 Welcome everyone to the Paul Mellon Centre. My name's Sarah Turner. I'm the Deputy Director here at the Centre and I also oversee the PMC's publication so I'm really delighted to welcome you all here for this very special evening. I'm very sad to report that Mark Hallett can't be here tonight. He's unwell and those of you who know Mark know that he has so much energy and so much enthusiasm for everything that we do so he really is poorly tonight and we send him our best wishes for a speedy recovery and I've already sent him a text message of a photograph of the reception and saying what a lovely warm vibe there was in the building straight away. We know that everyone who's here this evening really cares about this publication, really cares about Frank Halback's work and wants to be here together in the room for an evening of celebration and conversation so Mark I'm sure is here with us in spirit and we'll send him a report of the evening afterwards but he was really adamant that the show must go on and that we really use this evening together. I wanted to really just say a few words of thank you to people who've been involved in this publication and also this evening. I want to thank Catherine Lampert in particular for all her collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre and shortly Catherine's going to say more about the genesis of this publication. This book is special and quite unusual in many ways for the Paul Mellon Centre. I'm holding up my copy here and you'll already see how sort of deconstructed it in the process of really looking carefully at the way in which images and ideas have been put together in the book really thinking about those conversations between the essays and the plate sections and the images. It's a really special production and we wanted to say a particular thanks to Oliver Burstow, the designer of the book, for helping us think through again the physicality and the materiality which is so important to Frank's practice and that really I think comes through in the physical production of the book. Obviously a book is a work of many many hands and many people have shaped the conversations that have gone into making this from our Publications Committee at the at the Paul Mellon Centre to the five contributors who are part of the book, David Meller, Barnaby Wright, James Finch, Kate Aspenall and Alex Mazarus and we're going to hear from James, Kate and Alex this evening as well so it's absolutely great you could be here again to have this moment as a way to continue the conversation. I think the publication sometimes is seen as marking a final point in a research project but in many ways it's just the start isn't it of opening up further conversations, further dialogues with a body of work or practice and I think this evening I know Mark and Catherine really thought about how to do that and they wanted to do something different and special and asked John Law and the filmmaker to make a film which again Frank has contributed to and I think really embodies that spirit of opening up dialogue and thinking and voices around so it's great John could be here with us this evening thank you so much John for for all your work on the film and having the reflections from James Kate and Alex I think will help us get into a dialogue with all of you in the room about the possibilities of portraiture about thinking about the practice of drawing about the process of writing about materials and practices. I also wanted to give a special thanks to the team at the Paul Mellon Centre working very hard behind the scenes to make this book happen so in particular to our senior editor Emily Lees our assistant editor Tom Powell and also the incredible image research work by Masoom Rahani with working closely with the team at the Marlborough Gallery so again thank you so much to the team here at the PMC for bringing this together. Catherine I'm going to hand over to you now as someone who knows intimately about how this book came to fruition and we look forward to hearing you from you and sharing your thoughts. I haven't prepared a list of things I was going to say because it's a friendly audience but I did want to say I met Mark for the first time when he was doing the lectures at the when he was he was organizing those lectures about Richard Hamilton and early mid-century 20th century art and I think Elena Crippa introduced us and then Mark asked me to come over would I be interested in being a research kind of senior obviously research fellow or some other position and I couldn't see that because I was so embedded in the work I was already doing which is usually is a bit overloaded but I did feel that there was one kind of book about Frank Arbach that hadn't been done and this was 2017 long before I knew about the extension of the Rizzoli book of his complete paintings and most of his large drawings and before the piano nobile show or any other exhibition was planned and we had several meetings and at one Emily Lee said because we were talking first about works on paper so it could have been drawings from landscape and drawings from the National Gallery a whole range of everything works on paper prints and Emily said don't you think you should just concentrate on the portrait drawings like I look to each other and it seemed right that it's such a strong aspect of Frank's work it's not something that anyone else does this way it starts right in the ffifties and continues to the present when he has Frank is working as everyone I think knows still having sitters so it seemed somehow absolutely a good idea and then there were funny twists because as we began to work on choosing images and Jake Arbach and I were with Frank when we did a first cull of how many images there were because there were at least double possibilities and we only had you know photocopy sheets but Frank in theory we're doing it three of us together but Frank was sort of going no yes no yes as fast as you could imagine and what he was looking for was not only I mean he did allow us to have the complete group of the EOW drawings up to 1960 but he was looking for variety and surprise he wasn't trying to say these are the drawings that he regards as the top 150 it wasn't like that it was more instinctive and I also ran by the choice with David Lando over a weekend when I was in Venice in august 2021 and also in a few cases we did a lot of the Paul Mellon Center was terrific we did a lot of new photography works that hadn't been done sort of in modern color as you can do even black and white drawings these days and for as many images we could get and Laura Langodoc helped me a great deal in the preparing that we we