In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Frank Auerbach produced an astonishing series of charcoal portraits and oil paintings. On display for the first time as a comprehensive collection at The Courtauld Gallery, The Charcoal Heads is a sequence of large-scale drawings and oil paintings tethered to a formative period of Auerbach’s career. They reveal the broken resilience of post-war Britain, with a spectral presence that make the viewer deeply aware of the relationship between artist and subject.

As London emerged from the devastation of the Second World War, Auerbach captured the essence of a city and its people rebuilding from the ground up. In sessions that went on for weeks – and in some cases, many months – in his Mornington Crescent studio, Auerbach drew his subjects again and again. He erased and reworked each portrait on the same piece of paper. The monumental results show the visible marks of his labour, with canvases scratched through and patched over, and surfaces scuffed and burnished by the repeated rubbing and removal of charcoal lines with an eraser.

These marks and abrasions are integral to each work: through consistent redrawing, Auerbach creates an extraordinary depth of feeling. Tellingly, he spoke of the importance of working repeatedly with the same subject: ‘to paint the same head over and over leads to unfamiliarity; eventually you get near the raw truth about it’.

The portraits are both present and absent, intimate yet hauntingly unfamiliar. His spectral heads fill every frame with an arresting physicality: the crevassed terrain of  a shoulder emerges from the shadow as a sloping forehead disappear into darkness. Unusually for the time, Auerbach considered his drawings to be of equal status to his paintings. These are not the quick, preliminary sketches carried out by an artist before they move on to the final form, they are deliberate, committed works intent on capturing the essence and complexity of each subject.

The intensive process of creation, erasure and recreation gives the viewer a glimpse of the close relationship he held with his models. Despite the monochrome palette, each portrait bursts with life. The same subjects feature repeatedly, including Auerbach’s friend and contemporary Leon Kossof, his cousin Gerda Boehm and partner Stella West (identified by the initials E.O.W).  West was Auberbach’s most enduring subject, and by 1960 he had completed ten charcoal portraits of her.

The oil paintings that sit alongside the charcoal drawings are equally complex. At times, Auerbach applied paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, and again uses his form to establish a visible process of creation. The paint is viscous, sitting in textured layers to the point where it becomes three-dimensional. His paintings of Kossof, produced before he moved on to charcoal drawings of his friend, depict a huge, swollen cranium with sunken eye sockets. Auerbach has created visible depth, with light and shadow manipulated to an almost tangible effect.

One of the final charcoal portraits created by Auerbach during this period is of a friend of his partner, Hellen Gillespie. It is one of the only drawings exhibited that includes colour. Against the black and white bold lines of red jump out, perhaps capturing a moment of intense emotion.

In the Charcoal Heads Auerbach is pushing at the boundaries of drawing and creation, a theme which has sustained him for well over three decades as an artist. The portraits are visceral, hauntingly beautiful works that convey the depths of human experience. The series is small, but well worth a visit – these are images that will stay with you long beyond the walls of the Courtauld.

Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads is at The Courtauld Institute, London, until 27 May.

Location: The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN. Price: from £14. Concessions available. Book now.

Words by Ellen Hodgetts