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Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001
Frank Auerbach's world is London, his home since 1947. The German-born figurative painter (b.1931) depicts the city and its inhabitants in thick, energetic, brilliantly colored brush strokes. His work, which includes landscapes and portraits that recall the Old Masters, has earned him a place among contemporaries such as Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, and R.B. Kitaj.This book is published to accompany a retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. With essays on the works, their place in Western art, and on the painter and his sitters, it brings Auerbach's art to a wider audience.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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October 4, 2018
"'the exploration by the groping hand of the object, succeeded by plastic or pictorial fixation equidistant from imaginary grabbing and conceptual contemplation. These are the two aspects of the image, one devoted to the fight against chaos-because the work of art selects and clarifies the contours of the individual object-the other requiring the beholder to submit to he worship of the created idol he sees. Hence the predicament of civilised man, which ought to be the true subject of a science of culture that takes as its object the illustrated psychological history of the internal between impulse and action'". p. 16
"The apex of discovery is an original proof, a revelation possible when observations overtake what is expected". p. 28
"'...a more declared sense of the frustrations of spacial difference that rise between the painter's body and the other's, frustration that must somehow be made sense of on the place that lies between, part barrier and part window, the flat white canvas'". p. 28
"...the impetus from one day's drawing to the next's, seeing that a branch has turned into a feather duster. The models change to go out for the evening or the locks of their hair shake in to a new shape. This quotidian impulse for a painting is the 'excitement'". p. 32
"...Auerbach renders Rembrandt's concealed geometry visible." p. 34
" It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint...." p. 62
"it is energy in pursuit of a geometry of an exact expression." p. 62
"I go out each morning and draw. I can't really start a painting in the morning until I've done a drawing...I go out and try to notice some fact I haven't seen before...." p. 124
"...once I've been provided with a reason for changing my picture, I can come back to the studio and change it...usually it is a new sensation of proportion or connection, often revealed by the light." p. 124
"...notations tha thave more to do with my problems in Tyron got find some formal geometry that will encapsulate the thing I'm trying to paint". p. 124
"...what it was actually like to draw there that morning...what I see is what I was looking at when I did the drawing...it reminds me...I seee the sunlight and the trees and the oil so I paint from these by looking at the drawing...I"m looking at black and white drawings and the lines signal colors to me." p 124
"The apex of discovery is an original proof, a revelation possible when observations overtake what is expected". p. 28
"'...a more declared sense of the frustrations of spacial difference that rise between the painter's body and the other's, frustration that must somehow be made sense of on the place that lies between, part barrier and part window, the flat white canvas'". p. 28
"...the impetus from one day's drawing to the next's, seeing that a branch has turned into a feather duster. The models change to go out for the evening or the locks of their hair shake in to a new shape. This quotidian impulse for a painting is the 'excitement'". p. 32
"...Auerbach renders Rembrandt's concealed geometry visible." p. 34
" It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint...." p. 62
"it is energy in pursuit of a geometry of an exact expression." p. 62
"I go out each morning and draw. I can't really start a painting in the morning until I've done a drawing...I go out and try to notice some fact I haven't seen before...." p. 124
"...once I've been provided with a reason for changing my picture, I can come back to the studio and change it...usually it is a new sensation of proportion or connection, often revealed by the light." p. 124
"...notations tha thave more to do with my problems in Tyron got find some formal geometry that will encapsulate the thing I'm trying to paint". p. 124
"...what it was actually like to draw there that morning...what I see is what I was looking at when I did the drawing...it reminds me...I seee the sunlight and the trees and the oil so I paint from these by looking at the drawing...I"m looking at black and white drawings and the lines signal colors to me." p 124
Displaying 1 of 1 review