The double message

Frank Auerbach Self Portrait
sold for £423,700 in 2008

In a letter to The Times in 1971 Frank Auerbach wrote: "Your correspondents tend to write of paintings as objects of financial value or passive beauty. For painters they are source material; they teach and they set standards." And this is much the same thing as T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote - in the September 1919 issue of The Egoist - that the poet "must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past"

Jacob Bronowski, as always, gives the wide-angle view: "The characteristic feature of all human cultures is that they make artifacts and this is really what we mean when we sat that the human mind is creative. The artifacts begin as simple stone tools, some of which are at the least several hundred thousand years old. What characterizes these and later artifacts is the double message that we read in them all., from the first chipped piece of stone: that tells us what they are for and also, at the same time, how they were made. So the artifact is an invention which carries its own blueprint with it - as we look at it, we see forward into its use and backward into its manufacture, and it extends our culture in both senses." - The Visionary Eye, p.65

From the 50s to the 70s Auerbach kept up a weekly habit of visiting The National Gallery and making drawings from paintings. This simple discipline of work, work, work reminds me of Rilke's comments about Rodin; in a letter (10 August 1903) he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé:

"wird es mir offenbar, daß ich ihm, Rodin, folgen muß: nicht in einem bildhauerischen Umgestalten meines Schaffens, aber in der inneren Anordnung des künstlerischen Prozesses; nicht bilden muß ich lernen von ihm, aber tiefes Gesammelstein um des Bildens willen. Arbeiten muß ich lernen, arbeiten, Lou, das fehlt mir so! Il faut toujours travailler - toujours - sagte er mir einmal, als ich ihm von den bangen Abgründen sprach, die zwischen meinen guten Tagen aufgetan sind; er konnte es kaum mehr verstehen, er, der ganz Arbeit geworden ist (so sehr, daß alle seine Gebärden schlichte Bewegungen sind, aus dem Handwerk, genommen!)."

"It is becoming apparent that I must follow him, Rodin: not in a sculptural reshaping of my creative work, but in the inner disposition of the artistic process; I must learn from him not how to fashion but deep composure for the sake of fashioning. I must learn to work, to work, Lou, I am so lacking in that! Il faut toujours travailler - toujours - he said to me once, when I spoke to him of the frightening abysses that open up between my good days, he could hardly understand it any longer he, who has become all work (so much so that his gestures are homely movements taken from manual work!)"