Adam Heardman
Looking and Looking Away at the Same Time
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On the 11 September 2001, an opening reception took place at the Royal Academy of the Arts in London, launching the first major retrospective of the German/British painter Frank Auerbach. Included were the tenebrous early portraits and jagged, charred-red urban landscapes done in post-war Camden. Later rooms gave way to the more explosively colourful views from Primrose Hill and Mornington Crescent painted in the 1980s and 90s, a large selection of portraits spanning multiple decades, and some important drawings. There was a sense that this retrospective was overdue, and the launch was well attended. Catherine Lampert – the critic and curator who had begun sitting for Auerbach in 1978 – was among the crowds. ‘I remember viewers looking at the crusted images of postwar bomb sites,’ she later wrote, ‘the Camden Town scenes where rough, burnt-black ‘girders’ indicate the hard man-made matter on the streets, the artist’s extreme response to pointed chimneys, metal gates and tower blocks and to buildings tapering upwards in window-filled storeys. Some were clearly thinking of what had happened to the Twin Towers and their occupants that morning’.
Chimney in Mornington Crescent, Winter Morning (1991) and Tree in Mornington Crescent (1991-2), both of which appeared in the Royal Academy exhibition, feature the looming chimney of the Carreras cigarette factory, a vast Art Deco building directly opposite the studio Auerbach occupied from 1954 (and still occupies at the time of writing, at 93 years old). In both, the chimneystack appears to be falling. In the Winter Morning picture, it seems almost uprooted by an angular tangle of fence and concrete at its base. The sheerness of its vertiginous climb into the heavens (disappearing off the top of the frame) is matched only by its dynamic vulnerability and off-centredness. In the later painting, the titular tree, though skeletal and frail, stands upright, its presence pushing the chimney over and out towards the margins, as though the organic roots were displacing the man-made form. A threateningly geometric zone of blue sky lances the top of the chimney from right-to-left.
It’s not hard to see why these images would resonate with viewers who had spent the day unable to avoid television coverage of the falling towers in Manhattan, the blooming orange explosions and the crumbling grey buildings set against that Giotto-blue morning sky. The paintings themselves are a calamity of sky and building, a cityscape in flux. Even more so, those earlier pictures of what Lampert calls ‘postwar bomb sites’ – the 1958 Railway Arches, Bethnal Green, for example – are gory visions of a destitute city; angular lines slashed into the picture plane with gridded violence, inches-thick oil paint making the girders it figures appear to melt.
Given that this was his first major retrospective, many visitors would have been seeing Auerbach paintings for the first time. That they entered the gallery to find pictures so closely resembling the world-historical images being beamed around the globe that same day is a striking and inescapable coincidence. For an artist like Auerbach, it could be seen as an intrusion. It’s not just that Auerbach the man seems intent on ejecting History from his own life, but also that Auerbach the painter, perhaps more so than any twentieth century artist, sees each work as a totality, a world on its own terms, a purely pictorial space entirely made of and entirely concerning paint.
His process is a violent one. His sitters have often reported feeling terrified or violated.
Even a casual acquaintance with Auerbach’s work makes two seemingly paradoxical things clear (accepting as a given that very first thing that strikes his viewers – the paint is applied very, very thickly). Firstly, he painted the same things over and over again: landscapes within a mile’s radius of his studio and portraits of the same handful of sitters across multiple decades. And, secondly, that he didn’t paint series. Each painting exists as a separate and entire statement. It’s difficult to say why this is so clear, but it is immediately so.
In the Mornington Crescent paintings already mentioned, the displacement of the chimney happens in paint. It is paint pushing paint into different zones. The language and the vision is of, and through, paint. The pictorial space is the only space in which these gestures occur. It is purely representational art, reality captured in the material of paint. If there are allusions, they are painterly ones (the viewpoint from below, the chimney’s angles in toppling out and away from the picture’s centre, strongly recall the composition of Veronese’s Allegories of Love (c.1570), which Auerbach will have seen often during his regular trips to The National Gallery as an art student in London during the 1950s) rather than historical ones. But, for Auerbach, through this materiality the painting becomes a world, capturing a sensation of worldfulness. ‘What happens when one sees any good painting, the experience is not one of seeing paint or colour or line or shape on canvas, only very marginally so’, said Auerbach to Lampert in 1978. Instead, he prefers a painter to have ‘a permanent sense of the tangible world’.
