Frank Auerbach, The Charcoal Heads: there’s a raw, vital power behind these haunted faces

Sombre, sepulchral, murky, dark: that is the atmosphere inside the Courtauld’s new exhibition, which assembles 17 monumental post-war charcoal “heads” (as well as six oil paintings) by Frank Auerbach, that 92-year-old hero of British art. I emerged from Somerset House blinking at the weak wintry light, as if I’d spent an hour deep underground in some stygian chamber of forbidding rock, surrounded by strange and miserable pale, Gollum-like creatures, with craniums the size of boulders.