Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting

4 ideas

1. Kindertransport child becomes Camden's daily painter

   Frank Auerbach was sent from Berlin to England alone in 1939, aged seven, on the Kindertransport, and his parents were later killed in the Holocaust. From the mid-1950s he worked in the same Camden Town studio almost every day of the year for decades, painting a small circle of sitters and the streets near Mornington Crescent. Catherine Lampert sat for him weekly from 1978 and recorded these conversations, which makes his life a documented case of an extremely narrow, repetitive practice sustained across a lifetime.

2. Scrape off, restart, finish in one go

   At the end of each session Auerbach scraped the day's painting off the canvas or board and began again at the next sitting, sometimes over hundreds of sessions. The work that survives was usually made in a single final campaign, so it carries the unity of one continuous act instead of a buildup of patched corrections. The discarded attempts are not lost labour: they train the hand and eye until a whole image can be made at once.

3. A picture is done when it surprises

   Auerbach will not accept a painting that only competently matches what he intended or already knows how to do. For him the image is finished when it arrives as something new that he recognises as true but could not have planned. That standard is what forces repeated failure, because controlled competence reliably produces the familiar.

4. Familiarity breeds strangeness, not boredom

   Auerbach painted the same few heads and the same streets for decades rather than looking for new subjects. Long looking strips away the generic label ('a face', 'a street') and exposes how particular and unfamiliar the thing actually is. Depth of attention to one subject, not variety of subjects, is what generates fresh perception.

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