There is an obvious difference, then, between ‘resemblance’ (Auerbach’s pictures accidentally looking like the TV coverage of the World Trade Centre attacks) and ‘representation’ (the artist’s attempt to capture an image or a feeling of the world using their materials). But so involved is an Auerbach painting in its material conditions as a painting, so fluxious and deep the application of the paint, that when the figure of an urban landscape or a face emerges, often after looking at the picture for a long time, you get the sense that, for him, representation is also a kind of accidental miracle. Despite his ‘permanent sense of the tangible world’, Auerbach starts from a place of un-image, of blank incomprehensibility. When bringing a figure into being on the canvas, he says, ‘I’m not in fact conscious of which parts of it have a name as it were, a nose, or hair, or perhaps a steeple’.
‘Why the way to freedom in painting should be via the incomprehensible is a question not asked enough of modern art,’ writes T. J. Clark, ‘Auerbach’s painting takes it to be axiomatic’. Auerbach’s paintings do have a kind of alterity inherent to them, an urge towards the unfamiliar which is more often the stuff of poetry. But Clark perhaps misses the fact that, in almost every Auerbach painting, there emerges from within the ‘incomprehensible’, a figurative accuracy that you could call photogenic if it weren’t based more on a feeling captured in the material rather than objective representational fact.
Because of this emergent faculty of the representational in an Auerbach painting, because his paintings place ‘feeling’ on a par with ‘fact’ when it comes to figurative picture making, the accidents and traumas of history – both collective history and Auerbach’s own personal traumas – become as embedded within the totality of his paintings as the landscapes or sitters from which he paints. They are, as a result, felt with strange force by his viewers.
Writing on Auerbach is a curiously closed business. Those who have written extensively – Lampert, Feaver – tend to be part of an inner circle of sitters, family, curators and interviewers who respect and perpetuate Auerbach’s resistance to any interpretive or historicising criticism. With the guidance of the one meaningful breach of that closed circle made by the novelist W. G. Sebald, it’s possible to see that Auerbach’s paintings, not despite but because of their absolute commitment to the totality of the picture plane, their unshakeable belief in representation as a pure pursuit – in short, their rejection of history – themselves become the most organic, most natural, type of history. In particular, the history of violence. The resemblance of some of the paintings to the historical violence of 9/11 is incidental, too on-the-nose and should be resisted when interpreting the paintings. But it cannot be ignored, and taking this instance alongside another, more recent case of history intruding upon a visitor to an Auerbach exhibition may provide some way of beginning the thorny task of reading into Auerbach’s pure painting what it seems right to call the ‘natural history of violence’.
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From February to May 2024, Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads ran to great acclaim at The Courtauld Gallery in London. I visited on the first of March. The small but immensely powerful exhibition presented Auerbach’s early self-portraits alongside charcoals of the artist Leon Kossoff and the frequent sitters Stella West (known as E.O.W), Auerbach’s wife Julia, his cousin, Gerda Boehm, and Helen Gillespie.
I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. It was a close friend and they were in a state of great distress.
The charcoals were mostly those from the 1950s and 60s. These pictures appear to rise out of London’s post-war ash. Kossoff is all skull, his facial features crammed into a small crescent of head that disappears round his bone-coloured cranium. E.O.W.’s heavy brow, deep-set eyes, and placidly expressive mouth are done in energetic slashes and erasings. The paper is worked until it breaches and wears away, blistering beneath the artist’s hand as he applies, removes and reapplies his marks. Often, new sheets are pasted on top of the work and the picture continues, simultaneously consuming and emerging from its own material.
