Quite soon Auerbach started gluing two sheets of paper together, to double its thickness and make it more resilient.

One has been worked over in oil paint, and mounted on a sheet of hardboard, and almost all the others have been through innumerable scrapes – the paper so abraded by his eraser that its surface is scuffed, peeled, worn through, torn, patched, repatched (sometimes with a different sort of paper), wrinkled, worn smooth and sometimes almost burnished by his repeatedly rubbing on and taking off the charcoal, often working with his fingers or a rag but often using a hard typewriter rubber that would frequently take the surface right off a piece of paper and eventually gouge right through it. All are drawn in charcoal, sometimes with a little bit of white, blue or red chalk on roughly imperial sized sheets of paper. There are only six subjects – three of painter Leon Kossoff, seven of Stella West (“EOW”), whom he met while both were acting in a play by Peter Ustinov, two of Julia Wolstenholme, who later became his wife, three of his cousin Gerda Boehm, Helen Gillespie and two self-portraits. The Courtauld has bought together 17 charcoal portraits made between 19. The only gaze we meet is the artist’s own in a couple of self-portraits, but even then he’s looking right through us or towards something else that we can’t see. His drawings are always all about presence and being, and the multiplicity and richness of encounter, the artist and the model, the artist and the drawing, us and them. Auerbach is here, too, an inescapable presence even when he’s the one making the drawing rather than the one who is in it. Here these people are, and we think we can hear their minds ticking away, which is also part of his achievement, especially when the drawings are such build-ups of the cursory and the worried over, the impetuous and the studied, the lunged-at and tender, all these attempts at identification. Photograph: © Frank Auerbach, courtesy of Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London View image in fullscreen Looking at something we cannot see … Self-Portrait, 1958. What would it be like, I’ve often wondered, if he got it right first time? I don’t think Auerbach believes in miracles, though I do think that mystery – and the mysterious connection between the artist and the sitter, or of one human being in front of another – has more than intrigued him throughout his long career. Much is made of the effort and what’s been called the hard-won image in Auerbach’s work, whether in painting or in drawing. Failing better, as Samuel Beckett had it, Auerbach eventually made good. When he scribbled a month and a year somewhere near the edge of one drawing, it looks like he’s sending up a cheer in a childish hand that finally he’s done.ĭrawn and erased, redrawn and then erased again, Frank Auerbach’s heads emerge from multiple attempts and successive failures.

They were busy doing nothing throughout the sessions that went on week after week, month after month. I don’t think he ever told anyone how to sit or strike up a pose – and he never, most importantly, told any of his models how to be.

Frank Auerbach’s charcoal heads lean in and swerve away. Head down, head up, now to one side, then to the other.

Sad pencil sketches