Yeats or have you got a whole anthology of different poets lodged in it? I'm mostly misquoted but I've got a fair anthology. I'm susceptible to poetry, I'm not susceptible to music at all or ballet organised religion, but I am susceptible to poetry. In fact, if you talk about influences, I think it has geed me up and egged me on, particularly perhaps Blake. Throughout my life, one of the many mysteries of art is how the muse, as it were, picks people, because it picks the most disparate people, or she picks the most disparate people.

2:47I mean, if you look at the Oxford Book of English verse, Where do you get a hunchback dwarf pope, an illiterate farm labourer, Claire, a misfit woman who kills herself by drinking a bottle of disinfectant, Charlotte Mew? How did the Mews pick these, almost as a joke, these totally incompatible people and turns them into great poets? And I think something similar happens in my trade. People are chosen mysteriously from very early on and they don't know what has drawn them to this, but they have been drawn to it.

3:31We usually record at BBC Broadcasting House for this series, but today we're at one of your studios. Just tell us where we are. Well, we're in Hackney. Here I've had for some time a flat and I work in one of the rooms as a studio here and I've had a studio in Camden Town since 1954 that I've worked in all my life. Since 1954, that's 70 years this year. That's right, yes. How do you divide your time between these two spaces then? Well, now, because of the circumstances, I've got into the habit of spending half the week there and half the week here. I'm so much a creature of habit that it was due to necessity some years ago but there's a rigid timetable.

4:18One's free to think about everything else and doesn't have to think about what one's going to do next. Despite being so associated with London for so long, you were born in Berlin in 1931. Yes. What are your very earliest memories? Well, I've got, in a sense, very few memories because I was in a strange situation of being sent here just before my eighth birthday. And I then, for a long time, didn't see a single person that I'd seen before. It was an absolutely clean break. And I've got very few fragmentary memories of Berlin, although I was to some extent aware of the uneasy atmosphere. My memories of my parents are very fragmentary and vague and partial.

5:05But I do actually remember drawing at a very early age, and I remember that it was regarded as amusing. And painting at all as a very young child? Yes, I remember. In fact, I remember being given a paint box for a birthday and I remember the thrill of putting my brush on the colour and getting it onto the paper, yes. What did your parents do? My father was a patent lawyer and my mother had been an art student. She came from Lithuania. Jake has been to see the flat that they lived in, fairly prosperous married couple in Berlin. My father came of a large family, must-live lawyers. I've never made any attempt to find out any more about them since they were killed during the war and I've simply moved on.

5:59I think life is too short, in my case, to brood over the past. But you say there was a sense of impending danger or anxiety? Yes, there was. I remember various uneasy things. I remember I had a nursemaid to take me out for walks and somebody stopped in the street and gave me a suite. And when I got home, my mother, who may have been of a fairly anxious temperament, thought that the suite might have been poisoned and put me to bed because she thought that any approach from strangers might be perilous because of the Nazis and our being Jewish. Well, you arrived in England as a seven-year-old in 1939.

6:39That's right. Was that part of the Kindertransport? No. There's a fairly well-known American-Italian author called Iris Arrigo, and she was one of the number of saints that I've come across in my life, and she was associated, possibly through the Quakers, with the headmistress of a school that had been brought over from Germany in order to escape the Nazis to England, a boarding school. And she guaranteed six children so that they could come over and not be a burden on the state. I was one of those six children, and I came over with a brother and a sister called Heinz and Ilse Altenberg, we had never met before, and their nanny.

7:21And we came by ship, the SS George Washington, stopped at LARF, where I still remember carcasses of meat hanging outside the butchers covered in flies. this was 1939, landed us in Southampton. We got onto a train to Victoria, none of us speaking a word of English. I think we'd been in second class on the boat and we were in first class on the train and I think the guard questioned the nanny and she didn't understand first class. She thought it was Fustenklasse, which means royal class. And anyway, we were dumped at Victoria, picked up by another train, got onto that, went to Maidstone, Lennam and Kent and then to the school at Bunce Court where I suddenly felt actually it was in a nice grounds, a sense of freedom.

8:10It was a mixed boarding school. Boys had no haircuts and wore shorts until they were 16 and it had a distinctly liberating atmosphere and feeling for me. And you had arrived with nothing, just a suitcase? I arrived with a couple of suitcases and my mother had, there were things in them for immediate use and then there were things like sheets and tablecloth with red crosses in the corners for use when I got married later on. So she had, it was a sort of long term. Yes, I think like most people, they thought all this would blow over and settle down but they never left and I think they must have had a certain intimation that it might be the end, yes.

