Frank Auerbach drawings in charcoal at the Courtauld Institute

"I feel there is no grander entity than the individual human being... I would like my work to stand for individual experience."

Unusually for the time, Auerbach considered his large drawings to be standalone works and of equal status to his paintings.

Indeed, the creative dialogue between his drawings and paintings of the same sitters propelled the development of his art, as shown by the selection of painted heads included in this exhibition. Auerbach's portrait heads are among his greatest early works, made as he established his reputation as one of the most original artists of the post-war generation, alongside his friends Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff.

Today, Auerbach continues to work in the same studio in Camden Town where many of these early portrait heads were created. They mark the origins of his ongoing fascination with making intensely observed drawings and paintings of people he knows well, which has sustained a major aspect of his art for more than seventy years.

This exhibition presents for the first time a comprehensive group of the remarkable portrait heads drawn in charcoal by Frank Auerbach (born 1931) at the beginning of his career. These large-scale drawings were a distinctive feature of Auerbach's art during his formative years in London in the 1950s and the early 1960s, as the city emerged from the devastation of the Blitz and people remade their lives after the turmoil of the Second World War. Auerbach's charcoal heads - heavily worked and scarred but enduring and vital - connect us to the tenor of the post-war years in Britain.

Made over long periods of time, the drawings offer us experiences of what it feels like to engage deeply with another person.

Auerbach worked on the drawings relentlessly over numerous sessions with just a handful of sitters who were important people in his life. After each sitting, he erased the entire drawing, leaving only a blurred ghost. Over these remains, he redrew the head completely at the next session, all the time observing his sitter closely. It took perhaps forty or fifty attempts before he felt he had finally created a drawing with its own independence. The charcoal is heavily worked, rubbed and cut through with white chalk and an eraser, the paper often torn and patched up. Yet, Auerbach's figures emerge anew from what was evidently a long and intense period of destruction and creation. Auerbach pushed the possibilities of drawing to extremes to create a hauntingly beautiful, raw form of modern portraiture capable of conveying great depths of human experience and emotion.

This exhibition presents for the first time a comprehensive group of the remarkable portrait heads drawn in charcoal by Frank Auerbach (born 1931) at the beginning of his career. These large-scale drawings were a distinctive feature of Auerbach's art during his formative years in London in the 1950s and the early 1960s, as the city emerged from the devastation of the Blitz and people remade their lives after the turmoil of the Second World War. Auerbach's charcoal heads - heavily worked and scarred but enduring and vital - connect us to the tenor of the post-war years in Britain.

Made over long periods of time, the drawings offer us experiences of what it feels like to engage deeply with another person.

Auerbach worked on the drawings relentlessly over numerous sessions with just a handful of sitters who were important people in his life. After each sitting, he erased the entire drawing, leaving only a blurred ghost. Over these remains, he redrew the head completely at the next session, all the time observing his sitter closely. It took perhaps forty or fifty attempts before he felt he had finally created a drawing with its own independence. The charcoal is heavily worked, rubbed and cut through with white chalk and an eraser, the paper often torn and patched up. Yet, Auerbach's figures emerge anew from what was evidently a long and intense period of destruction and creation. Auerbach pushed the possibilities of drawing to extremes to create a hauntingly beautiful, raw form of modern portraiture capable of conveying great depths of human experience and emotion.

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF E.O.W.

1956

Charcoal and chalk on paper

Working in charcoal allowed Frank Auerbach to explore dramatic effects of light and dark.

He used white chalk and an eraser to cut through the darkness of the charcoal and shape the sitter's head and features. The prominent diagonal lines create structure, energy and tension, heightening the intense presence of the sitter. Auerbach's drawn portraits of Stella West began the major series of charcoal heads made in the postwar years. This work may have been one of the drawings Auerbach showed at an exhibition dedicated to his charcoal heads at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1957, alongside others displayed in this room.

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF E.O.W. VI

1961

Oil paint on board

Frank Auerbach often painted in black and white as well as earth tones at this time: those were the cheapest pigments and he was desperately short of money. However, he exploited the full creative potential of his limited palette. Here, through numerous attempts to form the head with his brush, he finally breathed life into the monochrome tones. One of the leading critics of this period, David Sylvester, greatly admired Auerbach's strange new type of portraiture, writing:

'a head becomes an object which, as we look at it, gives a sensation curiously like that of running our fingertips over the contours of a head in the dark, reassured by its presence, disturbed by its other-ness.'

National Galleries of Scotland

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF E.O.W.

1960

Charcoal and chalk on paper

Frank Auerbach experimented with different ways of using his materials. Much of this work was created by using an eraser to cut through the dark charcoal; the surface is so rubbed that it has a burnished appearance in places. The figure of Stella West appears almost like a negative image, with light and dark reversed. She seems somehow both present and absent. The drawing prompts thoughts about the nature of perception and of existence, themes that were especially significant in the post-war years.