As one looks at these portraits over a sustained period of time, some ghost of an almost photorealistic likeness begins to haunt them. Auerbach has said that, in his post-war London milieu, ‘there was the sense of survivors scurrying around a ruined city’. Certainly, something of the post-Blitz, post-atom bomb world – a world keenly attuned to the proximity of being to dust – exists in these raw, living figures conjured out of ash. They’re every bit as much of an excavation of London’s peopled rubble as the bomb-site landscapes. Unavoidably, from within their raw new dark space, it’s not only the ghost of representation that emerges, but also the ghosts of history.
Gerda Boehm was Auerbach’s cousin. Her family escaped Nazi Germany and arrived in London in 1938. Auerbach himself, whose father came from a long line of Rabbis, was smuggled out of Germany the year after, sponsored by a bohemian writer-friend of the family, to attend a new school for German expats founded in Kent. Auerbach’s mother bid the seven-year-old boy goodbye and sent him off with a suitcase full of clothes. Only when he was older did Auerbach realise that some of these clothes were larger than his size and marked with a red ‘x’. They were for use when he grew up. He never saw his parents again.
Auerbach claims never to have felt any curiosity or grief about what happened to his mother and father. ‘I never felt any particular curiosity about it. They were taken to a camp and killed. I don’t know which one,’ he says flatly in To the Studios (2001), a TV documentary produced by his son, Jake (with whom he also appears to have a strange and distant relationship – as though he were trying to exist ungenealogically). Gerda, then, was the only direct German relative Auerbach ever knew after leaving the country aged seven.
Much of the power of the charcoal heads comes from their dual ability to contain an inalienable specificity of representation within and alongside a figuring of post-war feeling. But Boehm is a particularly interesting case as Auerbach’s only direct link to the past from which he claims to be totally severed. Her portraits are unique among these early charcoals because of the inclusion of colour. Do the thin strokes of blue, red and pink that cut into Boehm’s face, shoulders and throat in the 1961 and 1962 charcoals represent the emergence of some more direct and striking pain? Does Boehm stand for a different, more historicised brand of fact than Auerbach’s other sitters?
Differently to Auerbach’s other compositions (the monumental cranium of Kossoff or the deep-eyed and sculpturally austere E.O.W.), Boehm’s head seems whipped by a lateral or vortical wind, the large white zones erased by the artist’s hand giving the face a dynamic, whirling energy. Noticing also the ochre tones beneath the oil painting, Head of Gerda Boehm (1964), it’s difficult to ignore the spectre of Klee’s Angel of History, of which Walter Benjamin famously wrote that, ‘His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.’
Auerbach famously applies paint thickly then scrapes it off and begins again. His process is a violent one, a slashing, destructive and gruellingly physical journey towards representation. His sitters have often reported feeling terrified or violated. Around Auerbach’s feet as he paints and scrapes, ‘the pile of debris… grows skyward’, just as it does inside the frames themselves, whether the thing figured is a bombsite or an eyebrow. Auerbach’s own admission that he ‘buried’ his childhood trauma seems to cast a little light on this explosively violent activity from a usually taciturn man. I do not mean to suggest bluntly or only that the paintings are the record of some inarticulable grief finding its way into the world (though this seems, pop-psychologically speaking, near enough undeniable). It’s more that Auerbach’s paintings include something – a looking of singular intensity that is also a looking away at the same time – that seems close to the core truth of how human beings fundamentally relate to pain, violence, generational traumas. It is as though each painting is a record of the world’s natural history of violence as it becomes written into the selfhood of the people who make up that history, its victims and perpetrators. As we shall see, W. G. Sebald saw this fact buried deep in Auerbach’s painting and went about, through counter-fact or fiction, excavating it.