came to the assembly of drawings and Frank at first thought it was going to be like an album I think and he had ideas that he wanted it grouped by sitters that was his choice but after that he didn't really have much to do with it and certainly not with the choice of contributors and as all of you will know the Paul Mellon Center likes to forefront British art historians of different generations and also people who had the exception of Barnaby Wright hadn't written about Frank for this kind of for either ever or certainly not for a book and it was a new experience for me of course because I've commissioned writers you know from my whole long career making exhibitions but I hadn't gone through this academic process which also involves submitting the essays to a board and I think it I I feel Paul Mellon Center it's been a good experiment because here you have an artist who begins in the 1950s and ends doesn't end but it's continuing to work in the present so it's a kind of step into the living artist area in a kind of you know fairly unique way I I don't think you could find a substitute person particularly if Frank's quality is an artist maybe in any other any other person and I'm very pleased also that Mark decided to become a a writer to this not just a acknowledgements and a forward but he kind of hooked and he so he ended up writing almost a piece in itself and I wrote a few afterthoughts which Frank said oh they're nice they're sort of valedictory you know okay I don't mind that was fine I didn't want to do anything else but that and we Frank didn't want to be interviewed with filmed while he was talking and he but he did agree as you'll see in a minute to be um he let John come and mic him up and was very pleased that he didn't feel inhibited by having somebody else in the room and then Mark and I asked sort of had questions different kinds of questions in order to generate that and so I'm gonna speak any more but I think you'll see this is definitely Frank who given an opportunity of course has lots to say as we all know he just and and he has lots to say when he's even talking to himself I think in his mind but in this case he was talking for the occasion of this book and that we'll see what you think sometimes towards the very beginning of somebody sitting for me it only occurred to me recently I quite often start with a drawing rather than with a painting partly because I think the sloshing round of paint may make the sitter feel that the whole process is so idiotic and unreadable and messy and that they might lose faith in the procedure although most people are simply for bearing and keep on sitting whereas the drawing they can see that there's a visible image certain points in the occasion which perhaps bears some relationship to what people might expect of a drawing of an image and I think that it might reassure them that the whole process isn't peace of total madness the actual activity is pretty speedy but as one goes through the whole thing again and again and rehearses the forms and their relationships and the possibility of analyzing or extending or dramatizing or characterizing the forms in various ways a whole repertoire of thoughts accruws and that when the thing is finally finished what seemed to be the interesting exciting true new ideas that have occurred to me this is of course an ideal I don't mean that every drawing is exciting and true although I try but that it's very very much a question of rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing in the same way as one would rehearse for a play and then very often if a play has been really properly rehearsed and worked through there are possibilities among other things of improvisation towards the end that don't break the continuity. Buried deep or seemingly deep within your portrait drawings we typically find or often find what have been described as the pictorial ghosts or signs of earlier raised drawings I wondered what role you think those ghosts or those signs of earlier drawing what role they play in the final image well as part of the final image there certainly not as it were extraneous to it for instance if there's a ghost of a drawing and the actual image the visible image as it hasn't one or two cases slipped sideways or downwards then I am aware of what has gone on where the thing started originally and try to fix something that I haven't been able to fix or discover something I haven't been able to discover that is what I hope for which is something that is true and unfamiliar to me and to surprise to myself on the other hand the surface which is the scarred and surface with various blots and blotches and ghosts on it is absolutely taking into account and is for me as much of the final image part of the final image as the graphic head which could be picked out of it it is for me an image from corner to corner right across the whole surface of the drawing I have to have make more visible marks as I get towards the end but also the whole process for me has to do with something called inspiration and sometimes when the final image is say is done in Indian ink or acrylic there actually is a moment after what is often weeks or months of drawings when I have the courage or really it feels as though the muse is visiting me if that doesn't sound too soppy but the muse does play a part in my mind and I suddenly pick up and with really I'd never know when this will happen Indian ink or acrylic or something and make an image across what I've been doing when I have suddenly felt a complete command of a new idea of the subject your portrait drawings feel like very open images they're animated as much by the gaps left between the marks that you make is by the marks themselves isn't that true of all drawing maybe it is you know I mean the blank paper say that Rembrand drawing of a sleeping girl in the bridge museum marvelous drawing seems to be done in five minutes with a few inclines it perhaps you don't know but it's a famous and favorite drawing of mine the white part of the paper is as much bulk and space as anything in the drawing it's a drawing is eloquent and in its spaces as much as in its marks and in fact the sensation of drawing is very often enclosing masses and spaces imaginary masses and spaces on a blank or a white sheet of paper many many drawings have this character many of the greatest drawings maybe are defined by this character that the viewer has a lot of latitude or freedom in working with and interpreting and engaging with the image say that but think of a water drawing if you can call one to mind those amazing drawings perhaps water Rembrand head of anybody else and catching life on the hop