https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/violet-hour
Saul Nelson
04 April 2025

The painter Frank Auerbach, who died on 11 November last year, has always needed rescuing from his admirers, whether they be psychobiographers in search of holocaust trauma, critics looking for links to German expressionism, or anglophile modernists trying to iron him out into Kettles Yard-esque tastefulness. His paintings are often the site of misconceptions. Recently he was the subject of a troubling little memorial at Tate Britain. His Head of E.O.W. 1 (1960) hung in a corridor just before the Early 20th Century galleries, beside a square glass vase holding eight white roses – drooping, ever so slightly, when I visited near closing time in December. The painted head – Estella Olive West, Auerbach’s longtime model, lover, and sometime landlady – looked down and to the left, from beneath its brilliantly lit overhang of forehead. The shelf with roses stood in this sight-line, so that Stella, grim-faced, brooded on the tribute to her absent maker.

This is in bad taste. Not because of the intention it expresses – a bland gesture of remembrance, eminently reasonable, from an institution to which the painter had deep ties – but because of the impact the framing has on the painting. Auerbach’s portraits might be ostentatious, at times strident. But the roses on the table, light filtered through cut glass – these speak to a version of English modernism utterly foreign to his vision. The great mass of highlights seems to weigh on Stella’s forehead, to press down on her features, to roll her whole head into its expression of slightly crushed introspection. Auerbach has sacrificed a lot to this weight. Stella has no hair; it has been dissolved, volatilised by the lighting. The shadows cast by the electric glare are their own kind of drama. The lighting on Stella’s shoulder is bounded in vivid red, the edge of her left cheek a bubbling of reds and greens. Although they represent darkness, these shadows contain the painting’s brightest colours. They form an intersecting diagonal lattice, as solid and structural as the orthogonals in Auerbach’s contemporary paintings of building sites.

The relation between coloured shadows and massed, lit flesh can be very tender. Auerbach made the paintings of Stella on his knees, on boards propped against an armchair. I can never get away from this perspective when viewing the paintings – their smallness and closeness adding up to a kind of hard-won intimacy. ‘Hard-won’ because reached through a mad, exhaustive testing of the painting’s representational means, the oils going on, wet-in-wet, again and again, scraped and repainted at greater and greater densities, until the final result, the visual ‘fact’ (to use Auerbach’s terms), ‘stalks into the world like a new monster’.

This new thing retains its link to representation. If you compare the paintings to photographs of Auerbach and Stella from the 1960s, you’ll see his knack for a likeness. But it is a kind of representation subjected to profound stress by the sheer weight of the impasto. Critics have often reached for tactile metaphors to comprehend this kind of depiction, at once so close to its objects and so estranged from them, like ‘running our fingertips over the contours of a head in the dark’, as David Sylvester put it in 1969, ‘reassured by its presence, disturbed by its otherness’.

All this is a long way from the Tate’s vase of white roses. There were English modernists for whom the clarity of light through water and the elegant grouping of figures and objects in well-lit interiors were the fulcrum of art. Think of Ben Nicholson in St. Ives, Jim Ede in Kettle’s Yard, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell in Charleston. The meeting of taste and place, of good design and domestic setting, was a well-trod path in the 20th Century. But it was never Auerbach’s. His was a world of spartan interiors and urban grime, of Smithfield Meat Market (1962), of Mornington Crescent Station for the hundredth time. In Studio with Figure on Bed (1966), the studio is a bulging, filthy grid of reds and blacks, like a cruel machine, the figure on the bed squashed and comical. The Tate’s pairing of painting and flowers suggests a domesticity that the art went to great lengths to refuse.

It would never have occurred to Auerbach to make a beachfront studio or a Sussex country house the base for his modernism. Born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1931, he was saved from the gas chambers by a family connection, the American writer Iris Origio, who sponsored his emigration to England along with four other children in April 1939. He attended Bunce Court, a progressive boarding school in Kent for refugee children run by another German Jew, Anna Essinger. Meanwhile his parents were deported to Auschwitz in March 1943 and murdered later that year. In 1948, aged sixteen, he moved to London to study fine art – first at the Borough Polytechnic under David Bomberg, then at Saint Martin’s. He would remain in London, with hardly any interruption, for the next 76 years.