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The storm of history, then, blows into the pictures from within and without. Here’s how it happened to me on the 1 March 2024. I’d been standing in front of Head of E.O.W. III (1963-64), one of the few oil paintings in the Charcoal Heads exhibition, for several minutes. I allowed my eye to follow the finger-thick lines of scarlet, ochre and blue paint, squeezed directly from the tube onto the painting, as they overlaid the deeply applied impasto tones beneath. Then I soft focused and stepped back to watch as a human figure of profound delicacy and richness became itself through these lines and waves and currents of paint. It seemed to me a treatise on deadness and livingness, a drama of lifeless material becoming haunted by the living spectre of an image before a viewer’s eyes. Immersed as I was in the painting, it was a moment before I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. I left the exhibition, found a spot in a window niche near the Courtauld Gallery’s main staircase and returned the call.
It was a close friend and they were in a state of great distress. They’d just seen something on social media that had deeply affected them, and needed to talk to someone. By 1 March, this kind of conversation was commonplace. Israel had been waging a genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people for almost six months. For those of us who followed groups and reporters supporting Palestinian liberation, it was a daily occurrence to see images of unimaginable violence being doled out on civilians, often children, by the occupying Israeli army. On this occasion, after they described the image they’d seen, my friend and I talked through the now familiar feelings of rage, despair, disbelief, guilt, for a long while.
After we spoke, I didn’t want to look for the photograph they’d described. But I did, of course, bring up Twitter on my phone and, after a few seconds of what I convinced myself was idle scrolling, there it was. It showed what was left of a Palestinian man lying in the Gazan dirt. His intact forearms and hands spread out wide, each wrist bearing the remnants of the plastic cable-tie that had at one point bound them together, were the only identifiable features. The rest of him looked like, in a word, paint.
The man had reportedly been run over, slowly and while still alive, by the track of an Israeli tank, from feet to head. His insides had been squeezed up through him until they had burst out from various points in tubes of scarlet, darker reds, yellows. It wasn’t clear where the ruptures had occurred. He’d simply bloomed into an inside-out state, a pillowy mass, the colours vivid against the terracotta earth. Though vaguely aware of the ethical imperative to bear witness, I couldn’t look for more than a second.
People are unable or unwilling to comprehend the truth.
It’s difficult to even acknowledge in hindsight what was pretty much unbearably clear at the time – the inescapable resemblance between what I’d just seen and Head of E.O.W. III (1963-64), at which I’d been looking when I received the phone call. In both, the human form had been translated into a state of near-incomprehensible, vibrant colour. As with the experience of those visiting the Auerbach retrospective on 9/11, it seems obvious that this accidental visual rhyme should not factor into any reading of the paintings, and yet I suddenly found the painting as impossible to look at as the social-media image stream. The two images had become terms of one another.
I went back to the gallery, not knowing what else to do. For a long moment, I was contorted with guilt at my own freedom to visit a museum and engage in the act of ‘looking’ at all. I simply rejected the role of witness entirely. Resenting sight. Looking away. I sat and wrote an angry tweet; I vowed to donate more money and attend more rallies and speak out more, utterly useless though these things felt. Eventually, I again looked up at Auerbach’s charcoals and paintings, since they were still my immediate environment. And I found something there that spoke to my otherwise inconceivable complex of feelings.
Look again at the figures in Auerbach’s charcoals. They look down, or over the viewer’s shoulder, or off to the side, averting their eyes, looking away. Something about the intensity of the painter’s gaze or the violence of his process, or the strange covenant between viewer and portrait to allow whatever shared meaning exists between us to be somehow hugely unspoken, causes them to avoid eye contact. These paintings don’t explicitly imagine or speak of any particular violent act or historical moment, but something deep in their core can meet any human in any such moment and make perception feel like the beginning of understanding. Within these pictures is captured the true and absolute feeling of a human grief and pain. And through such feelings they create a unified image of a world that grows out from an unimaginable darkness. There’s an assurance that we are kin, and that out of such historically violent incomprehensibility, through some inherent collaboration, a total and coherent world can emerge.