you know people are sitting on the ground turning their heads and so on I think that the sensation is pretty specific it's not limbed by cast iron lines that contain something like a mold but one feels nothing could be moved by a millimeter without making it somehow more banal or less true or less alive or less specific the third drawing if you made in 1960 of Stella you know people say those drawings are very heavy charcoal they're very dark but this particular drawing burn her heads almost to the edge of the right hand edge of the sheet and the everything on the other side is is light and white and indeed in her and then the patch has very straight lines and I just wondered first of all why you stopped drawing Stella but also if you remember that kind of it's almost the contrast to very heavily worked charcoal drawing we're talking about 65 years ago and nothing is conscious in that way that all those drawings were down in the downstairs bedroom with Stella sitting in front of me me on my knees with a drawing board on a chair and they simply came out differently there's nothing more you know and in fact because I was always afraid that she would stop sitting and that I didn't realize how long these things would take once or twice I'm afraid I pretended that the drawing wasn't what was finished was not finished got another sheet of paper drew a rough version of the previous drawing and misled Stella into thinking that I was going on with the same drawing which hadn't been finished as to why I stopped drawing it's very simple I created vast clouds of charcoal everywhere which was all over the place including in the bed everything and finally Stella rebelled that at home to paint which while it made blotches on the floor didn't actually fill the air or cover everything in the room with a black dust that's very interesting and it may be a the reason why this the last drawing of Stella is so fresh and white in that way and then when you begin drawing Garabom and Helen Gillespie particularly the head and they often don't look at you you can tell I think perhaps that they're less intimate were you aware that they were very different I wasn't aware I'm never aware of anything I just carry on but do what the muse tells me to do but of course it was a different situation the Stella situation was intimate on every level also the business of drawing was intimate I mean I don't know how she put up with it really I was a very short distance away from her in a little room and there was a very strong connection as it were in the air whereas Garabom and so on were further away from me physically and I didn't have the same feeling of empathy with anybody in my life as I'd had with Stella due to the fact that we both behaved as badly as we were capable of and still managed to stand each other your drawings of regular sitters enable us to follow them changing and aging over time and of course changing in relation to your own changing practice but do you see your long series of drawings of these sitters as in some way biographical projects in which you trace their lives only and looking back I don't try to project an idea on the sitter I try to put down the truth but what is to me rather touching is that I can see I mean in the case of Jake and Julia and indeed Catherine I can see the process of aging occurring I'm not only there aging but also mine and this is really it's to me that is part slightly of the magic of art it starts off as an immediate day-to-day thing I was just thinking of this today and fuel allow me just to divert for a moment as there's an exhibition coming that contains a painting by Michael Andrews of what became his wife and was then his girlfriend two people from very different backgrounds and I remember when they got together I remember people thinking this couldn't possibly last and I remember the whole fraught and individual and dramatic and affectionate situation and then he did this painting and it's been somewhere for 50 years and it's come out now well I dare say the same thing preceded the ropy Venus or the Duchess of Alba it starts in life unless it starts in life unless it starts in the actual frantic doomed existence that we have it isn't art at all and it finishes up as art and that is one of the things that is so immensely magical about the whole business when it works there are a lot of drawings that are called oil on paper yes or their drawings or paintings did they all began as they all began as drawings without exception and sometimes it may be out of various impulses but sometimes it may be simply that the old thing had become too encoded and dark and rough and that I picked up paint in order to go on with it and then the viscosity etc of your paint you say that it's always experimental and different every time absolutely I never know what it's going to do but I think that's true of everybody who paints do you think that happens to this almost the same extent with the drawing materials or not to a certain extent it does the last but one drawing that I finished it's very odd they have started recently with the same things same sort of paper same sort of graphite and so on but the last but one drawing I don't know what it was it behaves differently every time the materials behave differently in the last but one there were patches of I tried to rub out what I'd done that was simply ingrained in the paper to such an extent that the whole drawing became you know very very dark and in co-ethers that were happening in the dark and I didn't know how it could possibly finish but perhaps weakness or possibly even a strength that I never leave anything I go on and on and then suddenly I found that taking a different form of graphite I worked across this dark scratched variegated laboured mass of rubbed out blotches and managed to find an image in it but working with the same material same paper same stuff it never happened in precisely that way and it happens differently every time it's very mysterious everybody who paints genuinely I think is at the mercy of the unpredictability of the materials they work with when you were speaking to Richard Calvagressi he asked you whether you ever were tempted to use a spray gun no I haven't I wasn't tempted I had never got round to it I like to feel that I'm actually engaged with what in my mind is a three-dimensional form displacing space and I can't imagine doing that in any specific way with a spray gun I never know what will happen in the future but I've never been even slightly tempted I don't mean that I think it's you know beyond the pale or wrong or anything like that I can see it absolutely works for people perhaps people with a more