Frank Auerbach's Grecian Urn

Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, l964 by Francis Bacon 

In a essay about the current Frank Auerbach retrospective at the Tate, entitled “Auerbach’s defeat of death,” (The New Criterion, 12/15), Dominic Green employs the artist's own words to make the following comment: “The fury of the paint is Auerbach’s struggle to ‘pin down something and take it out of time’—to fix the truth of the image and prepare if to for an independent future.” Auerbach as Green points out, like Lucian Freud was a German Jew and “both were encouraged by Bacon and denied the influence of German Expressionsim.” All three were friends and Bacon painted a work entitled “Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.” But while Green’s portrait of Auerbach throws light on his style and its relation to his two colleagues, it’s a telling statement about the parallel universe in which the artistic image lives. That's to say art, particularly of the mimetic kind, emerges from a particular time and place. The attachment to reality is partially the beauty of the great portraits of a Rembrandt or Sargent. On the other hand a painting occupies a universe all its own, to the extent that like Keats’ "Grecian Urn," it achieves another time line. Despite the fact that everything will one day pass into oblivion, art tempts immortality. Auerbach’s subjects may be long dead, but the painting lives on. “Fury” is a good word to describe a painting style, which attests to the agony that accompanies the birth of all artworks and the creative act itself.

Rome Journal VII: The Screaming Pope

watercolor by Hallie Cohen

The papacy had it pretty good when Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphilj was elected Pope Innocent X in 1644. By 1870, at the final stage of the Risorgimento, the power of the Holy See had already substantially declined. Pamphilj’s nephew, Camillo, provoked his uncle’s wrath by declining the important post of Nepoti (from which the term nepotism derives). But he presided over Palazzo Pamphilj which today houses a collection, Galleria Doria Pamphilj, whose signature piece is Velazquez’s portrait of his uncle. Innocent hardly lived up to his name. Velazquez captures the power emanating from his gaze, embellishing it with a deep red background and gold throne. Francis Bacon must have seen more than a Henry Kissinger-like determination in those eyes when he based his Screaming Pope series on Velazquez’s painting. Innocent himself didn’t like the painting which he described as "troppo vero.” But he probably accorded it more credulity than Bernini’s sculpture of him which stands in the same room. Bernini has been the favored sculptor of Pope Urban VIII, whom Innocent blamed for bankrupting the treasury. The sculptor himself fell into disfavor with the advent of the Innocent’s reign— though Bernini’s sculpture with its sharp realistic features including what the audio tour describes as “wrinkled eyes,” “misshapen nose,” and “large ears” is a perfect and almost naturalist counterpoint to the Velazquez masterpiece.