Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads review: war-scarred faces on paper that has taken a pounding

The Courtauld, London
These portraits from the dark postwar years have been so reworked that the paper is often gouged through. The results feel as war-damaged as his family – yet still thrillingly alive

Head down, head up, now to one side, then to the other. Now straight ahead. Frank Auerbach’s charcoal heads lean in and swerve away. I don’t think he ever told anyone how to sit or strike up a pose – and he never, most importantly, told any of his models how to be. They were busy doing nothing throughout the sessions that went on week after week, month after month. When he scribbled a month and a year somewhere near the edge of one drawing, it looks like he’s sending up a cheer in a childish hand that finally he’s done.

Drawn and erased, redrawn and then erased again, Frank Auerbach’s heads emerge from multiple attempts and successive failures. Failing better, as Samuel Beckett had it, Auerbach eventually made good. Much is made of the effort and what’s been called the hard-won image in Auerbach’s work, whether in painting or in drawing. What would it be like, I’ve often wondered, if he got it right first time? I don’t think Auerbach believes in miracles, though I do think that mystery – and the mysterious connection between the artist and the sitter, or of one human being in front of another – has more than intrigued him throughout his long career.