Frank Auerbach

Speaking and Painting

Catherine Lampert

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780500772768
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Born in Berlin in 1931 to Jewish parents, the eight-year-old Auerbach was sent to England in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime. His parents stayed behind and died in a concentration camp in 1943. Now in his eighties, Auerbach is still producing his distinctly sculptural paintings of friends, family and surroundings in north London, where he has made his home since the war.

The art historian and curator Catherine Lampert has had unique access to the artist since 1978 when she first became one of his sitters. With an emphasis on Auerbach's own words, culled from her conversations with him and archival interviews, she provides a rare insight into his professional life, working methods and philosophy. Auerbach also reflects on the places, people and inspirations that have shaped his life. These include his experiences as a refugee child, finding his way in the London art world of the 1950s and 1960s, his friendships with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff, among many others, and his approaches to looking and painting throughout his career. For anyone interested in how an artist approaches his craft or his method of capturing reality this is essential reading.

Chapter One

Finding a Home in England

Berlin childhood

Born on 29 April 1931, Frank Helmut Auerbach, an only child of older parents, recalls being coddled in a way that even at a young age felt suffocating. This stemmed not only from the memory of being dressed in a blue velvet suit but also from the fact that his daily life was rather isolated from other children, with little freedom to play unwatched. The flat where he lived with his parents, Max Auerbach (b. 1890) and Charlotte Nora Borchardt Auerbach (b. 1902), was in a tall building with a large courtyard at 49 Güntzelstrasse in Wilmersdorf, a middle-class area of Berlin.¹ A brass plate at the entrance announced his father’s name and credentials: he was a patent lawyer specializing in engineering and had his office at home. He had served in the army during the Great War and been awarded a medal of distinction. Pudgy and blond with glasses, Max Auerbach was descended from a long line of rabbis, including his father, Mannheim. Frank’s mother’s family, also Jewish, came from Lithuania; she was a dark-haired woman with a fine figure, although her jaw, like that of other Borchardts, protruded somewhat. Charlotte had studied art as a young woman and had been married before.

The family lived in comfortable circumstances, milk and fresh rolls were delivered daily to the door. Frank’s parents seemed to get on, although his father was more relaxed and indulgent than his mother. ‘One of the few sort of tags of memories is of him buying a particular sort of bun for me and sitting opposite and seeming to take pleasure in the fact that I was greedily eating it.’ Objects on his large desk, especially a blotter and paper punch, amused his son. Other recollections are telling, such as the gift of a paint-box. ‘I remember vividly putting a wet brush for the first time onto a cake of watercolour and I think one of my tricks, like you get a dog to roll over, was that I did little drawings, and in my case they were of Red Indians on scooters, which I was asked to draw. I can’t have been more than three or four.’ ² Among his books, Kai aus der Kiste (1926) by Wolf Durian was a favourite. It was ‘about a German boy who stowed away, in a wooden box, for America. He had a great success in the States by devising ever more amazing advertising stunts.’ ³ In conversation, memories still occasionally surface, as when I described going to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2013 to watch Kraftwerk perform. Mentioning their nostalgic song of 1974, ‘Autobahn’, Auerbach commented that when one of the first sections of the Berlin ring road opened in 1936, taking a drive was a popular diversion. The family stopped at the observatory just off the motorway, and the five-year-old impressed the grown-ups by coming out with the word ‘meteor’.

Frank with his mother, Charlotte, Berlin, c. 1931

Max Auerbach, the artist’s father, Berlin, c. 1932

The rise of the Nazi party and the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in January 1933 were a cause of anxiety and, already nervous by nature, Frank’s mother was fearful of the mounting anti-Semitism. On one occasion, when the nanny took Frank to the park, he was given a sweet in the street and, hearing of this and alarmed that someone had been trying to poison her son, his mother put him to bed so she could watch for tell-tale signs. As time went on, the restrictions on Jews increased, particularly after the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 that defined who was Jewish, and when the licences of Jewish lawyers were revoked, the plate at the entrance had to be changed to ‘Max Auerbach, Engineering Graduate’.

Uncle Jakob, his father’s older brother, was also a lawyer. His partner, Dr Altenberg, retired to Italy in 1938. There he met the wealthy Anglo-American writer Iris Origo, who was to provide a lifeline for Frank. Iris, who had grown up in Fiesole, had married a minor Italian aristocrat, Antonio Origo, in 1924 and the couple then devoted their lives to improving the poverty-stricken estate of La Foce that they bought in the Val d’Orcia in southeast Tuscany. Origo had started a school for the children of local peasants, most of whom were illiterate.⁴ This led her to correspond with Anna Essinger, a German Jewish educator who had opened her own school, Landschulheim Herrlingen, near Ulm in south Germany in 1926. The teaching was informed by Essinger’s studies at American universities, and especially by her identification with Quaker principles. She embraced the educational philosophy known as Reformpädagogik whereby pupils and staff were considered equal and everyone was responsible for the common good of the school.⁵ By 1933, the pupils in Ulm were exclusively Jewish and, concerned about the Nazi threat, Essinger transferred the school to England. She rented, and later bought, a Georgian house, Bunce Court, near the village of Lenham and not far from the town of Faversham in the North Downs of Kent, where existing and new students were offered places. Unsurprisingly, the demand from Jewish families rapidly escalated as the Nazis’ racial laws tightened. Origo arranged with Essinger to sponsor six children to attend Bunce Court; those selected included Dr Altenberg’s nephew and niece, as well as Frank.