8:56because they must have known the danger they were facing but you think that possibly they thought it would end? Well, I don't know. They thought it would, yes. You know, they were very ensconced in Berlin society and my father had been in the army in the First World War and I just don't think they quite realised the enormity of what was about to befall them. So you arrived at Bunt Court School in Kent. Yes. Which most of the pupils were Jewish refugees. They were then. It had some English pupils even then. Left-wing English children of divorced parents were sent to the school as well. And the school had a very particular character.

9:40And apparently the Ministry of Education said it was more like a family than a school. And I think that that is true. There was a sort of Quaker morality. The headmistress was a German-American Quaker with Quaker ethos, and it was both free and, in a sense, slightly puritanical in the Quaker way. Staff was very mixed and during the war extremely mixed because they were either overqualified English conscientious objectors or overqualified refugees. and some of them came more or less for idealistic reasons and were totally amateur in the subjects they taught, that is the biology mistress, who was also the gardener, I think read up her lesson the night before she taught it and the geography lesson as well.

10:29So it was a curious, eccentric school at which I have to say I was extremely happy, I think. You felt at home there? Yes, I did. I did. You never heard from your parents again then? There were things called Red Cross letters. You were allowed to send via the Red Cross 25 words. And I got these Red Cross letters perhaps three or four times a year, and then they ceased. Did you find out what happened to them? Yes, I've done this thing that psychiatrists disapprove of, of blocking things out. And eventually I was told that they'd died in Auschwitz. But I never investigated. I just went on with my life.

11:08There seemed no point in being dominated by this, which had already affected me considerably. Yes, I can imagine. Do you think you blocked it out having been told that information, or do you just not remember being told? Nobody told me specifically, and then eventually it was somehow leaked out to me in a quiet way. I have to say that among the staff, had many quite extraordinarily kind and imaginative people. There was a lot of, I suppose, love for the kids there, really. This mixed and amateur education produced a quite exceptional number of people who made a considerable public success in later life.

11:51And it wasn't that we were trained for a career. Nobody ever mentioned, and it's one of the many things I owe to that school, that we would have to make a living or have a career or anything. It was somehow a little republic, pretty much cut off from the world. and we made our own way in this free and very, very austere atmosphere. And you say that you made that decision just to block everything off, to forget. It wasn't a conscious decision. It's the way I am, yes. Do you ever think about your parents now? Hardly at all. I mean, I think of them as benevolent presences. Jake has taken much more interest, my son, yes.

12:40On this cultural life, Frank, my guests reflect on the most important influences, experiences, people and cultural works that inspired their own creativity. And it was at school at Bunce Court that you had what you've called before a life-changing moment when you saw a reproduction of the Turner painting, The Fighting Temeraire. It was an author, Mies Children's Encyclopedia, but it would be mistaken to think that I was drawn to painting exclusively. I was interested in acting. I do remember in Germany seeing a children's play and that somehow caught my imagination and I was interested in writing but I think there was something in me that would have been unhappy and impatient with a life that didn't involve transformation by the creative imagination.

13:33When I was 14, I came to London to stay for half the holidays with a cousin of mine who had me for half the holidays for two years. And I was an office boy in Victoria Street at a firm called Gisab Limited, and I did filing. And I sat at this desk and I was given these sheets of paper. This was, I think, an idea to get me used to normal life because the school had been such a strange, eccentric bubble. And I did it. and absolutely I was far too shy to say that I took sugar in my tears I did in those days I thought perhaps half an hour had passed from this desperately boring work and I looked up and it was only five minutes if once a week I was sent out to deliver a letter it was like being released from a 20 year sentence of hard labour and I was determined never, never again I would rather have slept in the streets than do what was called a regular job of those sorts So part of the impulse that impelled me into art school was a very strong desire not to lead a sort of life that was concerned simply with getting and spending.

14:38The irony is you have had a regular job in a way because you've been working every day ever since. Because part of the attraction, I mean, I didn't know what any of these things entailed, of course. I thought that painting would be, as it were, exciting and fun. You would do brilliant things and go out with girls and be bohemian and so on. And then I started doing it, and as time went on quite rapidly, I suddenly realized that I was going to do this thing in any proper way. It would be seven days a week for the whole of one's life and come before everything else. Well, I want to explore that a bit more in more detail, but just take us back to that moment of seeing the fighting Tameraire for the first time.

15:20What was it about that Turner painting? Well, if you allow me a certain disquisition, for me, there's a total gulf between all the painting that brightens up our lives, the illustrators who do far more reasonable things than people who work in the area that I do, Shirley Hughes or Judith Kerr or Raymond Briggs, do drawings that respond to human movement, and the portrait painters who do good likenesses, which are valued by the people that they're of, the cartoonists like our excellent Peter Brooks, who's the best of my lifetime. But all these things don't exist for me in the area that I think of as art.

