Self-Portrait, 1958, Frank Auerbach, Charcoal and paper collage
Courtesy of the Daniel Katz Gallery, London. © Frank Auerbach, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art
Transcript
[soft, reflective piano music]
Female Narrator Getty Curator Julian Brooks.
Julian Brooks Here we have a self–portrait by Frank Auerbach. And there are five self–portrait drawings in existence from over the span of his entire career. So, he made very few. He found it somewhat unsatisfying. He called it 'chasing one's own shadow.'
When you look at this, compared to, say, photographs of him at this date, his features seem older and more worn and worried; he's really trying to capture more of himself than you can get in a simple photograph. He's capturing inner thoughts and anxieties beyond that.
[music ends]
And always, you know with Auerbach's work, he's looking and working and reworking and looking and working and reworking. And in this case he is working with charcoal sticks, and then erasing with an eraser. And when he was working on canvas, he could scrape it down or he could add more paint. With paper, he literally got to a point where the paper just tore off and fell apart. So he would put patches on and repair the paper and keep going at it.
[expressive mid-tempo piano music]
It's made over many, many sessions, gradually pulling up this form. And it's no coincidence that what we see here looks in some ways like a ghost.
And yet, in some ways like solid marble or something really tangible, because he's treating the paper in a dimensional way, to really pull three dimensions out of it. And the collage that he uses helps within that.
This drawing was actually in the collection of R.B. Kitaj, and Kitaj hero–worshipped Auerbach. He really admired Auerbach's unwavering sense of purpose and the fact that Auerbach had this ritual of just painting and drawing every day, and single–mindedly chasing the image.
[music ends]