*
In the last story of W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1996), the narrator moves to Manchester during the 1960s in order to study. On his Sunday wanderings through the still war-scarred docks, he finds and befriends a painter, Max Ferber, a character who is based on Frank Auerbach. The pair discuss art, the post-war city, mental suffering. The narrator finds Ferber ‘loath to answer the questions I put to him about his story and his early years’. Many years later, the two meet again. Ferber, despite now being an art-market success, still sits surrounded by piles of scraped-off oil paint in his warehouse studio with the almond tree in the yard. This time he is more open about his past, and eventually entrusts his interlocutor with a packet of his mother’s memoirs, which the narrator then reproduces in full. After another few years, as the narrator finishes ‘the account of Max Ferber given above’, he hears the painter is dying in Withington hospital. He visits, then wanders, lost in a reverie of urban history – and then the enigmatic story abruptly ends with an invocation of The Fates.
In the earlier German edition of the book, the character was named ‘Max Aurach’, and an Auerbach portrait of Catherine Lampert was included in reproduction. Auerbach was uncomfortable with Sebald’s story, and insisted on the name change and the removal of the image for the English edition (though Sebald does get to have his cake and eat it too – when the narrator recounts a list of surnames on headstones in the Jewish cemetery at Bad Kissingen, two leap out at readers in the know: ‘…Arnsberg, Auerbach, Grunwald, Leuthold, Seeligman, Frank…’).
The only mention of Sebald’s story in the closed circle of extant writing on Auerbach appears to be a footnote in Lampert’s 2015 biography, in which she reports that Auerbach found the story ‘misleading and invasive’. In a dismissive tone that betrays her own animosity and perpetuates the painter’s reticence about being ‘read’, Lampert writes that ‘Sebald created a fictional character who had a close resemblance to what he knew about Auerbach’s past’. That phrase, ‘what he knew’, cements and defends the idea that only an inner circle of Auerbach acolytes know the painter’s truth. It builds an unhelpful wall against exploratory writing, even writing that deliberately signals its own status as fiction, like Sebald’s. Lampert also disowns the removed Auerbach painting, calling it ‘an illustration of one of his drawings’, a strangely evasive way to refer to a portrait of oneself.
It is a looking that contains the impulse to look away.
But despite this desire from the painter and his circle to disown Sebald’s story, and despite the liberties it takes with the truth, ‘Max Ferber’ remains perhaps the most valuable piece of writing on Auerbach that exists. Indeed, those familiar with both Auerbach’s work and the story would be forgiven for thinking that Sebald’s greatest crime was being right. Lampert’s claim that Auerbach paradoxically found the story both ‘misleading and invasive’ is itself a sort of admission – if it was totally ‘misleading’ it would not be close enough to the bone to be ‘invasive’. Perhaps Auerbach’s misgivings are because Sebald attaches such an incisive reading of his art to a fabricated personal history. It is my belief that Sebald unlocks, in his fictional narrative, which wears the raiments of historical fact, the true energies of generational violence that vibrate in the core of every Auerbach painting.
As with Auerbach’s, a process of destruction is central to the overall effect of Ferber’s paintings. Like Auerbach, Ferber ‘applied the paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off’. ‘Time and again,’ the narrator says, ‘I marvelled to see that Ferber, with the few lines and shadows that had escaped annihilation, had created a portrait of great vividness.’ For Sebald’s narrator, this undoubtedly figures the ancestral suffering of the Holocaust, the pictures a function of those who ‘escaped annihilation’ and the darkness that swallowed those who did not. The painting’s former ‘selves’, scraped from the canvas, are compared to the Holocaust victims that haunt Ferber’s past: ‘He might reject as many as forty variants… if he then decided that the portrait was done, not so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper’.
