modern British artists: "Friends & Relations" exhibition

One of Britain’s noted post-war painters, Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931. Arriving as a Jewish refugee in 1939, he attended St Martin’s School of Art, London, and studied with David Bomberg in night classes at Borough Poly­technic. He then stud­ied at the Royal College of Art and remained in London ever sin­ce. His first exhibition was held at Lon­don’s Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956; since then his works have been collected widely.

Auerbach is the last surviving artist being celebrated in the Gagosian Gallery London exhibition called Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews. The exhibit­ion, which closed in Jan 2023, clarified the links betw­een their resp­ec­tive practices, and featured some artists’ portraits of each other.

Note the photo that John Deakin above captured of the four painters in Soho in 1963, along with much younger painter Timothy Behrens: From L-R they were Behrens, Lucian Freud (1922-2011), Francis Bacon (1909–1992), Frank Auerbach (1931-) and Michael Andrews (1928–1995).

Curated by art historian Richard Calvocoressi, Friends and Relat­ions con­textualised key works by 4 significant artists. Featuring 40+ paint­ings from private and public collections, it posit­ioned Freud as the grouping’s central figure. Each painter was aware of the others’ pract­ices, sometimes as coll­eag­ues and sometimes as competitors. But of the four, Freud alone collected his friends’ work, especially buying works by Bacon. At his death, Freud also owned 16 by Auerbach and a small oil by Andrews. The exhibition included two portraits by Auerbach formerly in Freud’s collection, on loan from British museums.

Portraiture was at the heart of Freud’s, Bacon’s, Auerbach’s and to some extent Andrews’ practices. The exhibition’s title echoed not only the four artists’ interrelationships, but also the intimate relation­ships between artist and sitters, lovers and spouses. Girl in a Dark Jacket (1947) exemplified Freud’s crisp, early style and depicted Kitty Garman, his first wife and the daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein. Nak­ed Portrait on a Red Sofa (1989–91), praised by his friend photograph­er Bruce Bernard as one of Freud’s most audacious and sensitive works, showed the reclining figure of the artist’s daughter, Bella. The Paint­er’s Mother Resting III (1977) was part of a series of port­raits of the artist’s mother, Lucie Freud, which he began when father Ernst Freud died.

The intense friendship between Freud and Bacon was commemorated in the latt­er’s Three Studies for Portraits: Isabel Rawsthorne, Lucian Freud and John Hewitt (1966), in which Freud’s head was paired with those of Hew­itt, an antiquities dealer, and Raw­s­thorne, a fellow artist and friend. Another highlight was Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps (1972), a tribute by Bacon to his lover George Dyer, who’d suicided just before the artist’s 1971 retrospective opened at Paris’ Grand Palais.

A selection of Auerbach’s work included E .O.W., S.A.W. and J.J.W. in the Garden I (1963), a full-length portrait of his lover and frequent model, Stella West, and her family outdoors. Also included was Head of Gerda Boehm (1964), which depicted Auerbach’s much older cousin, who also fled Nazi Germany. On loan from the University of East Ang­lia, the work’s dense application of paint epitomised Auerbach’s ap­proach then. Else­where the exhibition reflected the deep relation­ship that both Auer­bach and Freud enjoyed with the cityscape of London. 

Andrews’ ambitious group portrait The Colony Room I (1962) was on loan from Pallant House Gallery Chichester. Set in a Soho drinking club, it pic­tured Andrews’s own mural at back, with the figures of Freud, Bacon, Bernard, artist’s model Henrietta Moraes and the club’s proprietor Muriel Belcher in front. Melanie and Me Swimming (1978–79), loaned by the Tate, depicted the artist teaching his daughter to swim in a Scottish river.

Also on view at Grosvenor Hill were photographs of the four artists by their friend, the noted writer and photographer Bruce Bernard (1928–2000). Complementing the paintings in Friends and Relations, Bernard’s portraits of the artists in their studios, some of which were exhib­ited publicly for the first time, were both direct and informal. The painter Virginia Verran, who represented Bernard’s est­ate, noted: “The link between painting and photography was a vital one throughout his life and the chance to bring his photographs together with paintings in this way is a profound one.”

The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue includ­ing installation views of the show and featuring essays by Martin Gayford and Florence Hallett, and an interview with Frank Auerbach by Richard Calvocoressi. Well worth reading.