Sour about Auerbach

Sour about Auerbach at Tate Britain

Would I (to put it crudely) “get” Auerbach when I visited the exhibition at the Tate? Or would I come out unmoved and perplexed, as on the few occasions I’ve come across his work (there are a couple in the Courtauld Gallery)?

I’m afraid I did not get it. I find Auerbach’s paintings of landscapes and urban places (usually Camden Town) confusing and lacking in feeling; his paintings of models (usually heads) sometimes ghastly.

I didn’t buy the big catalogue. But I was handed the customary free brief guide on entry. These guides normally just repeat the general information posted in each room of an exhibition. In the case of Auerbach, what one got was a series of condensed little essays by various critics, sitters and other artists, all apologists for Auerbach and all attempting to share their insights into his merits. All were pretty much unreadable. If they are preaching to the unconverted they left him (me) even more unconverted.

It is always a bit unfair to sample articles which are striving too hard to persuade that the Emperor’s new suit is really, really a la mode. To be charitable, much aesthetic appreciation, in all media, is difficult, and requires application and learning. Therefore when a critic/scholar struggles to find clear words to communicate a passion about some work, there are two ways (at least) to take it: either the art in question is too complex, too intrinsically difficult to be pre-digested for the general palate – or, pace the learned critic, the artist in question has created, in Jeremy Bentham’s phrase, Nonsense on Stilts.

(One only has to have a passing acquaintance with modern high culture to recognise the permanent dilemma of those anxious to appreciate the good and avoid the falsely promoted. It is all so tricky.)

To return to Auerbach and the Tate’s little hand-out. By their tongue-twistedness you shall know them. So many essays striving at communication but communicating only bewilderment. If there really was some penetrating shaft of light to shine, brilliantly illuminating Auerbach’s genius, surely one of them would have shone it? But no.

Of an early building site painting: “..its subject matter barely legible.. Auerbach’s restless reworking of the subject resulted in expanses of thickly massed paint, its skin dried to deeply wrinkled and puckered surface. It is as if the paint has consumed almost all vestiges of the image itself.”

Quite.

Auerbach’s studies of heads are the most consistently figurative of his work, and also quite repetitive. Some paintings are rather alarming: his use of yellow, pink and red can give the impression of a decomposing corpse just disinterred, especially when the image is thickly painted.

Nature paintings (predominantly of Primrose Hill in North London are more elusive. Back to the Tate booklet: “Auerbach is a landscape painter, but of a peculiar kind. Nature for him seems to be instantaneous. It leaps out of the void. The paint contorts to capture it, but what the impasto seems to be after is not the “character” of a scene or even its atmosphere, but, rather, its simply being there for once…”

What can this mean? What relation do Auerbach’s sprawled and splotchy paintings have to any actual landscape?

The hand-out then quotes Lucien Freud: “Auerbach’s work is brimming with information conveyed with an underlying delicacy and humour that puts me in mind of the last days of Socrates”.

Who spent those last days preparing to drink hemlock.

Brian Sewell has written that Auerbach has spent most of his later career repeating himself: as Sewell wittily puts it, “painting Auerbachs of Auerbachs”.

Many critics prefer to emphasise Auerbach’s creative methods, rather than talk about the end product: in particular, his habit of scraping off the day’s paint and starting again the next day, repeating this cycle over and over again until, in his judgment, he gets it “right” (or perhaps has had enough). This suggests another figure from the Ancient Greek world. Sisyphus was the mythical character condemned by the gods to eternity of rolling a boulder up a hill, the boulder always escaping and rolling back down before the top is reached.

Perhaps the ultimate (in all senses) Auerbach will be the one which, Sisyphus-like, the artist never completes but never abandons: the Auerbach of an Auerbach that never will be.

March 2016