Jeg har egentlig ingen principielle problemer ved at sidde her frimodigt og påstå, at jeg havde hørt om den britisk-tyske maler Frank Auerbach før jeg stødte på en af hans nekrologer forleden. Han var trods alt, kan jeg læse mig til, ‘a celebrated and tireless painter’, ‘one of the towering figures of British postwar art’, der:
‘redefined portraiture … by making portraits of people close to him that were so dense with paint that they bordered on abstraction. Facial features faded into way into swirls of grey, and roiled backgrounds threatened to consume the sitters posed before them’
Og:
He was also known for the unique way in which he created his work – repeatedly scraping the paint from versions he was dissatisfied with and starting again until the finished work could be so laden with paint that it threatened to wobble off the canvas.
He once estimated that 95% of his paint ended up in the bin. “I’m trying to find a new way to express something,” he told the Guardian. “So I rehearse all the other ways until I surprise myself with something I haven’t previously considered.”
Det ville dog være løgn, hvis jeg påstod at jeg havde hørt om Auerbach. Jeg mindes ikke at være stødt på ham, hvilket muligvis er en uheldig bivirkning af at min kunstsmag ophører med at fungere efter 1920’erne. Figurative malere i Camden Town og deres venner i Soho (såsom Lucian Freud og mit personlige hadeobjekt Francis Bacon, jeg tilgiver aldrig hans mishandling af Velázquez) er sjældent øverst på min liste over malere, jeg har lyst til at udforske.
Men jeg vil jo heller ikke være ukultiveret og udannet, så jeg læste løs om Auerbach. Jeg kom til at fnise lidt af dette citat fra Financial Times’ nekrolog:
By the time of Tate Britain’s retrospective in 2015, Auerbach’s painterly world of sites and sitters — the buildings and park around Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill, sometimes depicted in brilliant sunburst hues; his lover Stella (Estelle) West and wife Julia — had become one of modern art’s instantly recognisable personal landscapes.
The achievement was the more compelling because his method — piling on and scraping down layer after layer, heavy impasto, staccato strokes, until the moment, he said, when the painting “speaks back” — created hard-won, contingent, only just cohering images. Auerbach once gave his gallerist a diagram of a Mornington Crescent picture annotated “hole”, “man with wheelbarrow”, “distant houses” and “I can’t remember if that is a man or a cement mixer”.
Der er nu noget vidunderligt over en skabende kunstner, der ikke umiddelbart kan kende forskel på en cementblander og et menneske i sine egne værker. Og hvis jeg skal være ganske ærlig, så ved jeg heller ikke for alvor, hvad jeg skal tænke og føle om dette maleri (solgt for 5 mio. USD i 2022!):

Frank Auerbach – Head of Gerda Boehm’ (1964)
Hvad skal man stille op med det portræt? Det ligner en af de mågeklatter på molen, jeg så desperat forsøgte at stoppe børnene fra at spise da de var små, og vi gik ture ved Roskilde havn. Men … måske det er mig, og ikke Auerbach, der har et problem. Noget tyder på det. For nyligt læste jeg en stærkt provokerende artikel, hvori skribenten skriver:
I have also found impressionism to be the favorite style of most people, at least among the more educated classes. When someone tells me that impressionism is their favorite style, I immediately suspect that they are not intensely interested in art. That’s not because there’s anything wrong with impressionism—it’s a perfectly fine style—rather because I think to my self, “What are the odds that they’d randomly pick impressionism from among all the other equally great styles, if they were not basing their taste on which style is the prettiest?”
Så sidder man her, som dybfølt elsker af (post-)impressionisme og bliver outet som en overfladekunstelsker, der primært kan lide smukke ting. Og … ja, det er jo rigtigt. Til en vis grad. ‘Grim’ kunst fascinerer mig ikke. Jeg drages af det smukke, det ægte, det sande, det gode. Og af det evigt tabte og det melankolske. Så naturligvis kan jeg også bedst lide Auerbach når han maler steder, især med varme farver; det kan min sarte æstetiske mave bedre håndtere.

Frank Auerbach – ‘Camden Theatre Cold Spring’ (1977)

Frank Auerbach – ‘The Studio II’ (1995)
Måske bliver min kunstsmag mere voksen en dag. Måske jeg en dag står foran et George Baselitz maleri og bliver betaget af alt dets altfortærende grimhed. Eller måske jeg en dag tilgiver Francis Bacon for hans transgressioner. Hvem ved. Uanset hvad, så tyder noget på, at hvis jeg havde spurgt Auerbach, så ville han mene, at jeg skulle se og stoppe med det der utiltalende krukkeri. Som Janan Ganesh skriver:
His art was the other interesting thing about him. Frank Auerbach, the painter who died on November 11, put blob of colour over encrusted blob of colour until his work was literally heavyweight. (A canvas of his took as much effort to lift as a bigger one by someone else.) Because super-thick impasto is such a cliché now — something chain hotels put on their walls — it is hard to understand how polarising it still was in the mid-20th century. This, plus Auerbach’s excusable indifference to the world outside the Primrose Hill to Islington corridor, cost him. It wasn’t until the second half of his life that he got his commercial and critical due as one of Europe’s major artists.
What could be more interesting than such work, then? His personal lack of introspection. Because no one had more to be introspective about. As a child, Auerbach was sent to Britain from Nazi Berlin by his Jewish parents, whom he would never see again. Asked about this experience, he’d offer the following. “I’ve simply moved on.” “Life is too short.” “I’ve done this thing that psychiatrists disapprove of, which is blocking things out.” “There’s just never been a point in my life when I felt I wish I had parents.” “I’m not given to self-analysis.” When critics said his art was “surely” the expression of some inner turmoil, he’d stress how much fun it was to make.
There is a point that needs constant remembering in metropolitan circles. Most people get through their lives without reflecting on their interior state very much. This behaviour is not just compatible with a functional life, but with a successful and happy one. It need not suggest “repression” — though in some cases does — so much as a genuine lack of interest in the subject of oneself. Believing otherwise is one thing that has come to mark educated liberals out from much of the rest of society.
Of all the discoveries I made on my way up the social pole — that microwave ovens are naff, that it is “the south of France” not “southern France” — the most startling was the intense bourgeois belief in the power of self-examination, whether alone or in the presence of a paid professional. (And this was Britain. Imagine the same social ascent into the American upper middle class.) I don’t doubt that it does good things for people. I just fear that some of them think it is, or should be, universal. Lots of people now won’t date or befriend those who “don’t do work on themselves”. That is much more of the pool than you think, friend.
Vi er kommet et stykke rundt omkring i dette indlæg (undskyld), fra figurativ kunst over min manglende kunstneriske dybe til hvorvidt introspektion er overvurderet. Det sidste grubler jeg (fnis) selvsagt en del over. Er det mon sandt? Jeg håber det ikke, men måske det ville være vejen til et lidt mindre neurotisk liv, hvis jeg holdt med at overintellektualisere og fortolke forholdene i min egen navle konstant.