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Lot Essay
Pilar Ordovás: Catherine, Auerbach has painted your portrait many times, when did you start sitting for him and how does he choose his sitters?
Catherine Lampert: 'Choose' isn't exactly the right word. Auerbach regularly paints his wife Julia and son Jake. His three other current sitters are art historians: David Landau (who is also a businessman), Ruth Bromberg and William Feaver each of whom in various ways have previously indicated their high regard for Auerbach's art. I began sitting for him in May 1978, towards the end of his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. I had organized the exhibition and had had the privilege of interviewing him for the catalogue so he knew how much I admired his work. I went regularly on Monday evenings for many years, and occasionally Saturday mornings. Lately the times vary since I now live part of each month in Italy. The film that Hannah Rothschild and Jake Auerbach made in 2001 gives an indication of how central a thing posing becomes for Auerbach's sitters, as well as the pleasure of the regularly continued conversations and sympathy expressed. During the two hour sessions I may feel in a horrible crisis or overwhelmed by work, but oddly I always leave the studio exhilarated.
PO: I presume sitting for him gives you a rare insight into his working method?
CL: What a model sees (facing the back of the easel) of his working process, is the artist's total involvement. Auerbach is always moving: looking, rapidly building an image with soft paint scooped and squeezed from pots and tubes, wiping it off on newspaper and becoming covered in the medium. The scraping down of the image if it hasn't reached the state he wants often just precedes beginning another session. There are good written accounts by sitters, and they almost all emphasize the noise - the poetry recited, the talking and the grunts - as much as the quiet moments.
PO: You once told me that all his sitters, with the exception of his wife Julia, are seated on the same chair in his studio. Within the routine way in which he works does Auerbach have an idea of how he wants the work to be before he starts or is the sitter invited to sit in a different position?
CL: The sitters who come to Camden use the high-backed pine chair that replaced the original wing chair. It is the only 'clean' piece of furniture in a studio not large enough to offer changes in the set-up. Julia poses in another location, sometimes lying down. From one painting (or drawing) to the subsequent one, we perhaps alter the direction of our head to focus on another part of the wall with the window above, or I change T-shirt. Auerbach has an impulse/idea that he keeps to himself of what he hopes to paint - something he hasn't managed before - and has prepared a board or canvas with a particular shape. Apart from the six portraits on the go, he is also engaged in a large landscape, or perhaps a smaller one, and goes early in the morning to a very specific spot to draw.
PO: You once talked about Auerbach's notion of juxtaposing areas of colour so that they cohere, and how for him a prismatic painted unity represents the grandest kind of painting, is this his main aim?
CL: Auerbach has explained that, "Paint is at its most eloquent when it is a by-product of some corporeal, spatial, developing imaginative concept, a creative identification with the subject. I could no more fix my mind on the character of paint than if maybe an alchemist could fix his on mechanical chemistry". What you have described explains his primary purpose but the paintings are achieved by 'pinning down facts' as well - descriptive and specific items like the Council's Christmas tree in a recent painting of Mornington Crescent - and marks that are true to the spirit of his feelings for the subject. For instance in his portraits of me I can recognize unique things about my skull, posture, preoccupations, fantasies, really my whole life. All of his sitters recognize the special urgency and tension that comes in the last weeks of the picture. But putting aside observations of the struggle, entering a room with a finished painting on the wall, one is struck by how Auerbach has achieved a new profundity in portraiture not unrelated to the freedom he gains by continuing with the same person for decades. 'Kinetic' aspects are part of the experience, so the marvel of his unified carpentry is more of a mystery. Often a rebellious wariness arises through tiny flecks and impasto with tangible contours. When writing about Cézanne, Rilke spoke about one colour coming into its own in response to another patch to assert itself or recollect itself, just as the mouth of the dog anticipates the approach of various things, the art has a "glandular activity within the intensity of colours, reflections".
Catherine Lampert is a curator and an art historian who began working at the Hayward Gallery in the 1970s. She was appointed Director of the Whitechapel in 1988 and shortly after leaving in 2001 she curated Auerbach's exhibition at the Royal Academy. Since then she has been engaged in working on several books (on Francis Alys 2003 and Euan Uglow and Tunga to come) as well as future exhibitions of Rodin for the Royal Academy.
