Frank Auerbach, Self-Portrait, 1958, charcoal and chalk on paper, 76.8 x 56.5cm(301⁄4 x 221⁄4in), private collection © The artist, courtesy of Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London

SINCE reopening after refurbishment, The Courtauld has featured characteristically brilliant shows, from Vincent Van Gogh’s self-portraits and new and recent paintings by Peter Doig to ground-breaking works by Claudette Johnson.

Latest up is one of the most-renowned artists in the world, and in Camden, Frank Auerbach.

Now aged 92 and still working out of a Mornington Crescent studio, as he has done since 1954, the artist is not known for the number of interviews he has given.

But an exception is that which he granted to John Wilson for the BBC’s This Cultural Life (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vsbv) ahead of this new exhibition.

He talks not only about his extraordinary life, having arrived in Britain from Germany as a child refugee in 1939, and of the artistic influences upon which he has drawn but also – and most interestingly for this Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads show – the time and intensity involved in his working method.

The Courtauld Gallery’s deputy head, Dr Barnaby Wright, says the aim was to show together, for the first time, this series of haunting post-war drawings that Auerbach made in the 1950s and early 1960s.

These, he says, were important to “that dialogue between painting and drawing for Auerbach which developed in the course of this decade and the way that he drew, the way he used charcoal, then fed in to the way that he painted”.

Frank Auerbach, Head of EOW, 1956, charcoal and chalk on paper, 76.2 x 55.9cm (30 x 22in), private collection © The artist, courtesy of Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London

From the outset, he suggests, the artist wanted to make significant and stand-alone works, and a show-opener has a charcoal head of Stella West alongside one of six carefully selected oils which are included in the exhibition.Both had been in the private collection of Auerbach’s friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011).

Dr Wright says Auerbach wanted to produce a statement series of 10 works featuring Stella West (or EOW as she is referred to in titles and with whom he was in a relationship).

Indeed, then as now, Auerbach’s work is characteristically of very few sitters, most very well known to him, and long-standing.

Dr Wright says lack of money had, in part, led the artist to the use of charcoal at this time, but the large-scale portrait heads can be seen to have been worked and reworked, patched and repaired, erased and re-erased over time. The process could take weeks, months, sometimes more, until a particular version was deemed to be finished; the aim, apparently, to go beyond a mere likeness.

It’s, of course, also a method related to Auerbach’s oils, resulting in richly textured and layered paintings with both emotional and physical depth.

The charcoals here number 17; there are six of EOW, three of his artist friend Leon Kossoff (1926-2019), two of Julia Wolstenholme, who he had married in 1958, three of his cousin Gerda Boehm, and one of Helen Gillespie.

In addition, and importantly, there are two self-portraits from 1958 and 1959. Auerbach (b 1931), has said that he has returned to self-portraiture since the Covid-19 lockdown. So there are more yet to be seen.

• Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads is at The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, WC2R 0RN until May 27. Further details, see: https://courtauld.ac.uk/