There is something miraculous about an exhibition of self-portraits by Frank Auerbach, modestly displayed in two rooms in a side street in Mayfair. Not only is the artist in his early nineties, but he narrowly escaped being killed during the Holocaust: these portraits of the artist as an old man might so easily have never been.
If Auerbach had not been evacuated, aged seven, on a small boat from Germany to England in 1939, he would have been gassed by Hitler, as happened to his parents who stayed behind, and this week there would not be one of the most astonishing exhibitions of self-portraits ever seen in London.
