Charcoal and Chiaroscuro: Frank Auerbach’s Graphic Portraits and Post-war Culture

The occasion of the first major exhibition dedicated to Frank Auerbach’s early portrait drawings from the 1950s and 1960s offers an opportunity to discuss, situate and reinterpret this rich body of work, which proved crucial in establishing the reputation of one of Britain’s most important living artists.
This study day is intended to bring together art historians, curators, and artists to respond to these intensely felt portraits, and place them in a wide range of interpretative contexts. It will be an opportunity to reflect on the atmosphere of 1950s and 1960s Britain, the status of drawing in the post-war art world, and the questions raised by portraiture at the time. How do Auerbach’s drawings relate to his and other artists’ practices of making in the post-war era, and to contemporary philosophy, theatre, photography, film, and literature?
How did they engage with concepts of domesticity and subjecthood, and how do they express the relationship between the artist and their sitter? What do we make of these drawings’ material facture, their distinctive formal qualities, and their reworking of the traditional dynamics of pictorial chiaroscuro to modern effect? And what does it mean to draw people repeatedly and at length in a period marked by the Cold War, the Suez Crisis, and London’s post-war transformation? Created in a city cloaked by the dust of bombsites and the smog generated by coal-fired power stations, here are seventeen drawings which show what it means to live in a darkened world. How do they resonate today, in the shadows of our own era’s forms of environmental crisis, psychological anxiety, and economic turmoil?
Organised by Altair Brandon-Salmon, Ph.D. candidate in Art History, Stanford University, Dr Barnaby Wright, Deputy Head of The Courtauld Gallery and Daniel Katz Curator of 20th Century Art and Professor Mark Hallett, Märit Rausing Director, The Courtauld.
Programme
Introductory remarks by Professor Mark Hallett, Märit Rausing Director, The Courtauld.
Panel 1
Chaired by Professor Mark Hallett, Märit Rausing Director, The Courtauld.
Dr James Finch, Assistant Curator, 19th Century British Art, Tate Britain
‘‘Nothing one began with but a new fact’: Destruction and Creation in Auerbach’s drawings’
Dr Kate Aspinall, independent art historian
‘Figure, Ground, and Auerbach’s Development of Drawn Depths’
Alex Massouras, artist ‘Resemblance’
Panel 2
Chaired by Dr Sarah Turner, Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Dr Isabelle Jain, University of St Andrews ‘Philip Holmes’s Charcoal Portraits’
Dr Richard Johns, Senior Lecturer, University of York
‘Drawn to the City: Frank Auerbach in London (August 1956) and David Hockney in Cairo (October 1963)’
Dr Gregory Salter, Associate Professor, University of Birmingham
‘Auerbach / Medalla: Material, Process, Gender’
Panel 3
Chaired by Professor Mark Hallett, Märit Rausing Director of the Courtauld
Altair Brandon-Salmon, PhD candidate, Stanford University
‘The Void: Portraits after the Holocaust’
Pele Cox, poet and artist, ‘Auerbach and the Poets at The Colony Rooms’
Professor Peter Davidson, Senior Research Fellow, Campion Hall, University of Oxford ‘‘The darkness moves between the characters’: Auerbach, Peake, Ayrton after the war’