MODERN ART: Auerbach versus Clemente

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

Auerbach versus Clemente

by Peter Fuller, 1984

If you too are sick of ‘bad painting’, you should have seen Frank Auerbach’s exhibition at Marlborough Gallery. (Auerbach does not exhibit frequently: this was his first one-man London show since the retrospective at the Hayward in 1978.) If you had done so, you would have seen some very good pictures indeed.

J.Y.M. Seated I, Frank Auerbach, 1981

I especially enjoyed a head and two seated portraits of J.Y.M.; and a reclining head of Gerda Boehm who has modelled for Auerbach over many years. But there were many fine paintings, both portraits and landscapes based on familiar territory for this artist - Primrose Hill, Euston Steps and The Studios, where he works. Auerbach also offered a consummate series of drawings, mostly of heads, including those of the Arts Council’s Catherine Lampert, Charlotte Podro, Julia, and J.Y.M.

In ‘Fragments from a Conversation’, a gnomic interview pub­lished in a quarterly review, X, in 1959, Auerbach once explained that he had painted the same model as many as thirty times. (I wonder what the relevant figure would be today, almost a quarter of a century later. How many times can Auerbach now have painted, say, E.O.W., J.Y.M. or Gerda Boehm?) But Auerbach confessed that he got the courage ‘to do the improvisation’ only at the end. This improvisation he identified with ‘gaiety’, which he described as ‘a serious word’.

But what has been true of his relationship with individual sitters may be even more so of his project as a painter itself. Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931 and is thus still in his early fifties; I do not wish to suggest for one moment that he is near the end of his working life. He is, however, getting better as a painter all the time; and the strength of his recent work (so apparent in this exhibition) seems to have a great deal to do with qualities which derive from his increasing confidence in his own ability ‘to do the improvisation’.

J.Y.M. Seated II, Frank Auerbach

This statement requires some explanation. Just a few years ago in an article in Art Monthly (reprinted in Beyond The Crisis in Art) I compared Auerbach and Kossoff. I argued that Auerbach’s work was manifesting a growing detachment from perceived objects and persons. At that time, I felt that Kossoff was superior to Auerbach, and I suggested that the qualitative distinction between the two might have something to do with this difference. I felt Auerbach was tending to pursue the sensual qualities of painting (as substance and process) in a way which meant that his pictures were becoming more and more severed from empirical response to the real world. I tried to relate this difference to certain biographical distinctions between the two painters. But, without seeking for one moment to diminish the high esteem in which I hold Kossoff’s work, I would like to emphasise the degree to which these marvellous new paintings by Auerbach show up certain fallacies in my previous line of reasoning.

For it is now clear to me that the ‘looseness’ (if that is an appropriate word) of Auerbach’s recent painting is not the result of any loss of the sense of real, beyond the world of painting itself. Indeed, Auerbach’s superb drawings - and what a draughtsman this man is - seem to me to be the proof of this. He is certainly drawing from the model better than ever before - and he was always among the best. (Look, for example, at the fine Head of Julia, of 1981, illustrated on the cover of the Marlborough catalogue.) Whatever is happening in Auerbach’s painting cannot be ascribed to any attempt to veil given reality before he has taught himself to see it clearly; Auerbach is not intent upon evasion, or the drowning of the appearances of the real in numbing illusions, or a curtain of subjective, expressionistic gestures. Rather, he seems less and less intimidated by the imping­ing facticity of the real (to use the sorts of words he understand­ably rejects as being too ‘windy’) only because he is more and more familiar with it.

If the outside world was once like a forbidding father with whom he had to wrestle, and ultimately to subdue, it has recently become more like the face of a well-loved friend with whom he can afford a reciprocal relationship. Auerbach has thoroughly confronted its otherness, scrutinised its physiognomy, and accurately observed its changing moods; because it is no longer intract­able to him, he has acquired the courage to take what some might mistake as cavalier liberties in his painting and drawing. Look how that brush-stroke seems urgently to be seeking not the twist of a particular lip, but itself! But, in Auerbach, these are signs not of incompetence, or some brash insensitivity, but rather of a true intimacy with both the visual world, and his own practice, painting.

Gerda Boehm, Frank Auerbach

Indeed, I think his willingness to improvise from a position of achieved mastery is edging his work from the good towards the great. For Auerbach is among the very best of our living British artists. Indeed, I know of only one other British painter alive today whose work is of comparable stature, and that is Kossoff. Beside Auerbach, Francis Bacon is simply an able caricaturist and sen­timentalist: the emotions Bacon wishes to evoke are all too rarely earned in the material handling of his forms and colours.

There are those who say that such distinctions are arbitrary and unimportant; that they reveal only the ‘taste’, or the arrogance, of those who make them; and that all such judgments are no more than the exercise of personal whim, or fancy. The case of Frank Auerbach, however, demonstrates why evaluation is so important in our response to works of art.

Auerbach has long enjoyed the admiration of a limited and discriminating circle of artists, critics, collectors and other viewers. His paintings have not lacked buyers. But, as I have argued before, he has rarely been allocated even a niche in ‘The Story of Modern Art’. (Not a mention, let alone a reproduction, in Lynton’s book of that name.) For reasons I have tried to analyze elsewhere, during the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s the art world was blind to the fact that in the late David Bomberg, Auerbach, Kossoff and Creffield Britain had artists every bit as good as, say, De Kooning, and incomparably better than all the fashionable rubbish brought to prominence through the successive vogues of Late Modernism.

