Frank Auerbach, artist, 1931-2024

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Frank Auerbach, who passed away on Monday at the age of 93, was the final living member of the postwar London group of artists that featured his close friends Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff. They focused on creating portraits and landscapes, drawing inspiration from real life and a small selection of subjects and locations. For many years, their work went unnoticed, but starting in the 1990s, they gained international acclaim as innovative representatives of the European figurative art tradition.

Last winter, Auerbach's show titled "The Charcoal Heads" at the Courtauld Gallery showcased his remarkable talent in creating large-scale early drawings. From the beginning, it highlighted his skills as a brilliant draftsman and keen observer of human psychology, exploring both how we appear and the essence of our character. When the exhibition launched, he shared, “I believe there’s nothing more significant than the individual human being. I want my work to represent personal experiences.” And indeed, it has done so for over fifty years, standing strong against the trends of pop art, conceptualism, irony, and spectacle.

By the time Tate Britain held its retrospective in 2015, Auerbach’s artistic realm, filled with locations and figures — including the architecture and park near Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill, often illustrated in vibrant, sunlit colors; as well as his partner Stella (Estelle) West and his wife Julia — had transformed into one of the most recognizable personal landscapes in modern art.

The accomplishment was particularly striking because his technique involved building up and then removing one layer after another, using thick paint and quick, abrupt brushstrokes. He described this process as reaching a point where the painting seems to "respond" to him. The results were challenging and often seemed to barely come together as images. Auerbach once provided his gallery director with a sketch of a painting of Mornington Crescent, labeling parts of it as “hole,” “man with wheelbarrow,” “distant houses,” and “I’m not sure if that’s a man or a cement mixer.”

Frank Helmut Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931 as the only child of a Jewish lawyer and his spouse. In 1939, he was sent to England by himself to escape the Nazi regime, where he found refuge at Bunce Court, a quirky and welcoming boarding school primarily for refugees located in Kent. Throughout his life, he maintained his German accent along with a charm, politeness, and eloquence that reflected the cultural richness of mid-20th-century Central Europe.

His parents perished in Auschwitz in 1942. He dealt with this tragedy, he explained, by completely shutting it out; however, he always felt the shadow of death looming over him because of his history. He found that creating art and being conscious of death were intertwined. Without this connection, we wouldn’t feel the need for art, which ultimately serves to capture and preserve moments, freeing them from the constraints of time. He painted in response to the feeling that life was fleeting. “I'm trying to create something new for the world that will linger in people's minds like a unique form of life,” he said.

He studied at St Martin's and the Royal College of Art from 1948 to 1955. Key influences on his work came from classes he took at Borough Polytechnic, where he was taught by the expressive painter David Bomberg. He also met Stella West when he was 17 and she was 32, during their time in an amateur drama group. West posed for many of his energetic and dynamic portraits, sitting for him three times a week in her flat in Earl's Court. He later remarked, “I truly became a painter through painting her.”

In 1958, Auerbach married Julia Wolstenholme, and they welcomed a son named Jake, but their relationship quickly began to fall apart. He maintained his connection with Stella and later reunited with Julia in 1976. However, he still spent many nights alone at his studio in Mornington Crescent, a space he inherited from Kossoff in 1954, where he continued to work and sleep until his passing. His early works focused on London's postwar construction sites, with his architectural paintings skillfully balancing structure and color in his urban scenes. Auerbach rarely ventured outside London, painted the same few models every week, and dedicated himself to his art every single day of the year.

His first standalone exhibition took place at Helen Lessore's Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956. He was then represented by Marlborough Gallery beginning in 1965, but he struggled financially during that time, often waking up in the middle of the night worrying about how he would pay for his painting supplies. His situation improved significantly after the retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1978 and his representation of Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1986, where he won the prestigious Golden Lion award. More recently, his artwork has fetched prices in the millions; for instance, a 1969 piece titled "Mornington Crescent" sold for £5.56 million in 2023, setting a record.

Auerbach stayed completely unfazed by the market trends, continuing to paint at his own deliberate pace. He delved deeply into a handful of recurring themes and seldom participated in interviews. When I had a lunch meeting with the Financial Times in 2012, he asked me to bring along some sandwiches from Marks and Spencer, calling them “a wonderful indulgence,” to his studio. “I’ve been incredibly fortunate,” he reflected. “If I hadn’t been able to dedicate my life to painting, I would have felt as if I had squandered my existence.”