MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Out of the ashes
JAN WOOLF ponders the images of humanity that emerge from the tormented, destructive process of the Kindertransport survivor Frank Auerbach
Head of Helen Gillespie II, 1962; Head of EOW, 1960; Self-Portrait, 1959
[© the artist - courtesy of Frankie Rossi Art Projects London] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Frank Auerbach, The Charcoal Heads
Courtauld Gallery
“I FEEL there is no grander entity than the individual human being... I would like my work to stand for individual experience.”
This statement of Auerbach’s features prominently in his exhibition Charcoal Heads; drawings from the 1950s and ’60s being shown in this combination for the first time. Monumental but deeply human, it is this contradiction that makes them extraordinary.
Down and dirty with charcoal, stuff from burnt trees, trees that could have been from the forests of northern Europe where so much awful stuff happened, he gropes for the essence of a person. Frank Auerbach was sent to England aged seven by his German Jewish parents to save him from the Nazis. This is context!
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