16:06In the National Gallery, the two most popular pictures are The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche and a long painting done at the age of 21 by Lord Leighton of a procession of Chimabuey's Madonna being carried through the streets of Florence or Rome or somewhere. And they're both remarkable feats. Leighton is an astonishing feat. Delaroche moves many, many people when they know the story. I don't think of those as art. The Fighting Temeraire in the National Gallery, which is our marvellous national museum with very little dross in it, the way that through these movements of mists and clouds and water and the slowly turning ship caught in this rhythm transmits, firstly, it seems total for me.

17:06I can't prove this, a leap into the unknown, whereas the other paintings that are cited beforehand were people, as it were, following the rules. And in a sense, our morality is the morality of following the rules, and art is the morality of breaking the rules. and I think I feel that the miracle of this Turner which is so and tells the story so marvellously unless you know the captions to these others you don't know the story but this ship slowly turning the regret every single mark seems invented into a vacuum if he came off the tightrope and made one single banal mark on the paper the whole thing would collapse And there is a realm of what seems to me to be miraculous art where the thing's absolutely inexplicable and set a standard of grandeur and freedom that is, in a sense, also a moral lesson.

18:08And what did you see when you first saw the... Because I think it was black and white, the reproduction, the first time. How did it strike you at the time? Well, I was enormously impressed. But these days, we tend to see the pictures after we've seen the reproductions. So, in a sense, perhaps I became slightly more intimate with it because I knew what it was supposed to entail. But, of course, the actual picture is so astonishingly overwhelming that the reproduction sank into oblivion. And did it inspire you to paint more, having seen that painting? It inspired me to try to do better and be less superficial, yes.

18:58Well, let's move on to another huge influence on your creativity. The painter David Bomberg, who taught you at art school from 1947 onwards. Yes. Where did you first meet him? It was totally accidental. I got into St Martin's for the following September, had two terms in which I had been at something called the Hampstead Gardens Hubbard Institute, which didn't suit me, went around the art schools with my portfolio and said, can I come for two terms? And the nice man who rang the Barrow Polytechnic Art School said, yes, it's all right. And he made out a timetable for me and said, we'll put you into Bomberg's class and see how you get on.

19:39There was really a very slight feeling that this was somebody not entirely conventional or acceptable. And he worked in what had been an engineering workshop at the Borough Polytechnic with swing doors that swung like the saloon in the Western. And conducted a life class there and a day class, which I also attended. He was, I think Samuel Palmer's phrase for Blake applied to him, a man without a mask. He could be rude to anybody, particularly people who were in a position to help him, combative, didn't mind what he said. And I went to his class and did a sort of painting. And he took a quarter of it and said, reproduce that bit in three tones of the same colour.

20:26And I did it. And I now see it was one of the very many highly intelligent things he did. And then he said, I suppose you think I'm an old fool. And I said, yes, I do. and he was delighted. I mean, I think there was just this faintest hint that we had something in common. Because you talked back to him. Yes, exactly. There used to be a thing called you're not supposed to run before you can walk, which is, of course, nonsense because babies run before they walk because they want to get somewhere. And he talked to people as though they were trying to make masterpieces of a national gallery level.

20:59Of course, we didn't do it, but he tried to do that. And he himself had mucked up his life in many ways by being so totally unbidable, so totally unwilling or unable to fit in again and again, but had been an astonishingly gifted student. He was taken at the Slade. He'd been a model. He posed for John Singer Sargent. But people saw his potential and ability, and they got him into the Slade. and at the Slade he did a lot of life drawing. A couple of drawings have remained which I think definitely of old master standard. At some point, this is very characteristic, of his time at the Slade where he was with Stanley Spencer and various other people, he rebelled against what was being taught there and started doing Cubist-influenced, very radical paintings and they threw him out.

21:58And he was known for that sort of futurism, the geometrical shapes. At one point he was one of the most famous painters in England. Then he was called up in the First World War. He fought on the Western Front, in fact, didn't he? Yes, I think he did. And then he managed to get himself out, actually. And he started painting from nature and was possibly all set to be a successful landscape paper. But again, he jettisoned that, started painting in what seemed to him to be a more, I don't know, radical, raw, truthful way. And he was a marvellous teacher. His teaching was profound and newly invented every time he opened his mouth.

22:40And he formed a sort of school of followers who became the Barrow Group, which I never joined, who more or less then worked in the idiom that was his at that time. He himself, of course, was always moving on. But as in many cases, like religion, what is for one person a piece of inspiration becomes another person, a set of rules. But he taught you for six or seven years, I think. Absolutely, in the evenings. I was at St Martin's during the day and then the Royal College of Art. So after you finished the studies and began to work as an artist, how hard was that initially? And I'm thinking because you arrived in Britain as a refugee with nothing, how did you support yourself in that?