It is easy (perhaps too easy) to see the marks of trauma and forced migration in Auerbach’s life. The obsessive work schedule (364 days a year), the disliking for possessions, and the extreme reluctance ever to leave north London have all been interpreted – rightly, I’m sure – as eccentricities conditioned by the ructions of his childhood and the effort at containing them. It can seem a small step from recognising the effects of trauma and repression on the life to seeing them in the art. ‘Auerbach, the boy who had arrived clutching one little suitcase, hugged his loneliness close’, as one of the obituaries puts it. Why shouldn’t those gunked up paint layers stand for the sedimentations of a psyche engaged in obscuring its own feelings and memories? Why shouldn’t the muck-caked gloom that wreaths the early building site paintings represent the mood of an orphaned young man? Why not see Stella’s withdrawnness – her squashed, downcast stare – as a projection, not of her own emotional state, but of the painter’s, cut off from others by his own past?

None of these readings is wrong, exactly. But we should beware of the tendency of biographical reasoning to make the art an illustration of the life – in particular of events suffered during childhood. One thing this approach neglects is the concreteness of Auerbach’s paintings – their nature as specific, intentional acts, marked by context and related to the productions of other artists in a mutually enforcing network of culture and influence. Sometimes, as in his copies of paintings in the National Gallery, the borders of this network could be thrown very wide, across the history of Western art. At other times, they were drawn close. This was the case with the Heads of Leon Kossoff he did in the mid 1950s. Auerbach met Kossoff, an English Jew born to immigrant parents, at Saint Martin’s in 1949, and introduced him to Bomberg’s painting classes. They sat for each other on numerous occasions in the years 1954-7. The resulting paintings are so similar that, were it not for the physiognomic differences between the two men – Kossoff’s sharp features, Auerbach’s strong jaw – it would be almost impossible to tell them apart. The paintings have the same heaped impasto, the same play with surface texture, with limited colour, the palette moving between greys, browns, and blacks. The effect of these techniques is to grasp and fix each head as something that is at once massive and mobile, both physically there and liable to slip away. Head of Leon Kossoff (1954) is cemented in place by the mottled, low relief black paint that forms a shroud of hair and shade around the highlit areas of the face. These brighter areas, formed from thicker applications of grey and mixed, filthy white, have dripped and oozed. Rivulets cross the socket of Kossoff’s right eye like sweat. The verticality of this runoff gives a sense of gravity, of the head subjected to external forces, pulled downwards by the weight of its own emphases even as it is held by them.

The affinities between Auerbach and Kossoff in the 1950s give the lie to any understanding of Auerbach’s art as a unique emanation of his childhood. He and Kossoff were both proteges of Bomberg, both participants in a discrete, Europeanised vein of British modernism inherited from the music halls and back alleys of Walter Sickert. They arrived at their technique ‘like two mountaineers roped together’, as Auerbach liked to say, repeating Pablo Picasso’s famous simile for himself and Georges Braque in the early years of cubism. And although they took it in different directions – Kossoff towards anecdote; Auerbach towards totality – their proximity in the mid-1950s speaks to a shared need in the rendering of modern British life. The intense, depressive murk was there to see. As was the lurking sense of pastiche and obsolescence. TS Eliot had given them words years ago. There was no need to fetch them up from Birkenau.

Take one of the early landscapes – the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Primrose Hill, Winter Fog (1960). Auerbach was a great reader (and reciter) of Eliot. The painting’s complicated silhouetting of the hill’s black-brown diagonal against the greyer browns of the sky always puts me in mind of The Waste Land’s ‘brown fog of a winter dawn’. There is no crowd of damned souls here. Auerbach lacked the poet’s patrician sneer. But the painting chimes, for me, at some deep level, with Eliot’s pairing of opulence and squalor, of ‘stony rubbish’, ‘oil and tar’, with ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’. The poem’s atmosphere is that of the ‘rat . . . dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I was fishing in the dull canal’; but it is also that of ‘the violet hour, the evening hour that strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea’. This range of tone was one of the fruits of modernism’s breaking up of artistic orthodoxies. It is there in Primrose Hill, Winter Fog, which, in spite of all the density of thick brown murk, cannot quite make up its mind whether the intended effect is not that of the grande décoration. It comes back to the painting’s size, almost three feet tall, over four feet wide. It comes back to the fog.