The ash and dust to which the victims of the death camps were reduced, and the years of trauma that resulted, are everywhere around Ferber. Like Auerbach, he was packed off to England at a young age, and his parents were murdered by the Nazis soon after. His studio windows are ‘layered with the dust of decades’. He feels ‘closer to dust’, the ‘debris’ that ‘continuously fell’ from his paintings, than he does to other elements of life. Deep in the mother’s memoir is the German fairy tale of Paulinchen, ‘the girl who went up in flames’, and an advert for new ladies’ dresses that ‘char to ash’. When the narrator visits Ferber on his deathbed, the painter’s face is ‘ashen’, much like one of his own portraits. Ferber’s final conclusion about his own career in Manchester is that ‘I am here… to serve under the chimney’. He’s punning on the difference between his own work and that of the factory labourers who once occupied the buildings around him on the Manchester docks. But the chimneys of Auschwitz loom. The accidental resemblances of history gather, as they must have done for Auerbach beneath the Carreras factory chimney in Mornington Crescent. Eventually, Ferber concedes what Auerbach would not: ‘the fact is that the tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers’.
Sebald’s description of Manchester as his narrator wanders through it gives an impression of a city created through continual destruction and re-emergence, a landscape of ‘demolition rubble’ with the odd new building and gangs of children rising out of it. Within this landscape, as we look deeper, we find a ‘debris’ of paint-scrapings created by an equivalent process of creation and destruction. It is as though we have stepped into a Ferber/Auerbach painting and journeyed towards its centre. There we find Ferber. And, after a long process of excavation on the narrator’s part, Ferber finally hands over his mother’s memoirs, relinquishes his buried ancestral pain. Sebald here is dramatising a journey into an Auerbach painting, unlocking what is really at the core of these strangely total, self-contained images. From within Auerbach’s art of ‘looking away’, if you look hard enough, there emerges, with ‘great vividness’, a representation of the very thing from which he averts his gaze.
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The phrase, ‘looking and looking away at the same time’ is here taken from Sebald’s foreword to the printed version of his 1997 Zürich lectures, ‘On the Natural History of Destruction’. In those lectures, he uses it to describe the German people of the 20th and 21st centuries, looking back at the national shame of World War Two and the disgraceful violence that followed when the Allies’ ‘moral bombing’ campaigns killed countless German civilians and destroyed entire cities. To his mind, there’s a cultural blindness. People are unable or unwilling to comprehend the truth, and this has led to a difficult contortment of national identity, perhaps even the incubation of the most rotten kinds of nationalism. Sebald employed the phrase in a purely pejorative sense. But the type of looking that might begin to overcome the dangerous evasiveness that he diagnoses has its own divided quality. It might be said to contain the ‘looking away’ within the ‘looking’.
To create, for example, a self-portrait, you have to look at and away from yourself at the same time – into a mirror or picture, and at the portrait itself as it begins to emerge. I know of few more stark articulations of the darkness and light involved in such activity than Auerbach’s charcoal self-portrait of 1958. In it is all the great and deep pain from which the painter has always looked away. Through it, he, and we, are always already looking directly at an image of that same pain – personal and historical.
Without writing like Sebald’s story – a sustained but aslant look at what the paintings keep shrouded or hidden – fewer of us would have means to express what we feel when we see them. But it is the paintings that contain these feelings. Like a Venn diagram turned into a tesseract, Sebald’s story contains the meaning of Auerbach’s painting in its excavations, but these meanings, inviolable, are still contained inside each Auerbach painting.
With reference to our present moment, an art like Auerbach’s expresses a universal and an urgent acknowledgment of our own experiences of historical pain and violence. It is a looking that contains the impulse to look away, and through it we can unlearn the kinds of cultural blindness that Sebald diagnoses in post-war Germany, with all its attendant reactionaryism. There is, of course, the necessity to act, not just look – to donate, to campaign, to march, to resist, to demand liberation until it is achieved. But when it comes to processing and understanding the world’s often inconceivable history of violence, it’s towards writing like Sebald’s and pictures like Auerbach’s that we’ll look.
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Adam Heardman is a poet and writer from Newcastle upon Tyne. He writes regularly for Art Monthly and other magazines, and his poems have appeared in PN Review, bath magg, The North, The Moth, Propel, berlin lit, The Rialto and elsewhere. He lives and works in east London.
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