“Aesthetics is more interesting than history. I wonder sometimes if people who are taught art history were asked to describe pictures, rather than put them in various sociological or historical settings of influence, how much they could say that would make somebody else see more in them. Does the quality of appreciation somehow atrophy when they assume that everything is part of a general story, rather than the general story being a vast mass of the mediocre and a few really great pictures which make the whole activity worthwhile, and which have a curious fellowship throughout the ages? Finally what matters is whether the picture works, and that could be Giotto or Fragonard or Monet, and finally the criteria as to why it works are the same. In a way I think of a Cézanne and a Giotto being closer to each other than a Cézanne and a Pissarro.”He says the obligation to take account of the art that has gone before carries two demands: “first that you attempt to do something of a comparable scale and standard, which is impossible; second that you try and do something that has never been done before, that is also impossible. So in the face of this you can either just chuck it in, or you can spend all your energy and time and hopes in trying to cope with it. You will fail. But as Beckett very kindly said for all of us, ‘try again, fail better’, and painting just took me over. I started off as a superficial person who was attracted to the arts willy-nilly. The more I realised how difficult it was, the more I knew that it was a challenge, that I would feel I had wasted my life if I didn’t try to grapple with it.”
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/16/frank-auerbach-when-paint-fantastic-time-lots-girls
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