In the final chapter of Catherine Lampert’s 2015 book Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, ‘Idiom and Subject’, Lampert reflects on the artist’s self-portraits, which were initially very rare, but which he has latterly embraced as a subject.
‘I wondered about the self-portraits, done on occasion in the early years, two drawings (1958-1959) and one painting 1961-65 and a later picture in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery made over seven years 1994-2001. Now they happen regularly. He told Jackie Wullschlager, writing in the Financial Times in 2012; ‘When I was young, my head seemed bland. I never had the narcissism of Courbet or Dürer, who obviously thought themselves marvellous-looking chaps. As I got more wrinkly, with bags under the eyes, the whole landscape became more interesting. But I also partly started doing them because people were talking more when I painted them, and there’s something refreshing going back to silence’ (1)

As Lampert describes above, in William Feaver’s catalogue raisonné, we find only five self-portrait works made over the entire period 1950-2009. Of these, four are charcoal drawings WF 65 (1958) (Fig.1), WF 66 (1959), WF 848 (1994-2001), WF 849 (2001) and one is the oil Lampert mentions WF 205 (1961-65). WF 848, the drawing which took seven years to complete is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. The oil, Self Portrait at 34, is a rather unsuccessful image, not readily identifiable as the artist, and he hasn’t attempted to paint himself since.

Auerbach returned to this subject around 2010, soon after the catalogue raisonné was published, and he showed three of his new drawings at the Marlborough Gallery in 2012. There are now numerous examples continuing up to the present day, which document the artist ageing into his late eighties. It’s fascinating to consider how Auerbach negotiated the recent, and unprecedented, lockdown restrictions, given that his working practice is so wedded to a fixed schedule of sitters arriving on each day of the week. Lampert remarked in 2015 that ‘it is now unthinkable that one of the five remaining sitters should stop’ (2) , but stop they did and the numbering of Self Portrait X, 2020, indicates that Auerbach was forced to look to himself as the only reliable model. (3)

Contrary to Auerbach’s description of his younger self as ‘bland’, he was in fact a very handsome man, as is we see in a series of now classic photographs of the artist taken by George Lewinski in 1963 (Fig.2). In the two earliest self-portraits the face of a youthful Auerbach, then still in his twenties, looms out of blackness, the chiaroscuro effect recalling the self-portraits of Rembrandt. As is typical of drawings from this period - which include numerous brooding drawings of Stella West (1956-1960) and more occasional appearances by his friend Leon Kossoff (1956-7) – in his 1958 Self Portrait Auerbach has drawn over the image so many times that the paper has become abraded and he has been forced to patch up the holes with further pieces of paper.
Auerbach’s process of drawing and then rubbing back the image only to be redrawn at the next sitting, is a constant and mirrors his painting practice. This process is captured in a fascinating sequence of forty photographs of the sitter Sandra Fisher, published in the 1978 Hayward Gallery catalogue. The photographs, taken by Fisher herself, reveal how the subject transforms over time as Auerbach strives for a definitive image.

In contrast to the heavily worked surfaces of his early drawings, in Auerbach’s post 2010 self-portraits most of the charcoal is removed after each attempt, and the final drawing emerges as a delicate network of lines. These fragile images, scattered with ghostly marks, are comparable to the artist’s etchings in which the white of the paper is so central to their mood.
The present drawing dating from 2015, is a rare example of a self-portrait in landscape format. The structure and character of Auerbach’s face is easily recognisable, while the deliberate marks and solidity of the form convey a quiet, bodily strength. He appears with his head tilted slightly upwards as if bathed in sunlight. The particular angle of the head is a consequence of Auerbach drawing directly from a mirror and this pose is repeated across the late drawings including one acquired by the Staedel Museum, Frankfurt in 2017. This was the first acquisition of Auerbach’s work for a German museum, after his Tate retrospective toured to the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2015.

(1) Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach, Speaking and Painting, Thames and Hudson, London, 2015, Chapter Five, p200
(2) Ibid
(3) In email correspondence between the gallery and William Feaver in April 2022, Feaver puts the total number of self-portrait drawings since 2009 as 64, with the ‘most prolific year’, in Auerbach’s own words, being 2020. Further details about the size and finish of these drawings will have to wait until the publication of the second edition of his catalogue raisonné.