adventurous or subtle attitude to painting but it wouldn't work for me there's a definite relationship between portraiture and caricature and it would be ludicrous to deny it after all how do we recognise people by the way they diverge from the proportions of other people and this is exactly what caricatures talented caricatures of whom they're not all that many what they hone in on some of Rowlandson's ladies seem to me to be as lovable as their caricature and indeed Max Birbombs where Coleridge is talking to a table everybody's fallen asleep because of his legendary ability to go on talking for six hours is actually an affectionate tribute to Coleridge rather than any sort of exoriation of him there isn't even a very fast hard line between caricature and portraiture good portraiture can often have an element of caricature and actually fairly quiet caricatures in yet one feels splendid likeness has like Max Birbombe verge on portraiture good art in a sense all has an element of caricature because caricature what is it finally but forceful portraiture I think all good painting is abstract I think non figurative painting is abstract painting with impoverished material and when I drew in the national gallery of course all sorts of considerations go through my mind when one's drawing but it is really a question of drawing the forms not the implications or the effect they have on people or what the story behind it might be hardly aware of it I was drawing these coherent and subtle and surprising collections forms that make a single form in order to give myself an idea of how a worthwhile image is constructed none of these considerations about whether it's a portrait or it's office on okay I mean you know obviously nothing is not thought about but think about as many things about painting and drawing as one does about life but I certainly didn't draw it because it's a portrait or anything like that I think I was tended to be on the whole drawn to a certain form or collection of forms that are needed at the time and what happens when you're drawing from a mirror image that's a good question and it's very different because if you have somebody sitting in front of you and you want to understand what you're drawing it's not a retinal image you have to have the the lump and the displacement of air in your mind so you go look around the side a bit get an idea of what's going on see people in motion and what you're drawing is the whole head in the whole space now if you're looking at yourself in the mirror try to look around the side your head moves around the side as well so you have nothing you don't get the same image so I do very much more many different things I draw myself in the mirror I look even more than I usually do at the image in the mirror I sometimes look at the image and the drawing and the reflection I move around a lot and I do very many different things and sometimes I do what I hardly ever do when I'm working from people I look and remember and move the image somewhere else and try to see what I've done and try to work while looking at the mirror it's a more complicated process simply because the model is not static to make a very broad generalisation there is a way of working in art I might cite say Van Eyck or Broegel or Bosch or Dali where the artist seems to have to be walking a tightrope and seemed to have to be enchanted and concentrated on what he's doing so that the work gradually accruws without any slackening without any diversion and is in doubt until the last moment there's another sort there might cite I don't know hundreds of people Mane or Rembrandt or myself where we do the thing again and again and again and in my case if you do the second one I think even more than the first sort what comes out is something akin to handwriting and I can no more characterise or analyse it than I could buy voice or behaviour in general it's absolutely unself-conscious it's the result of my practice which is of a particular sort let's take that phrase um mark a mark of that the idea of an image being open of opening up conversation and thought of being a generous of a a generative space for thinking I think that's what I was as I was watching that suite of images and hearing the conversation unfold I just kept returning to the idea of the open image so I think that's what we're going to do now is to open up the discussion with the help of james and Hayton and Alex who've already been doing such incredible thinking to write their chapters for their blog and there was a workshop as well that you had so there's a whole process of dialogue and thinking before you even got pen to paper as well so james do you want to start us off and I said that the order because james's essay is is one of the first in the book so we're going to go in in good order I think so james thanks thanks Sarah um the starting point for my contribution to this book was thinking about our backs relationship with the art of the past and the history of portraiture specifically the art that he's spent the most time with the art that he looks at the art he keeps in his studio the art with which he feels a kinship and I was particularly struck in this wonderful film by hearing him discuss the relationship with portrait with between portraiture and caricature and this idea that there is a definite relationship between the two and particularly this phrase forceful portraiture to describe caricature which I think is also such a wonderful description of our backs own work and so I'm just going to offer a couple of brief remarks on how I see this kinship with caricature as feeding into our backs work it's interesting to me because there has been historically kind of something of an uneasy relationship between portraiture and caricature I often think of Hogarth's famous print characters and caricatures in which he attempts to delineate a clear distinction between art which conveys character and caricature which for Hogarth was an art of exaggeration or if not distortion and I'm personally I'm spending a lot of time with the work of John Singer Sargent at the moment who every year would exhibit portraits at the Royal Academy of Arts which were invariably the subject of lampoons in punch and other periodicals which would kind of take the distinctive characteristics of Sargent's portraits and then exaggerate them but hearing our back reflect on caricature I think gives us permission to see that perhaps it is not so much an oppositional relationship but one in which portraiture draws upon caricature and incorporates it and I think that in our back you can see him very much working with what's distinctive and individual about each of