Auerbach worked Primrose Hill, Winter Fog up from multiple sketches, done at different times of day, under different weather conditions and from different angles – the same technique he used for all his large landscapes. The effect, however, is not one of indeterminacy. Time and place are unmistakeable. We are at the entrance to the park, at the foot of the hill, and dawn is just breaking. You can see where the grey-browns of the sky have been physically pressed into the blacks and darker browns of the hill’s hump, forcing pigment into ridges, as if holding the hill in place. The sense of compression, of the painting gathering in weight and density around this central axis, is grasped as well as seen. Paint holds things together. It gathers the picture’s elements up. It totalises. Auerbach’s trees do not simply stand on the hill. They drip over it, their blacks extending in vertical strokes like reflections in a tarnished pool. The small horizontal stroke of muted red, settled on the dark crown of the hill, is a final point of emphasis. It is here that the painting’s muteness and intractability resolve themselves as aspects of a time of day – of a peculiar visual fact – as the first blush of sunrise throws the hill into dim relief. The building blocks of painting turn out, after all, to be atmospherics, the precise rendering of light and space, the construction and condensation of landscape into new kinds of visual intensity. And if these tip the work towards over-emphasis, or romance, or drama, of a kind familiar from Eliot’s ‘violet hour’, or Monet’s Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1903), or Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831), then so be it. ‘Painting has to give itself over entirely to unity and difference in the thing seen’, as TJ Clark writes of Auerbach, stressing his links to French modernism. ‘The visible has to seem to touch the painted surface . . . The unity of a picture is only compelling – only non-trivial, as philosophers say – in so far as it persuades us that it is an instance of an order in the material of experience. Not just a metaphor for that order, but that order occurring . . . as the painting proceeds’.

This insistence on the totality and independence of the picture itself – a totality wrested from the visual fact but also standing in for it – is the key to Auerbach’s development as a painter in the years that followed. This is because, in spite of contrary assertions by philistine art critics (Brian Sewell complained in 1988 of ‘so limited a range of interest so much repeated . . . that it induces weary numbness’), Auerbach’s later works departed so far from the gloomy impasto of his beginnings. Looking at the incandescent oranges of Camden Theatre, in the Rain (1977), or the day-glo pastoral of Park Village East (2002-3), it is as if the hints of gaudy sunrise in the early work were the hidden essence of the whole practice. Painting’s capacity to generate new intensities out of what merely exists is pushed further and further, towards extremes of dramatisation or ridiculousness from which others would have drawn back.

Part of the drama has to do with the reciprocal interactions of the human body and its surroundings. One striking feature of Auerbach’s mature landscapes is how strange their human inhabitants are – how bodies seem warped by their place on the canvas. The gloaming in Behind Camden Town Station, Autumn Evening (1965) divulges a silly little stick man at left, his posture ramrod-straight, striding self-importantly towards the painting’s edge. Catherine Lampert’s uncertainty about whether the figure in Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law III, Summer Morning (1966) is a piece of Victorian public art or a passer-by gets at the humorous stiffness of these figures. How and why do we get from the vivid, fleshly, tactile intimacies of the portraits and the nudes to these slender little reeds, crushed and stiffened, ironed into gridlike flatness by the painting’s structural imperatives and wafted through the shadows of an evening or the first light of day?

I suppose Auerbach’s answer would have to do with the differences in scope that come in when making landscapes as opposed to portraits. Not that the essential motivations need differ. Whether painting E.O.W.’s Reclining Head II (1966) or Mornington Crescent tube, the point of the painting – to grasp what he called the ‘recalcitrant, inescapable thereness’ of the scene – is the same. Whether a figure melts into background or holds the middleground; or whether, as with some of the heads done in the 1960s, they are all that the painting has of ground (fore, middle, and back all rolled into one), will depend on the painter’s perceptions. Sometimes a person will slip out of our vision; at other times, they are all we can see. Auerbach is the great master of the latter insight, though I wonder about the former. Melting into background is what his figures refuse to do. Even when swallowed by a painting’s mechanism, ground in its gears, bent and pressed and flattened, they never evanesce into atmosphere. Ultimately he is not Monet, nor even Van Gogh (whose peasants and landscape emerge out of one another). Auerbach’s people, on the other hand, although squeezed and pressed to absurd degrees, seem, precisely because of this process, to stick out further from their surroundings.

