Frank Auerbach, The Charcoal Heads: there’s a raw, vital power behind these haunted faces

Alastair Sooke | The Telegraph | 8th February 2024

Auerbach famously paints by repeatedly scraping off each day’s efforts and starting again. Likewise, his postwar charcoal drawings were drawn and erased so often that he sometimes wore through the paper. The images are intense – “unsmiling, stoic troglodytes, with downcast eyes”. Says one writer “We carry the marks of our experience in the flesh, and that’s what’s on these sheets of ripped paper: the battered, bruised and broken signs that somehow, despite it all, we’re still here.”