Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach – Life, Art, and Legacy
Discover the life and art of Frank Auerbach (1931 – 2024), the German-born British painter known for his impasto portraits and London landscapes, his obsessive process, and his enduring influence in modern painting.
Introduction
Frank Helmut Auerbach (April 29, 1931 – November 11, 2024) was a German-born British painter whose expressive, densely layered works made him one of the most distinctive voices in postwar figurative art. Though rooted in realism, his paintings carry a visceral, psychologically intense quality. Over many decades, he developed a method of constant reworking and revisiting, forging a body of work that confronts how we see, remember, and give form to people and places.
Often associated with the School of London (alongside Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff), Auerbach insisted on painting from life—portrait sitters, the streets around his London home, and his own studio interior. His art is a meditation on friction: between presence and disappearance, image and erasure, memory and material.
Early Life and Background
Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin, Germany on April 29, 1931, to Jewish parents: his father Max Auerbach was a patent lawyer, and his mother Charlotte Nora Borchardt had studied art.
With the rise of Nazism, his parents sent him to England in 1939 via the Kindertransport, a rescue effort for Jewish children. He was placed at Bunce Court School (a progressive boarding school for refugee children) in Kent, where he spent his wartime years.
Tragically, his parents remained in Germany and were murdered in the Holocaust. The loss of that familial root and the rupture of exile would deeply shape his sensibility—though he rarely speaks publicly of trauma, his work bears its shadows.
In England, he adapted to a new cultural and linguistic environment, but remained keenly attuned to visual and emotional awareness from his youth.
Education & Formative Influences
-
From 1948 to 1952, Auerbach studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London.
-
Concurrently, from the late 1940s, he attended evening classes at Borough Polytechnic, where he studied under David Bomberg along with fellow students like Leon Kossoff.
-
After St Martin’s, he went to the Royal College of Art (1952–1955).
Bomberg was especially formative: his emphasis on experiencing the subject, structural strength, and the act of painting itself (rather than copying) influenced Auerbach’s later insistence on iteration, reworking, and seeing as a practice.
Early on, Auerbach formed friendships and creative affinities with Leon Kossoff, another student of Bomberg, and their parallel careers in London would echo these shared roots.
Artistic Style & Methods
Figuration, Repetition & Psychological Intensity
Though often described as expressionistic, Auerbach rejected that label—his art is not about projecting emotion so much as grappling with the difficulty of making the visible visible again. He remained committed to figurative painting through shifting trends of abstraction.
Auerbach often concentrated on a narrow set of subjects:
-
Portraits / Heads: A few models became lifelong sitters (e.g. his wife Julia, Juliet Yardley Mills, Estella Olive West)
-
London cityscapes / building sites: the streets and alleys around his home and studio (especially Camden, Primrose Hill) became recurring landscapes.
His process is famously obsessive. He often painted, erased, reworked — sometimes scraping entire surfaces and rebuilding from below. The paint is thick, textured, almost sculptural. He spoke of dissatisfaction and the necessity of multiple passes to arrive at something that “speaks back” to him.
Auerbach’s relationship with time is also central: portraits might be revisited over months or years; cityscapes built from hundreds of sketches that shift and accumulate.
Influence of Art History & Intertextuality
Auerbach often referenced the old masters—Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens—in exhibitions and works. He didn’t mimic them, but dialogued with them, reinterpreting compositional ideas, dramatic lighting, or figural presence in his own idiom.
His art engages with the act of seeing itself — not simply representation, but how vision, memory, and gesture combine in paint.
Career Highlights & Exhibitions
-
His first solo show was held in 1956 at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London.
-
Regular exhibitions with Marlborough Fine Art from the 1960s onward, including international shows in New York.
-
A key retrospective in 1978 at the Hayward Gallery, London, helped cement his reputation.
-
He represented Britain in the 1986 Venice Biennale, winning the Golden Lion.
-
Major retrospectives and exhibitions later held at Tate Britain, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the Courtauld (e.g. The Charcoal Heads) explored both his painted and drawn works.
-
His works are held in numerous major collections: Tate, the National Gallery, Arts Council, Royal College of Art, Ben Uri, and more.
In his later years, he continued to work daily from his long-term studio in Camden Town, north London, rarely traveling far.
Legacy & Influence
Frank Auerbach’s influence is substantial, though sometimes quieter than more market-oriented artists:
-
He preserved the viability of figurative, expressive painting through eras dominated by abstraction and conceptualism.
-
His practice models durational engagement — deep familiarity with subject, relentless revisiting, and patience over immediate yield.
-
Many later painters cite his work (especially his portraits and spatial thinking) as a touchstone for how the painted surface can record psychological time as well as visual form.
-
He demonstrated how the everyday—streets, neighbors, a fixed studio interior—can sustain decades of poetic and perceptual inquiry.
-
His deep respect for art history, used not out of nostalgia but as interlocution, offered a path that neither rejects tradition nor is beholden to it.
Though he was sometimes characterized as reclusive, his reputation among peers, critics, and students is immense: a painter’s painter, loyal to his vision above popularity or trends.
Personality & Working Ethos
Auerbach was notoriously private. He avoided interviews, public statements, and rarely held himself up as a persona. His work, rather than words, does his speaking.
He was rigorous and demanding of himself and his models. He expected intense commitment and long hours. The studio was his laboratory, often the only arena he worked in.
He tended to maintain long relationships with a small circle of sitters, sometimes showing their likenesses in dozens of works over years.
In conversation, he emphasized the hard fact that much of his painting is born from dissatisfaction and reattempt — the white canvas resisting, the need to “push through” mistake after mistake until something emerges.
Selected Themes & Anecdotes
-
Auerbach often said, “If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you.”
-
He sometimes scraped back paintings nightly, starting over until an interior logic—visual and emotional—was achieved.
-
He visited old master paintings regularly (at the National Gallery, etc.) and allowed those works to inform his color, structure, and presence—not by copying, but by resonating with them.
-
One of his works, Mornington Crescent (1969), achieved a record auction price in 2023 (over £5.56 million).
Conclusion
Frank Auerbach’s life is one of tension between exile and rootedness, between absence and presence, between the impulse to make and the struggle to make right. His paintings do not simply depict—they persist, insisting on the friction and labor of vision. In them we see how even the ordinary, when looked at deeply and over time, can become materially and emotionally profound.
Recent news about Auerbach