23:21I had a grant all the time. Until the very last year, it wasn't enough to live on. I had to do odd jobs. But in the last year, I finally got£240 a year. When I left after four years at St Martin's, having got to know Leon Kosov, who became a close associate for a time, I felt I would never again do a painting that I wasn't entirely invested in. And over that summer, I was lucky enough, A friend of mine had a girlfriend who ran a stall in Battersea Fun Fair and I had a job three days a week and what she paid me out of her fiddlings, I was able to keep going for the rest of the week. And I painted that whole of that summer, I painted a picture of EOW, which I thought perhaps was a first painting of my own.

24:12And this was a friend of yours? This was Stella West, your friend? Yes, this was Stella West, who was, I suppose we're talking of influence, may have been the greatest influence of me of all, more than any painter. And you met her when you were a student? Yeah, I met her when I was 17 and she was 32 and she'd lost her husband, yes. Why would you say Stella West is your greatest influence? Well, because of her nature and because of her courage and because of her anti-Puritanism that, as it were, liberated me. Her father, who was a philosopher called O.S. Walker, her father laid down a distinction between death-aviding behaviour, that is, everything that we do in order simply to survive, pay the fares, save money, whatever, and life-enhancing behaviour, and most of us spend far too much time on death-aviding behaviour.

25:02He propounded those principles, but Stella lived up to them. And she became one of your models. If you ask anybody who knows your work to describe a Frank Auerbach, they will probably talk about the thickness of the paint, those impasto layers, those kind of deep ravines of paint that you layer on the canvas. Where did that technique first develop? Well, I have to say that Bomberg used paint pretty freely and sometimes fairly copiously, but nowhere near as thickly as I did. And it came simply from my determination, or perhaps the muse told me not to leave a painting until I thought it had an independent life of its own.

25:43And in those days, I was too timid, and timidity, I suppose, is the greatest vice that an artist can suffer from, to scrape it off. And I just went on painting and painting and painting on the same canvases, changing them radically. And what about this idea of scraping off the paint at the end of the day and starting again? Well, that came much later. By the time I had my first show in 1956, the only thing that people noticed was a thick paint, which I couldn't help. It was an involuntary by-product of the fact that I went on and on and on and repainted the whole image from top to bottom every time, so they became very thick.

26:20Is that because you were so frequently dissatisfied with the work? I was totally dissatisfied. All art comes out of dissatisfaction. Later on, I did scrape it off. It isn't quite as radical as people think, in the sense that I think sometimes I scrape it off before I picked up the painting again, so that the image was still in my mind and there were still some traces. But gradually, and very gradually, it took many years, I weaned myself off this eccentric thickness, and they became more or less normal paintings. But those paintings, each one took a very long time. Very, very long time. And we're talking about what, a month, possibly years?

26:58Absolutely, yes. I mean, by now it seems that a fair amount of work has accrued, but it's been over 70 years, and it has been absolutely seven days a week and five nights a week. You have painted a very small group of dedicated sitters all of your life, including Stella West, who you mentioned there. Your wife, Julia, as well. Absolutely, she's been marvellous. And your son, Jake, I know he's sat for you as well. What do you require from a sitter? Well, I require from a sitter that I know them really as much as anything. But at the beginning with Stella, who was just absolutely marvellous woman, she had three children and a very tough life, and she was prepared to sit for me.

27:42She sat on one side of the gas fire in a chair. I had the painting propped up on a chair opposite her. And paintings would take ages, and she sat three evenings a week. and she was a most independent and free-spirited and unconventional and loving woman and it was simply a gift, an enormous gift to me that she should put up with this. And she didn't... I mean, she saw that I was interested but I don't think she... She wasn't all that interested in painting, actually, to be quite honest. But she offered you her time and great dedication and loyalty to you. Absolutely, it was amazing. She appears in a show of charcoal drawings that is being shown at the Courtauld, portraits dating from the 1950s.

28:31Was it David Bomberg who encouraged you to use charcoal at that time? He didn't encourage me so much as that they drew nothing else in his class. But there is a fairly radical difference. Again, it wasn't planned. It just came upon me. The muse told me to do it between mine, charcoal drawings and his. his were all done at one go I think, premier coup mine took month and month and month and month with a lot of rubbing out again I hadn't planned this but when I got down something that looked like even if it were a fairly skilful adumbration of the thing in front of me it seemed somehow too slight and the relationship between myself and Stella who was sitting for me seemed too momentous in order to leave it at that So I would rub it out again and again and again, and I would do these three nights a week.

29:24So the same approach to the paint then, starting again the next day, rubbing... Absolutely, yes. Again, it wasn't planned. It was something... That's why I'm so much against what's called the demystification of art. I don't know what prompted me to do this, but it's something that I can't help thinking of it as a muse, something that tells us and takes us by the scruff of the neck and makes us do things that we hadn't planned.