his sitters and I see that the way that he depicts David Lando's forehead Michael Podros is or his own neck are very much kind of there's a there's a kind of a pattern and a kind of a resemblance in what what attracts him or what's what kind of really strikes him about each sitter and I think this also conveys what it's like to be in someone's presence. Max Bierbohm one of the caricatureists who Frank Howeback cites specifically in the film wrote in his film his essay The Spirit of Caricature that and I quote the most perfect caricature is that which on a small surface with the simplest means most accurately exaggerates to the highest point the peculiarities of a human being at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner. I think that again is is so evocative of our backs own work the ideas of accentuating the peculiarities of a human being at their most characteristic and conveying that in the most beautiful manner. I think there are also other things that we can pick out in our backs work which perhaps relates to caricature. One of them is is the sheer visual inventiveness which caricature gives license to and I think that just seeing the slides accompanying the film of drawn from Roland and Bierbohm and other caricatureists really get that across and it's so interesting to me that our backs specifically refers to Bierbohm's caricature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge table talking and you know seeing that image again because I was just I find it bewildering the way in which he takes this incredible incredibly difficult situation of people sat all around a table on all sides and managed us to almost give the sense of multiple perspectives and I think that thinking back to the history of portraiture which of course is so often commissioned perhaps that inhibited some license of formal experimentation and innovation in some portrait portraits but the fact that of course our backs work relies not on commissions but upon his relationship with a sitter developing organically with no obligation to flatter or to portray them in a particular way but as he says just having having no preplanned intentions but just working with what's in front of him I think that's that's what you get here and of course there's also the spontaneity and innovation that comes with with caricature and our back refers to performance and improvisation and very much that act of drawing and then erasing and then redrawing re-erasing and then finally hitting upon the the decisive formula which which solves the problem of making that particular likeness again I see that as connected to to caricature. There's also the the involvement with the subject as I said and I like the way that he he picks out in Rowlandson's work what he describes as the almost lovable women in Rowlandson's caricatures and the way that Beerbone conveys real affection and so it's not satire as as malice or in the way that you might think of some of you know Gilrae's most scabrous political satires but but in a way of the caricature elements arising out of the the affection and the the empathy with the subject and one final thought is that the the repetition of the sitters and the way that our back of course has worked with the same sitters repeated over many years again there's a similarity with the way that caricaturists have often had many of the same subjects who they who they work with continuing to depict them from different angles as they age as their as their lives progress and with Beerbone again he depicted George Bernard Shaw 70 times but I was interested to check that in the cat in the catalogue of beerbones caricatures no no subject features more prominently than beerbone himself he made 97 self caricatures and again the way that our back has in recent years become his his own one of his own principal subjects I think that's another lovely similarity and yeah and so I think I'll I'll end it there but just by saying that I think that these reflections from our back have a way of seeing much of the most innovative portraiture of of our backs generation and of the 20th century and since I think of Picasso and Bacon as an art which is not opposed to to caricature but which kind of let which lends from all of the possibilities that it offers as a way of making a a more forceful form of portraiture thanks thank you that that was fantastic um yes so yes I'm a contributor and I was actually looking at underneathness and I found it very moving listening to these words to just see the different ways that our back was returning to this concept and I was very struck by not only the idea of the ghost drawings which is something that he raised when we talked when I was doing my chapter and it was something I found very powerful where he said he didn't want to work on a blank piece of paper there was something of a kind of terror there and it was interesting to hear him speaking this time around about those ghosts as prior states as something that's evolving whereas the blankness of the page especially in relation to that gorgeous Rembrandt drawing was something that he courted and it made me think very much of that great transition that he made in the early 70s that was sort of beginning from the 60s on where his canvases get thinner and thinner and he transitions to a wonderfully thick paper and we lose that rich deep moody visceralness of those early pictures of Stella and we get instead this ebulliant sedimentary drawing style whereas James said you have the erasure the redrawing the erasure as a kind of ritual and that's certainly something I found extremely powerful and some of his comments about that his love of cutting across whether that's with a line or a charcoal or a piece of colour for instance a stroke of yellow is an element of reordering the entire materials of the picture as he's working I think this is a really profound thing that he's searching for this blankness he is creating blankness from tremendous energy from these lines layered on lines on lines on lines and a race and pushed down and I think this idea of cutting across making an echo it's the figure and ground problem we see in abstraction it's the idea that neurologically we are predisposed to read for the human read for the figure and everything else is designated as unimportant and he's playing with that beautifully almost unintentionally naturally in some ways when I hear him speaking about this and I look at those pictures I think about him trying to find a space of mental spaciousness where he can be experimentative free full make these marks find different likenesses like James was saying find the forceful element of these and then let them be