Catherine Lampert: 'Choose' isn't exactly the right word. Auerbach regularly paints his wife Julia and son Jake. His three other current sitters are art historians: David Landau (who is also a businessman), Ruth Bromberg and William Feaver each of whom in various ways have previously indicated their high regard for Auerbach's art. I began sitting for him in May 1978, towards the end of his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. I had organized the exhibition and had had the privilege of interviewing him for the catalogue so he knew how much I admired his work. I went regularly on Monday evenings for many years, and occasionally Saturday mornings. Lately the times vary since I now live part of each month in Italy. The film that Hannah Rothschild and Jake Auerbach made in 2001 gives an indication of how central a thing posing becomes for Auerbach's sitters, as well as the pleasure of the regularly continued conversations and sympathy expressed. During the two hour sessions I may feel in a horrible crisis or overwhelmed by work, but oddly I always leave the studio exhilarated.
PO: I presume sitting for him gives you a rare insight into his working method?
CL: What a model sees (facing the back of the easel) of his working process, is the artist's total involvement. Auerbach is always moving: looking, rapidly building an image with soft paint scooped and squeezed from pots and tubes, wiping it off on newspaper and becoming covered in the medium. The scraping down of the image if it hasn't reached the state he wants often just precedes beginning another session. There are good written accounts by sitters, and they almost all emphasize the noise - the poetry recited, the talking and the grunts - as much as the quiet moments.
PO: You once told me that all his sitters, with the exception of his wife Julia, are seated on the same chair in his studio. Within the routine way in which he works does Auerbach have an idea of how he wants the work to be before he starts or is the sitter invited to sit in a different position?
CL: The sitters who come to Camden use the high-backed pine chair that replaced the original wing chair. It is the only 'clean' piece of furniture in a studio not large enough to offer changes in the set-up. Julia poses in another location, sometimes lying down. From one painting (or drawing) to the subsequent one, we perhaps alter the direction of our head to focus on another part of the wall with the window above, or I change T-shirt. Auerbach has an impulse/idea that he keeps to himself of what he hopes to paint - something he hasn't managed before - and has prepared a board or canvas with a particular shape. Apart from the six portraits on the go, he is also engaged in a large landscape, or perhaps a smaller one, and goes early in the morning to a very specific spot to draw.
PO: You once talked about Auerbach's notion of juxtaposing areas of colour so that they cohere, and how for him a prismatic painted unity represents the grandest kind of painting, is this his main aim?
CL: Auerbach has explained that, "Paint is at its most eloquent when it is a by-product of some corporeal, spatial, developing imaginative concept, a creative identification with the subject. I could no more fix my mind on the character of paint than if maybe an alchemist could fix his on mechanical chemistry". What you have described explains his primary purpose but the paintings are achieved by 'pinning down facts' as well - descriptive and specific items like the Council's Christmas tree in a recent painting of Mornington Crescent - and marks that are true to the spirit of his feelings for the subject. For instance in his portraits of me I can recognize unique things about my skull, posture, preoccupations, fantasies, really my whole life. All of his sitters recognize the special urgency and tension that comes in the last weeks of the picture. But putting aside observations of the struggle, entering a room with a finished painting on the wall, one is struck by how Auerbach has achieved a new profundity in portraiture not unrelated to the freedom he gains by continuing with the same person for decades. 'Kinetic' aspects are part of the experience, so the marvel of his unified carpentry is more of a mystery. Often a rebellious wariness arises through tiny flecks and impasto with tangible contours. When writing about Cézanne, Rilke spoke about one colour coming into its own in response to another patch to assert itself or recollect itself, just as the mouth of the dog anticipates the approach of various things, the art has a "glandular activity within the intensity of colours, reflections".
Catherine Lampert is a curator and an art historian who began working at the Hayward Gallery in the 1970s. She was appointed Director of the Whitechapel in 1988 and shortly after leaving in 2001 she curated Auerbach's exhibition at the Royal Academy. Since then she has been engaged in working on several books (on Francis Alys 2003 and Euan Uglow and Tunga to come) as well as future exhibitions of Rodin for the Royal Academy.