Courtauld Gallery Lunchtime Talk Feedback
On Thursday I delivered my first talk in a gallery about an artwork. I talked about Frank Auerbach’s painting Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, 1962 at the Courtauld Gallery as part of a programme that allows MA and PhD students to deliver short lunchtime talks. They’re meant to be informal, but it’s still nerve-wracking delivering something to the general public.
I mainly talked about how Auerbach’s paintings, especially Rebuilding the Empire Cinema exist as points of tension; the tension between creation and destruction being what distinguishes his style. This is characterised by Auerbach's disciplined approach, where he intensely adds detail while at the same time obscuring and confusing attempts to discern it. The slow building up of an image also rests on the destruction, layering and sometimes removal of what went before.
Auerbach, in describing his destructive method, once quoted Robert Frost as having said, “I want the poem to be like ice on a stove – riding on its own melting.” Auerbach added:
Well, a great painting is like ice on a stove. It is a shape riding on its own melting into matter and space; it never stops moving backwards and forwards.
Frank Auerbach, Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, 1962.
I also talked about how the post-war building sites were an interesting point of departure for figurative painting at this time. While there was an established, neo-romantic treatment of ruins and bomb-sites, Auerbach was focused on the building site; again a point of tension. Here, as with his method, the tension lies at the point where form meets formlessness. The interest for Auerbach was at a point where the building was just beginning to take shape and rise out of the raw materials of the earth. While the bomb-sites and ruins were nostalgic, sites of construction on the other hand took destruction as the point of departure and looked to the future to create something new - Auerbach aspired to do the same with painting.
John Piper, Somerset Place, Bath, 1942
However, I wasn’t expecting the feedback - it was easily the best part and what made delivering the talk such a great experience. After I’d finished the talk several of the visitors stuck around to speak to me about Auerbach, the painting in particular or London just after the second world war.
One visitor said that he could quite clearly see the influence of David Bomberg’s In the Hold (c.1913-14), and that theme of architectural confusion that I had explored in my talk could also be relevant to Bomberg’s earlier abstracted fragmented figures. We also talked about Auerbach’s method of painting and the similarities and differences between his method and Leon Kossoff’s.
A couple told me about their experiences during the war in London and Portsmouth, describing the unreliability of architecture that seems to come across in Auerbach’s paintings. They themselves would walk around their local areas noting the houses that had become heaps of rubble overnight.
Another visitor, who had himself worked on building sites most of his life, helped me to identify aspects of the painting that he recognised. While there are several good studies of Auerbach’s building site series, many are not heavy on the identification of building practices being depicted. Where others have suggested a chasm in the foreground, this visitor suggested that it could actually be a waterlogged trench or hole and therefore the light patch to the left of the composition actually a reflection on the surface of the water. The beams crossing this water would have been used for carrying materials across on wheelbarrows, balanced on the planks. He also noted several diagonal marks, suggested by brushstroke rather than a difference in colour, that he proposed were large timber braces. We also wondered whether the triangular structure at the back-left of the composition could be a crane, similar to that depicted in Shell Building Site from the Thames, 1959.
Detail of Frank Auerbach, Shell Building Site from the Thames, 1959.
Naïvely, I hadn’t realised how much I would actually gain from talking to people after delivering the talk. I wrongly assumed that the emphasis was on delivering a neatly packaged, digestible twenty minute mini-lecture and that the main advantages would be 1) having done my first talk in a gallery and 2) getting comfortable with delivering talks to an audience about art. While they were both outcomes, the conversations and new perspectives that were generated after the talk in my opinion far outshine anything else.
For my lunchtime talk, and for the notes in this blog post, I have mainly drawn on Barnaby Wright’s introductory essay in his catalogue, Frank Auerbach: The London Building Sites 1952-1962.