Auerbach’s parents had hoped the persecution of Jews would get no worse, but facing the reality of the situation, they had acceded to Dr Altenberg’s plan. Shortly before Frank’s eighth birthday they took him to Hamburg, where on 4 April 1939 he boarded the SS Washington in the company of three people he had never met before: the Altenberg children, Heinz and Ilse, and their nanny. The four shared a second-class cabin. This temporary home offered a rather special playroom on their deck with a rocking horse; Frank remembers this and the stale odour on the ship. When it docked first at Le Havre, he saw, with horror, carcasses of meat covered in black flies hanging in the butchers’ shops. Arriving in Southampton, the group boarded a train to London and were met at Victoria station by someone from Bunce Court, who took the children down to Kent; the nanny returned to Germany. Frank’s suitcase contained his clothes and on the larger garments his mother had stitched a red cross to indicate they were for later use; on items such as tablecloths and sheets intended for when he was grown up, two red crosses had been sewn in a corner.

Bunce Court

The atmosphere at Bunce Court was unlike anything Frank had encountered in his previous life, yet instead of feeling abandoned he felt curiously at home, in the sense of liberated. Frank remembers being locked in a shed by two boys on his first afternoon, yet the experience ‘somehow didn’t depress me’. Later he got into a fight with another boy, and turned to a bystander to say, ‘I think I might get on a bit better if you cheered for me.’ His supporter, Michael Roemer, three years older, became a friend and the two are still close. In the nine months from December 1938 to when the war started in September 1939 a number of the other pupils at the school arrived in Britain unaccompanied on the Kindertransport organized by the Refugee Children’s Movement and World Jewish Relief. ⁶ The student body was not exclusively Jewish, however. Bunce Court advertised in the New Statesman and other left-wing papers, and English couples, perhaps going through a divorce and finding it awkward to look after their children, might send them there. Bruce Bernard, later a friend and a remarkable photo editor, together with his brother Jeffrey, a famous journalist, attended the school in 1936–37.

The staff, who were all devoted to the students, consisted mostly of refugees. Joined by British conscientious objectors once war broke out, they ranged from the unqualified to the overqualified. Essinger, known as Tante Anna, frightened many students, although a few, such as Roemer, were unruffled by her manner. After Frank had been at the school for about three weeks, the younger children were moved to the junior house, called Dane Court, a half-timbered Tudor building at Chilham, some ten miles from Bunce Court. The house-teacher was Gwynne Badsworth (later Angell), an attractive, sympathetic woman, who was 28 when Auerbach arrived. ‘She didn’t have any of this nonsense about not speaking English, so within three or four weeks we all were able to communicate in English. We were enrolled as Wolf Cubs or Brownies and did country dancing in the hall. And so, without any conscious effort we were anglicized.’ In an interview with a Kent newspaper shortly before her death in 2014, Badsworth recalled that ‘Every night I would read the little ones bedtime stories. I became a mother to them,’ and she remembered Frank as shy. ⁷ Auerbach agrees: ‘I was a rather quiet and nervous child … my respect for the way she dealt with the uprooted children has grown over the years.’ One of the memories of the school that Frank shared with Bruce Bernard was of being given baths by the lovely Badsworth.

Bunce Court mirrored a kind of ‘real’, grown-up life, albeit in a place ‘a bit like a closed religious community’. There were ‘duties’ for all, such as scrubbing the kitchen floor or gardening, and the older boys were asked to sift the coal to find big lumps that would stoke the boiler. Occasionally they worked on neighbouring farms, digging up potatoes, and so forth. The deprivations of wartime rationing underpinned the austerity. The cook, Gretl Heidt, called Heidtsche, was an amazingly competent German woman, briefly interned as an enemy alien, who invariably provided nourishing and attractive meals. The students were fed six times a day, which for the older children included a snack of dried fruit and cocoa before bedtime.

Frank at Bunce Court, 1939

Art was taught by the mathematics master and later by a pipe-smoking lady who worked with batik. Frank remembers ‘being stirred’ by a reproduction of J. M. W. Turner’s Fighting Temeraire in Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia and a poem on the opposite page. Later, when he was a bit older and ill in bed, he pored over R. H. Wilenski’s Modern French Painters (1939); the book served as a window to what Frank called ‘such a variety of styles’. Tante Anna had a Michelangelo print on the wall of her office and there were Brueghel reproductions over the dining tables, yet, as Auerbach recalls, the ambience was not art oriented: ‘You know, there are arty schools where children are encouraged to express themselves – we weren’t encouraged to express ourselves, we were encouraged to be part of a community and to have community spirit.’ ⁸

In June 1940, as the threat of German invasion increased with the fall of France, the army requisitioned Bunce Court and many Germans over the age of 16 living in Britain were interned. Tante Anna had to find replacement premises, and after a three-day search secured Trench Hall in Wem, Shropshire. This house where Frank lived for five years has stayed in his memory; it was grand enough to have a circular drive and a ha-ha, and inside a green baize door divided the living area from the servants’ quarters where bells once summoned staff to the various rooms. When he became an ‘older’ boy, Auerbach slept in the stables, which were fitted out with five bunk beds in two rows with a stove between. He and his lively Polish girlfriend, Peppi Unger, contrived to meet at night in adjacent barns; after they received their School Certificates in the summer of 1945, she left for London. Later Pe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• About the author
• Other titles of interest
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One: Finding a Home in England
• Chapter Two: Forging a Reputation
• Chapter Three: ‘Painting is My Form of Action’
• Chapter Four: The Best Game
• Chapter Five: Idiom and Subject
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Chronology
• List of Illustrations
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright Page