Think of the tiny anthropomorphic orange blob that hunches its shoulders and droops from the surface of To the Studios (1993-4), or the clownish child in Next Door III (2011-12), built out of the same zigzag armature of reds, yellows, greens, and blacks as the surrounding townscape and yet, for that reason, rendered more incongruous – because now she seems made out of the same shingles and girders as the buildings. Think of the runner in the Hampstead Road paintings (2010) with his elongated head and swivelling legs. Of E.O.W. undulating in her garden, as if ruffled by the wind (1964). In each case, the human body is deformed by the demands of atmosphere and structure, the instantaneous rightness of the scene depicted. But the effect is never total; the body under such demands becomes more obtrusive, not less. Auerbach cannot bring himself to see the human figure as incidental. As in the landscapes of Poussin and Canaletto, people get smaller and smaller, but they never vanish. If anything, they stick out more in their smallness.

Auerbach went on probing the affinities between oil paint and human flesh, the essential corporeality of an art form composed by heaping up quantities of greasy, coloured matter into patterns of resemblance and recognition. This was the quality he took from his heroes, those artists, living and dead, with whom his speech was peppered, and whose work his own often paid homage to. In 1961 he made the first of many paintings based directly on the masterpieces in the National Gallery, a large, bleak, grey work based on Rembrandt’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1635). After Rembrandt came Titian, Veronese, Ruisdael, Reynolds, Canaletto, Rubens. Often he would return to the same work repeatedly, in drawings and paintings. Asked about his reasons for returning, Auerbach was typically incisive. He first drew Samson and Delilah (c.1609-10), Rubens’s great historia, in 1984, and was attracted to the dramatic interaction of the bodies as well as the richly coloured draperies that knit the scene together: ‘If one looks at the hands there is something terribly poignant about the peasant hands of Samson and of Delilah and the sophisticated, tricky, sly Iago hands of the old woman and the barber . . . the yellow, the red and the purple drapery, that great knot of purple like a tear which underscores the fleshly drama which is an orchestrated accompaniment of poignancy and waste’.

The terms – dramatic, Shakespearean, full of high-flown contradictions – are classic Auerbach. No wonder he was drawn to a painting that conjoined ‘fleshly drama’, the vivid grandeur of baroque colour, with ‘poignancy and waste’. I can imagine Eliot finding nothing to disapprove of there. In the largest of the oil paintings Auerbach made on the theme, After Rubens’s Samson and Delilah (1993), he has gone to yet greater lengths to spin the physical essence of the narrative – the slump of the biblical hero, the murderers at the door – out of the intensity of the colour. The reds and purples that mark Delilah’s dress in Rubens are now splashed across the doorway. The bodies of the lovers, barely differentiated as in sleep, seem built from the same rich gold.

Auerbach’s paintings from the National Gallery were not the main notes in his art. They are less numerous than the seated and reclining figures, or the paintings made of the entrance to his studio, on which this essay has hardly touched. But they do capture an essential fact about his art: its deep, committed, fanatical engagement with a particular modernist history of Western painting. Ten years ago, in his essay for Auerbach’s Tate retrospective, Clark wondered whether there was another living artist for whom a painter like Delacroix, or a writer like Shakespeare, mattered as fiercely as they did to Auerbach. What I take him to have meant by this was not that contemporary artists had suddenly stopped reading English literature or looking at French painting, but rather that the manner of that engagement had shifted. Auerbach looked at his idols in the National Gallery and found new patterns of opacity and reserve, of difficulty and grandeur, of haughtiness and bombast. These are modernist values. They ring hollow in contemporary painting, where values like narrative legibility and moral (often liberal) clarity hold sway. Auerbach’s death leaves the field that much thinner.