Frank Auerbach
1960
Charcoal and chalk on paper
76.2 x 55.9 cm
This work demonstrates Frank Auerbach’s increasingly bold and inventive ways of drawing in the early 1960s. Electrifying the whole composition, the strikes of pink were added at the very end of Auerbach’s long process of making this work, which he redrew entirely many times. In a piece written during the period, he described how ‘At the end comes a certain improvisation. I get the courage to do the improvisation only at the end’. This highly unusual way of working results in drawings that feel both deeply considered and spontaneous.