subdued cut across see where else he can create connections and so he makes the new drawing by pushing the old down and when we look at some of the extraordinary images that are made especially in the 90s where we're forced to see through not only pieces of paper that might be stuck on top sometimes very evocatively over an eye or across the neck a little as a connection that makes us realise how fragile the paper is when some of these when we're reading for the figure we kind of slip almost fall into this depth of these lines these prior states which are preserved there and this is that sense of the underneathness that I find so compelling aesthetically which is that we look at something like a piece of paper we know how fragile and how thin it is and yet when we look at his pictures by the very act of trying to understand what's going on we're forced to engage in something so as it were deep thick we fall into it and yet we know that this is a paradox as we're looking and that is delicious and that he plays with that kind of push tug sense but there's also something really beautiful when he was talking about the bold line finding that and a reminder me of sicker talking in 1934 to the thanate school of art where he said if you were tying a pig victory sorry upper tree you wouldn't tack it on with tin you would tack it on with something very soft with flannel because you wouldn't want to cut into the branches and so you work in layers you do tone you block in form and then eventually you get to what he called the binding line which is of course a reference to Mauritaniae talking about Cezanne and Cezanne ability to use lines and washes of watercolour as if he's knotting a carpet together and so this idea that the final line which Aravak really beautifully calls the muse when he gets this new idea he gets this courage to finally articulate it in india ink or some other very thick forward form that that is in itself the binding that both brings everything into one while also allowing it to be dissolved deep confusing paradoxical so i think it's really gorgeous to hear his words to think about his process and to realise how this sense of depth and shallowness really structures the pleasure and the challenge that these pieces whether their drawings or paintings present to us and so that i hand on i'm hesitant to follow on these insightful very poetic responses so forgive me if i start by just quoting the film back at you actually and i do this with a scrap of paper that is not terribly legible but where he talks about the the Michael Andrews painting that i looked at earlier today and the enriched show at Gagosian the the painting of the woman who was to become his wife and he says i dare say the same thing preceded the rokeby Venus or the Duchess of Alba it starts in life unless it starts in life unless it starts in the actual fantastic doomed existence that we have then it isn't art at all and um yeah i think it's a it's a wonderful um sentiment and it has um sort of brought me to a um a dilemma which continues to to trouble me which is on the one hand an appetite for for the very mediated image i mean i'm as much of a fan of Richard Hamilton as as the next person um but on the other hand understanding entirely the commitment to being present and to a drawing or a painting as a as a um you know the a most actual visceral true uh i mean call it a document of an encounter relegates it somewhat it's it's a thing in its own right um so yes i don't know where where we get to when when weighing these two tensions and um when i uh in the in the thing i wrote for the book many thanks to everybody for for involving me especially Catherine of Mark who's not here um i um yes i think i i end up coming back to um and maybe slightly perversely thinking of it all as a as a as a response to photography or as a as a um in some ways a manifestation of an impulse that is normally associated with photography which is this idea of truth and thinking of um you know Edward Mybridge and that commitment to seeing how a thing actually works and what it is when when uh truly objectively understood um and we think we think of of that ambition as a sort of photographic and objective but actually you know in Alback's work we see that it there is a longhand version of the same um pursuit um and that that there is this there is the thing that is isn't an image it's it is the thing it's um and there are lots of i think serendipities in in um you know in life and i've recently been thinking a lot about Richard Smith and his his kites and um i you know a slightly strained metaphor comes to mind which i will nonetheless share embarrassly um but the you know the there seems to be something about the the work whether it's a drawing or a painting uh that Alback makes which he very generously you know gives to the muses or the materials or the encounter of course is him too and at the bottom of the kite string those are all floating up there and at the bottom of the string is is the this this reality that that he mentions in the film that it it is is grounded and and true to um to a thing that it that is uh profoundly related to it but which uh ceases to be the the the focus once the painting or the drawing exists. Well i'll just add on last Saturday the person that Frank was talking about was Richard Smith. So we wanted to open up this space of discussion thinking about the open image forceful portraiture the thin and the thick line um with you all i know people have very many and different relationships with Frank Alback himself and with his work um whether you have questions maybe reflections on the film thoughts about the book itself we've got copies of the book as well when we have uh the reception for you to have a look at um but we wanted to just have this space for for for you for you all to offer thoughts or discussion Catherine said to me let's not call this a question and answer session it's a discussion session so so please um you know we hope that you will join in the conversation. Good thank you Eleanor we always need someone like you in the room to help us start things up. I just would like to start by thanking all of you and the project of course I had um sort of like to support Catherine in the short eight many years ago and there is always this sense that these are very beautiful opportunities to open again and to different generations the reading of an artist and it's been a wonderful evening both listening to Frank and listening to you all in the room um what I really enjoyed as I was listening to the film something came very strongly to my mind which might be in one of Jake's film I don't remember you will help