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF E.O.W.

1959-60

Charcoal and chalk on paper

Although heavily worked and scarred in places, this drawing is also subtly and softly rendered. Frank Auerbach was careful to model the fine features of Stella West with great sensitivity and attention to detail.

Auerbach had a very close relationship with West and admired her greatly.

Although she had been widowed at an early age with three young children to raise, West retained a spirit of freedom and disregard for convention that Auerbach found inspirational.

Tate, London

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF E.O.W.

1957

Charcoal and chalk on paper

Stella West (identified by her initials, E.O.W.) was Frank Auerbach's most enduring sitter of the period. By 1960, Auerbach had achieved his ambition to complete ten portrait heads of her in charcoal. The final four are presented on this wall. Each offers a subtly different sense of character and atmosphere. In this work, torn and patched areas are present across the whole sheet, the result of Auerbach's vigorous reworkings. From these, West emerges stoic but somewhat melancholy.

In the lower left corner, Auerbach added. the notation 'Feb-April 1957', indicating the work took three months of sittings.

Private collection

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF E.O.W.

1960

Charcoal and chalk on paper

This drawing of Stella West is markedly different from the earlier charcoal heads

Frank Auerbach made of her (displayed in the previous room). In this work, Auerbach depicted more of West's body and paid greater attention to how she occupies the dark recesses of the drawing. She appears to press out of the picture into our own space. At the same time, she feels just out of reach, held within the monochrome realm of the drawing.

The Whitworth, The University of Manchester

Frank Auerbach

SELF-PORTRAIT

1958

Charcoal and chalk on paper

Frank Auerbach had to patch up this heavily worked self-portrait three times, but it does not diminish its strength and coherence. He was only 27 when he made this remarkable work, yet he has the countenance of an older man. It embodies his commitment to creating drawings that carry a weight of human experience.

Auerbach made only three self-portraits during this period - two in charcoal and one in oil paint. He did not return to self-portraiture until he was in his seventies and considered his aging face to be a more interesting subject.

Private collection

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF JULIA II

1960

Charcoal and chalk on paper

This work demonstrates Frank Auerbach's increasingly bold and inventive ways of drawing in the early 1960s. Electrifying the whole composition, the strikes of pink were added at the very end of Auerbach's long process of making this work, which he redrew entirely many times. In a piece written during the period, he described how

'At the end comes a certain improvisation.

I get the courage to do the improvisation only at the end'. This highly unusual way of working results in drawings that feel both deeply considered and spontaneous.

Private collection

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF HELEN GILLESPIE II

1962

Charcoal and chalk on paper

Helen Gillespie was a friend of Frank Auerbach's partner, Stella West, and the only sitter from that period who was not well-known to the artist. Despite this unfamiliarity, Auerbach created this striking drawing of her. She is revealed in a flash of light, her form just pinned in place by darting lines of white and red.

This was one of the last charcoal heads from Auerbach's early career. He didn't return to making large-scale portrait drawings until the mid 1970s.

Private collection, courtesy of Sotheby's

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF GERDA BOEHM

1964-65

Oil paint over charcoal on paper

Frank Auerbach occasionally began a portrait head in charcoal on paper but then switched to oil paint, as with this work. The spontaneity of charcoal is carried forward into this imposing depiction of Gerda Boehm - full of energy and movement. The black-and-white forms of the head might almost be embers with a reddish underlayer smouldering beneath the surface. This drawing in paint pushes beyond the conventions of portraiture. Auerbach did not want to make just another picture of a person but 'an independent image ... that stalks into the world like a new monster'.

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF GERDA BOEHM II

1961

Charcoal and chalk on paper

All three of the charcoal heads Frank Auerbach made of his cousin Gerda Boehm are brought together in this exhibition.

Auerbach recalled that, in her attitude and appearance, Boehm carried a melancholic sense of her previous life in fashionable pre-war Berlin before she was forced to flee to London to avoid Jewish persecution.

In this powerful drawing, Auerbach conveys a feeling of pathos and introspection.

Boehm's elaborate hairdo seems to weigh on her head as she adopts a faraway look.

Private collection

Frank Auerbach

HEAD OF GERDA BOEHM

1961

Charcoal and chalk on paper

Since the Renaissance, artists have adopted charcoal for sketching and preparatory studies because it can be swiftly manipulated, easily erased and seamlessly reworked. However, as this remarkable drawing demonstrates, Frank Auerbach used charcoal to create monumental works of lasting grandeur and emotional depth.

In this portrait head, the first he made of his cousin Gerda Boehm, Auerbach exploited the medium's full range of effects: the sharp edge of the charcoal draws fine lines while its soft texture means it can be rubbed to create powerful modelling. This results in a complex drawing from which Boehm emerges as a figure of poise and dignity but time worn and imbued with a sense of melancholy.