But today this position is changing. In ‘A New Spirit in Paint­ing’, at the Royal Academy two years ago, Auerbach was ‘reha­bilitated’ as the precursor, or Old Master, of a new expressionistic movement. Even though Auerbach is at last getting the sort of exposure he deserves, this ‘rehabilitation’ is as distorting as the previous neglect. Let me explain. If you pick up any history of Pop Art, you will see on around page eight a reproduction of Edward Hopper’s painting, Gas: the text will imply that the importance of Hopper lies in the fact that, as an early painter of petrol pumps, he anticipated Pop. Or have a look at the catalogue for ‘The Art of the Real’ exhibition which introduced American Minimalism at the Tate in 1969. A Rothko is similarly reproduced as if his true significance lay in the fact that he precursed all those blank squares and dead cubes, all that insensible ephemera.

Now the fashions for Pop and Minimalism have mercifully gone the same way as wide lapels, no one except the art historians should need reminding that Hopper was opposed to the anaesthe­sia the Pop artists instigated; or that Rothko’s pursuit of a symbolism of pure forms and colours which could convey high sentiments had nothing in common with that trendy renunciation of illusion, emotion and material skill which characterised mini­malist anti-art.

Auerbach’s ‘relation’ to today’s ‘New Expressionism’ is equally fortuitous. It has been elaborated from the observation of trivial and contingent resemblances, which depend upon putting all substantive question of value in brackets. The relationship be­tween Hopper and Pop, Rothko and Minimalism, or Auerbach and the Transavantgarde is really no stronger than that between Piero della Francesca’s Nativity and a plastic madonna from Lourdes.

Plot 78 by Francesco Clemente

Some will undoubtedly want to know in what Auerbach’s superior quality resides, and how it is to be recognised. Aesthetic quality is not some figment constructed outside the work through discourse, ideology, interest or promotional opportunism. Rather, it is realised, or not, as the case may be, through material transformations of paint, canvas and pictorial conventions. The capacity to recognise it, however, appears to be rooted in a genetically variable ability for intuitive judgment and/or the cultivation of exceptional taste.

But painting, as Auerbach once said, is a ‘practical thing’, and ‘words are so windy’. Although we can never strike the ground and reveal the source of aesthetic quality in a way which places it beyond dispute, we can always indicate its necessary, if not sufficient, conditions in things more practical and substantial than verbal exhalations. I would, for example, emphasise here Au­erbach’s consummate mastery of drawing; his relatively recent flowering as a colourist capable of playing the full emotional range; the increasing sureness of touch, which has enabled him to shift from mere accretion of pigment to a vividly lyrical handling which loses nothing in sensuousness; and his evocation of the ‘Great Tradition’ of Rembrandt’s humanist painting, which he calls upon to redeem his expressionism from solipsistic sub­jectivity.

But the mastery of such material and technical elements, though seemingly essential, guarantees nothing. And I believe Auerbach to have been right when he spoke of the seriousness of those qualities (like painterly gaiety) which spring immediately from improvisation.

For, in the absence of a widely accepted iconography, the way in which such improvisation is elaborated becomes decisive. As you can currently see at the Royal Academy, a painter like Murillo could call upon the iconography of the Madonna, celestial utopias and flying putti as the means of changing his childhood yearnings into a present and socially comprehensible vision of a spiritually redolent world. But that transformation of the physically per­ceived which could once be made manifest by allegoric devices, like haloes and ‘human’ wings, can now only be realised through the transfiguration of formal means like drawing, colour and touch. And I think it is because his indubitable technical mastery has transcended itself and entered this arena of imaginative, and improvised, transfiguration that Auerbach is able to produce works of such exceptional quality.

This transfiguration, or what I have called elsewhere ‘redemp­tion through form’, is the hallmark of successful expressionism. It is something which Auerbach shares with Rouault (in his great paintings of Parisian whores) or Soutine (especially in the carcass of beef canvases.) However sour the subject matter they are presenting, or angst-ridden the emotions that inform their work, these painters know how to bring about an illusory aesthetic redemption, and to leave their viewers with a feeling of the ‘good’, through the way in which they improvise upon the formal means they have learned and mastered.

But today’s new expressionistic painters know nothing about this; they want to evoke their feelings, to allude to them, not really to express them at all. Go and look at Clemente at D’Offay’s, and the Whitechapel . . . and then return to Auerbach. Clemente has never looked at the world; at least, he has not yet seen it. He has no idea how a head meets the shoulders, a limb the torso, or a wall the ceiling. But nor can he have looked much at art. He is pictorially illiterate. He has not achieved competence, let alone mastery, in the necessary material skills of painting: he cannot draw; he has no sense of colour at all; his grasp of composition is weak; and he seems to have no virtuosity in the handling of his materials. Little wonder then that there is infinitely more of this magic of aesthetic transfiguration in a single drawing by Auerbach of Catherine Lampert’s head than in both Clemente’s bombastic series of daubings. Clemente cannot even come out fighting, let alone dance like a butterfly, or sting like a bee.

If we compare Auerbach to Clemente we can see revealed (as clearly as it is ever revealed) the palpable difference between work of potentially enduring stature and fashionable trash. Clemente has been elevated to his present cultural prominence on tides of fashion and interest (tendentious as well as financial). But Au­erbach is one of very few painters working in Europe or America today of whom it is possible to say with any degree of credibility that here, I believe, is a master in the making.

1983