me is when Frank speaks about his relationship to the masters and says um well you know I used to think or one day I will be in the pantheon as one of them and now I'm just hoping that they will lend a hand to me and help me in my journey and I just it's just such a beautiful you know such a humble thing to say as one is an artist is aging but it also makes me think a lot what um Alex just said the relationship between the construction and the real experience and there is something beautiful and so generous in the way Frank in this film and other occasions um I you know is so generously referred to other artists work and how important is to look at the reality of what he encounters as much as look at other artists looking and engagement with drawing and making and the two this sort of the reality of the materiality and the presence being as important and is the of the constructed fully constructed nature of the picture and now it looks back through history and takes from other artists in in that construction that looking so yeah I think he just brings together lots of things that have been said and many of the tensions that are so exciting Frank's work and his generosity to to the person who sits in front of him but also to the sort of all the artists who preceded him and I sort of that resonated for me that the the word that kept coming up when I was watching and then listening to you speak James was was trans historical and that idea of the idea of crossing history as well but somehow in this practice there's a it's not just a evocation of the past or a calling up of history but this kind of the the line itself doing that work of crossing crossing histories and bringing the present the past into the present and the present into the past so I think that's um yeah that that that trans history space has often puts open books on the floor um not what he's doing self-portrait all sorts of things and right now he has a book open which is a Picasso self-portrait which Picasso did at the age of 91 same age as Frank and it's kind of you know big gobble the eyes and nose and you'd recognize it's quite a famous image with red and as well as the grey stone like head um but there he is he's got um somebody else who's struggling on it 91 um if I may just add on to sort of what we're saying here about the the trans historical thing I mean that's one of the beautiful aspects of some of the literature especially in the mid 20th century about the appreciation of drawing I mean John Berger was talking about this and more recently Francois Viet and saying that when we look at a drawing we identify with the hand of the artist when we look at a painting we identify with the subject and so that sense of as you're saying this dialogue across history I know Diana Patherbridge has written very beautifully about that with drawing so I think that's absolutely alive with these works um yeah I'd like to come back to this question of caricature which the first uh your first speaker expanded on I mean there's a whole german dimension to caricature which I think links Frank Arbach's work with Lucien Freud's work and particularly the early work of of Lucien Freud is very influenced by caricature if you think of those paintings like the refugees there's sort of comic looking um figures in very flat um uh foreground uh um with um you know wicked little faces and he told me um Freud that his one of his favorite books as a child was Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch um and now there's a link there with Sigmund Freud because Sigmund Freud owned a drawing by Busch um and then if you think I mean this isn't a question I'm just sort of rambling these are thoughts that went through my head if you think of you know the great work on caricature that was written by Ernst Crease and Ernst Gombrich when they were both curators of the cause historians in Vienna at which they brought with them in their immigration one to London Gombrich and the other to the United States Ernst Crease which was never actually published but what came out of it was a king penguin a king penguin book you know that little series that was published in the 1940s in which um Busch is illustrated they they um relate caricature to Sigmund Freud's um essay on jokes and its relation to the unconscious I'm just saying there's a whole sort of other dimension to to to caricature that that um it's very interesting I'd never heard um Arbach speak about it before yes hello also likewise I think going back to caricature it is fascinating to think perhaps too about the connection between Sikert and caricature of course being born in Munich and and Arbach and that sort of subversion to I suppose particularly the echo paintings actually taking etchings illustrations from popular magazines and turning them into paintings so yeah more of a thought again no we welcome all thoughts riffs rambolings it's it's great to build up a wave at me tomato it also when you were talking about that can't help but think about that beautiful installation at the top of the court hold of Corkoshka's sort of quasi caricature very painterly images and I think there's absolutely something going on at that moment and I think you covered it well well when the Corkoshka's first portraits were exhibited in Vienna these so-called psychological portraits in 1910 1911 they were dismissed by the critics as caricature they said this this isn't a serious art this is caricature so I think there's a whole German background that you know we need to to invest in Austrian Germanic Catherine can I ask you to tell us a bit more about the process of putting the book together and the decisions about the relationship between image and text and you know how your mark worked through through that the ordering to make you know something come together that focus is on portraiture and drawing but have these because it's really interesting I think the way the book structured is is quite specific and has a real texture and a feeling of itself so it just be it'd be great if you could just tell us give us a bit more of an insight into some of those decisions about making something that's not simply an edited collection of essays nor is it an album of images as you spoke about it at the beginning but it's something that is you know in conversation between between the text and the and the plates themselves one of the things but it was partly by necessity that we were aware of and I was aware of was not to let Frank too much of Frank's talking happen because it's quite intimidating to speak so articulately you know it's it's if he had done this conversation and then had been passed around to the authors it might