Obituary: Frank Auerbach

The British painter Frank Auerbach, who has died aged 93, created some of the most vibrant, vivid and inventive paintings of the 20th century. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, he was often compared to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in terms of the revolutionary and powerful nature of his work. His depictions of people and the urban landscapes near his London studio offer a depth, texture and sense of space and prove his status as one of the greatest painters of today.

While some described him as an Expressionist, others saw him as a figurative artist who viewed the world as chaotic, with the duty of the artist to impose order on it.

For half a century Auerbach lived and worked in a studio down a narrow alley in Camden Town; the area became one of the major subjects of his work. “What I wanted to do was to record the life that seemed to me to be passionate and exciting and disappearing all the time.” he said, in a voice which never lost its slight Germanic lisp.

He was a dedicated artist, painting 365 days a year. His practice was to discard his original work, scraping back the surface of the canvas to start and re-start the painting process daily, continuing afresh for months or years until the single painting took shape in a matter of hours, suddenly surprising him with its robust truth. This impasto technique made him remarkable among his contemporaries, and won him plaudits from The Sunday Times which described him as “our greatest living artist.”

“This part of London is my world”, he said of Camden Town. “I’ve been wandering around these streets for so long that I’ve become attached to them and as fond of them as people are to their pets”.

Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist. His parents sent him to Britain in 1939 with the Kindertransport, one of six children to be sponsored by Antonio and Iris Origo. He arrived at Southampton on April 7, with his luggage neatly packed and labelled.

He was nearly eight years old. He never saw his parents again. Both Max and Charlotte died in a concentration camp in 1942. A child during the rise of the Nazi party, Auerbach remembered a “rather bourgeois life”, in velvet knickerbockers and with a nanny. He also recalled that his mother had had a premonition that they might not meet again.

“I had some things for wearing immediately and then on some items my mother had stitched a red cross in the corner for later use, and some items like tablecloths and sheets were for use when I was grown up.”

He attended a progressive boarding school in Kent, for Jewish refugee children, Bunce Court, at Lenham near Faversham, which was evacuated to Shropshire during the war years. He moved to London in 1947 where he remained for the rest of his life. He attended St Martin's School of Art from 1948 to 1952, and the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. He also met the artist David Bomberg in night classes at Borough Polytechnic and developed a friendship with fellow student Leon Kossoff.

Helen Lessore gave Auerbach his first solo show at the Beaux-Arts Gallery, London in 1956. Some disliked his thick application of paint, but the critic David Sylvester, disagreed: “In spite of the heaped-up paint, these are painterly images, not sculptural ones, have to be read as paintings, not as polychrome reliefs, and make their point just because their physical structure is virtually that of sculpture but their psychological impact is that of painting.” Leon Kossoff supported that view. Auerbach also met the artist Lucien Freud and their friendship endured until the latter’s death in 2011.

He exhibited regularly at the Beaux-Arts Gallery until 1963 and from 1965 he showed at the Marlborough Gallery. He was given an Arts Council retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1978, and had solo exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, and at the Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam, in Pittsburgh, the Tate Gallery the National Gallery and the Hayward. His portraits were shown at the Courtauld Gallery earlier this year.

He also taught from 1955 onwards in secondary schools, later becoming visitor tutor at various art schools in the country, including the Slade and Camberwell School of Art.

The artist used three principal models throughout his career: his wife Julia, who first posed for him in 1959; Juliet Yardley Mills ('J.Y.M.'), a professional model whom he met in 1957 and his close friend Estella (Stella) West ('E.O.W.'), who became the model for most of his nudes and female heads until 1973. Auerbach rarely left Britain, operating from the same studio since the 1950s.

Some have drawn analogies between his work and his tragic early history. His Head of EOW – his first muse – suggests a golem-like imagery; the head emerging from an oozy material, which also characterises most of his landscapes. The sense of detachment in this painting could be read as the artist’s own alienation through his personal and tragic early loss. In looking at Auerbach’s work, you can never disregard this sense. Auerbach never discovered in what camp his parents were murdered.

As to how deeply his art was affected by the Holocaust, David Glasser, chair of the Ben Uri Gallery, feels “third parties” should not glibly offer interpretations. But he does believe that Auerbach’s “forced journey from Berlin to Britain” - “that break of continuity” may explain why, he feels that in Auerbach’s early work “there is a sense of emptiness.”

Auerbach was known for returning to a particular place, painting the view differently each time. His landscapes often featured the area near Mornington Crescent, and his subject material was as narrowly defined as his choice of sitters. He wanted each painting to be valued for its own merits rather than its style or era. He was also known for his pithy quotes: " I’m hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing” or: “It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint, considering that one may not wake up the following morning” or: “I destroy things every day in the act of working and often recall a picture I had considered finished in order to rework it.”

He met his future wife, Julia Wolstenholme when she was an art student and became his longest serving sitter. They married and their son Jake was born in 1958. But Auerbach could not cope with domestic life and returned to his first mistress Stella West. Julia raised Jake alone, but the two reunited in 1976, with the artist sometimes haunted by his bad behaviour.

Auerbach tended to emphasise the relationship of his work with the history of art. During his 1994 show at the National Gallery he referred to the gallery’s collection of paintings by Rembrandt, Titian and Rubens. His own personality and style formed the basis of the character "Max Ferber" in W. G. Sebald's award-winning novel, The Emigrants (1992 in Germany, 1996 in Britain).

Auerbach was the subject of a television film entitled Frank Auerbach: To the Studio, directed by Hannah Rothschild and produced by his son, (Jake Auerbach Films Ltd). This was first broadcast on the arts programme Omnibus on November 10 2001. His work was much sought after by celebrities, such as David Bowie who bought his Head of Gerda Boehm as part of his private collection. After Bowie's death in 2016, this piece realised £3.8 million at auction.

As the artistic environment began to change from the late 1980 onwards, some criticised his work for the visceral intensity of his paint application, accusing him of a conservative approach, applying paint without a sense of irony. Auerbach would implicitly reject that view, arguing in 2001:"If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you: you find ways to examine it.”

Others, like Simon Schama saw joy in Auerbach’s work, describing him as a fantastically "self-indulgent" enthusiast of paint who escaped postwar austerity with luscious art.

“His studio is like some sort of place where rationing has just been abolished. It's the ultimate sweetshop. It's full of touchy-feely paint. Freud talked about not wanting to paint nudes but to build them. It's Auerbach who's really building things, layering it on in a sort of party of impasto."

Frank Auerbach is survived by his son Jake.

Frank Auerbach: born April 29, 1931. Died November 11, 2024