Lacking money for paint, he went to a service station and bought a bag of charcoal. Sitting in his current Paris studio, a two-storey apartment overlooking the Canal de l’Ourcq, he recalls, ‘The first ...

Then take the black and the violent image, and draw it with layer after layer of charcoal, blown to a monumental size where you become aware that this is not a photograph but a work of art.

The Courtauld Gallery’s “Frank Auerbach. The Charcoal Heads” is the young Auerbach in full-pelt freestyle mode. Not long out of art school, he scratches, rubs and nibbles at the paper’s ...