have inhibited their own ideas and I think it's good that went the other way but it's a little bit about we did get out of him Emily said we must have something so we we we put down the the transcription of the place where Frank is talking about the three main qualities for drawings in Jake's film the last art film which of course he's with a chalk and a blackboard actually doing it and so that's in there and a little bit of conversation about the self portrait but not too much and then it was supposed to be very free and it begins with the second text after marks and third text and James is David Miller who's particularly talking about the sort of late 40s and 50s so he's talking about music hall and Frank's relationship to his interest in acting and great actors both in film and theater so it was it was allowed to be the written part is you know is the author's ideas really and then the visual images are by subject with a slight chronological part and then self portraits which of course a lot of them were done when Frank didn't have access to sitters during the COVID years so it happened quite sort of organically but I think it was intended not to be heavy in quotation of Frank. Thank you and I mean perhaps I could just ask you Catherine as someone who has sat so extensively for Frank how about what the process is like as a sitter your own mental space as you're watching him create and doing that for years decades at a time and do you feel that this is a kind of dialectical process. James has done just as much as I have from the late 70s onwards. No it's your life so of course it's great when Frank's early years reciting a lot of poetry or talking but there wasn't as much talking as there is today but he's living his life and you're living yours and he instinctively knows a lot about because it's not so many different people he knows a lot about your own mood and you know about his it is and then he may have seen something in the street when he was early in the morning seeing somebody running on Primrose Hill or somebody in a bad temper in the news agents or something it's it's it's got a quite a raw you know it's not just one to one person it's got a bigger scope I think than that and that is very touching because you know because he doesn't know 300 people in it you know it doesn't go to a private view and mix with all sorts of random people he knows a lot about your own life so he asks you about things he knows that you're worried with and so it's it's very um I always come out in a really good mood when I sit for him um so there we are but Jake might have a different one thing Frank always says I'm different with every person you know there isn't a recipe for myself and the sitter the relationship at all as to whether it's some form of dialectic I've never seemed like a conversation it's I mean he says it's cooperative process I'm not entirely convinced I mean I did not that I'm I'm working against um but it's it's I think he's doing most of the work if it is cooperative he's doing 90% of it and I'm doing about 10 but one is aware I think Catherine but that is a similarity with all the sitters there are a lot of sittings for a single image and most of the time you're aware that there's not going to be a completion during that week but you will feel the momentum start to build and things the temperature starts to rise and things become less chatty and more focused and I think the sitter certainly starts to take more of a part than I don't know what Catherine thinks I think that's right and also I think this Jake said Frank is on his feet the whole time you know um he says let's have a break like now and finally I'm in a much more comfortable chair than this great big wing chair that is right size for Jake um but I can't reach the floor um but anyway uh he's on his feet the whole time you know the the break is a minute and and that's it's really moving rubbing out um that's why he doesn't know whether it's a rag or a his hand is rubbed out with or a scraper or painting or scooping up more painting needs it's a it's a moving experience he's moving all the time he's looking and thinking and about things we don't know what he's thinking about you know it's something he's carried over and he's very interested in formal issues it's never just about lightness it that's necessary but it's he's much more interested he mentions there about a form in space is what he thinks he needs all the time and even though it's um some ways there are similarities between the portraits and scale and whatever but not in something he's searching for well I think we will continue our conversation over drinks and some canopies in the the ante room um but just before we do that I wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who's joined us um this evening um and particularly to James to Kate to Alex um and and for Catherine to helping us shape um this evening and of course our wonderful events team who've put all this together um thank you so much to Ella to Danny and Doug um and and to you all uh for coming we've got um like I say copies of the book um in in the room so and our publishing team uh with us as well so please do look through it and talk to us about about uh the book publication and process and I think each book that we publish it gives us at the Paul Mallon Centre an opportunity to experiment in form and format and to think through how to publish art history in in new ways in different ways and and I think this this project has really challenged us in in many ways certainly Emily and Oliver all of the designer Emily they get the right paper to get these works to work how to prove them how to working with the Welsh um printer how to achieve that it's not um you know it's not like just to think um you know anthology where you can stick through one definitely yeah get a lot of images yeah and I think those challenges push things on don't they to to really make you think hard about imagery production like you say texture of paper when paper is obviously so important so thank you all for for contributing and and to everyone in the room who's helped support the project in many different ways through um over many many years as well um and like I say please do come and join us for a reception and and hope you'll come back as well to the centre um to other talks look at other books use our wonderful library and collection as well so please join me in saying thank you particularly to Catherine sending our love and best wishes to Mark um who really has guided and shaped this this publication um and to to everyone who's been involved so thank you so much and I should also in particular say to Frank our back