Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads

A selection of magnificent works by the German British painter Frank Auerbach.

Accompanying an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London, this book presents a remarkable series of haunting drawings by Frank Auerbach. The catalog includes a new piece of writing on one of the drawings from critically acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín, accounting for his experience and offering new insights into the work and the nature of self-portraiture.

This catalog explores one of Frank Auerbach’s most remarkable bodies of work--a series of large-scale portrait heads made in charcoal, produced during his early years as a young artist in postwar London. Auerbach spent months on each drawing, working and reworking them during numerous sessions with his sitters. His prolonged and vigorous process of creation is evident in the finished drawings, which are richly textured and layered. His heads thus emerge from the darkness of the charcoal with burning vitality, born of an artistic and physical struggle with the medium. The process of repeated creation and destruction, of which these images bear visible scars, speaks profoundly of their time, as people rebuilt their lives after the ruination and upending of the war.

The exhibition marks the first time Auerbach’s extraordinary drawings, made in the 1950s and early 1960s, have been brought together as a comprehensive group.

Barnaby Wright is deputy head and Daniel Katz Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, essayist, short story writer, and critic. His books include Brooklyn and he is widely considered one of Ireland’s greatest living writers.