One of the joys of a retrospective is tracing an artist’s development – their first faltering steps, perhaps, followed a gradual mastery of forms and ideas, the flow of genius, then a glorious late flowering unlocked by the don’t-give-a-fuck freedom of old age. This retrospective of Frank Auerbach, born in 1931 in Berlin and sent by his parents to London in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution, doesn’t offer any such evolution. Auerbach’s art lands with a thud in an opening gallery dedicated to works from the 1950s and chugs along at pretty much the same tempo right up until recent pictures brought, possibly still wet, from his Camden studio.
Forget the old cliché about the eyes of a portrait following you round the room, here foreheads literally loom to greet you, knitted out of clods and ropes of paint with eye sockets so deep you wouldn’t be surprised to find mice nesting in their depths. The early works are all ochres and umbres, darkened by age or just dark to begin with, which gives every man (and woman) a kind of sagging, Tollund Man appearance. Colour, when it appears, makes skin look raw, as if it has got too close to the bars of an electric fire.
This is painting as sculpture, creativity as effort. Art so redolent of toil is ripe for a bit of psychoanalysing, though the standard line about Auerbach painting not people and places but the human condition gets laid on almost as thickly as his oil paint. Not that the work lacks emotion. It’s impossible to look at a 1958 self-portrait charcoal drawing, the paper rubbed through and patched up, without thinking of the artist forced to forge his identity in a foreign land (Auerbach’s parents died in a concentration camp in 1942).
There’s humour, of sorts, too – in the curved boot of a family saloon or a sign for a hotel interrupting his heroic gesturalism with a kind of crushing ordinariness. Even so, Auerbach’s stubby brushmarks and zig-zag outlines start to look like tics – and your eyes skid across the surfaces of his later paintings like bike wheels on a greasy road.
You could devise your own tour of Auerbach’s London – the corners of Camden, Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill from which he’s barely strayed for decades – but it wouldn’t add much to your understanding of his art, so utterly pummelled into submission his city vistas seem. Everything succumbs to his vision – and everyone. In fact, places and faces being to merge. Swap the titles of ‘From the Studios’ (1987) which resembles nothing so much as an exploded head, and a portrait of ‘William Feaver Seated’ (2011), and you’d be none the wiser.
Auerbach’s doggedness is mightily impressive. What drives an artist, though, isn’t necessarily what sustains a viewer. And admiration isn’t the same as love. I admire Auerbach with all my heart.