Frank Auerbach, the artist who arrived in Britain as a Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler’s Germany and went on to become one of the most significant figurative painters of the postwar era, has died aged 93.
Over a career spanning seven decades, the British-German artist was known for his portraiture, as well as street scenes of Camden Town in north London where he kept the same studio for 50 years. He was also known for the unique way in which he created his work – repeatedly scraping the paint from versions he was dissatisfied with and starting again until the finished work could be so laden with paint that it threatened to wobble off the canvas.
He once estimated that 95% of his paint ended up in the bin. “I’m trying to find a new way to express something,” he told the Guardian. “So I rehearse all the other ways until I surprise myself with something I haven’t previously considered.”
Geoffrey Parton, the director of Auerbach’s gallery Frankie Rossi Art Projects, said: “Frank Auerbach, one of the greatest painters of our age, died peacefully in the early hours of Monday 11 November at his home in London. We have lost a dear friend and remarkable artist but take comfort knowing his voice will resonate for generations to come.”
Auerbach was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1931 and arrived in Britain eight years later as one of six children to be sponsored by Antonio and Iris Origo. His father, an engineering patent agent, and mother, who trained as an artist, were both murdered in the concentration camps at Auschwitz. Through the sponsorship, he attended Bunce Court in Kent, a progressive boarding school for Jewish refugee children, where his talent for art and drama shone through. In 1947 Auerbach became a naturalised British subject and a year later he began his formal training in London – St Martin’s School of Art in the day, with extra night classes taken at Borough Polytechnic. During this time he took a role in the then 19-year-old Peter Ustinov’s debut play, House of Regrets, but painting would become his true calling and he continued his studies at the Royal College of Art.
Auerbach fell in with Soho’s artistic crowd, which included Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud: when the latter died in 2011, a proportion of his vast Auerbach collection was given to the British government in lieu of £16m death duties.
In 1956 Auerbach received his first solo exhibition at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery. Some visitors were unimpressed with his excessive application of paint but he found a fan in the critic David Sylvester, who called it “the most exciting and impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon in 1949”.
Surviving the war was a key influence on Auerbach; he would journey through the capital’s bomb sites and feel an urge to capture the scenes; to somehow document the nation’s collective trauma. Auerbach developed similarly intense relationships with his sitters and preferred to paint only a small circle of friends and family, chief among those his wife, the painter Julia Wolstenholme, the model Juliet Yardley Mills and Estella Olive West, with whom he had a romantic relationship that contributed towards him separating from Wolstenholme. His studio was reportedly cramped and cold, with Auerbach turning the oven on during winter to keep it habitable. To sit for him could be an endurance in itself: the weekly two-hour sessions could go on for a year while Auerbach painted, scraped and repainted. “Rather like going to the dentist,” one sitter reported.
After years of struggling financially, things picked up for Auerbach in later life. In 1978 he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, with the curator Catherine Lampert becoming a regular sitter for several decades afterwards. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1986, sharing the Golden Lion prize with the German artist Sigmar Polke.
In 2015 London’s Tate Britain staged a major retrospective of Auerbach’s work alongside the Kunstmuseum Bonn. His painting Head of Gerda Boehm fetched more than $5m in 2022.
Auerbach frequently referenced art history in his work and liked to discuss insights on his heroes: Constable, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. There was certainly something old-fashioned about Auerbach’s approach – in an age of international travel and glitzy art openings, he would rarely leave his patch of north London. He was a self-confessed workaholic. While under lockdown restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic, the 91-year-old took to painting self-portraits.
Auerbach had a son, the film-maker Jake Auerbach, with Wolstenholme, and after his relationship with West finally ended he began living with his wife again at weekends. Often, though, he was at his happiest alone with his canvas. “I sometimes think of doing other things,” he said to the Guardian in 2015, “but actually it’s much more interesting to paint.”
Tributes were paid to Auerbach on Tuesday. The Turner prize winner Mark Wallinger told the Guardian that Auerbach had been an “enormously important and influential figure” in the art world and a “truly great, significant painter who followed his dedication and vision right up to the end”.
The American video artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa said: “WTF. Hands down, the greatest British painter of the past 75 years.”
Sean Scully, who has twice been nominated for a Turner prize, said: “Frank, as with many great artists, came from a perilous background that included brutal antisemitism. His loyalty to his subject, which was the difficult human head, and majestic nature, produced obsessive originality.”
The conceptual artist and painter Michael Craig-Martin said the news of Auerbach’s passing was “terribly sad”. “He was such an important figure, who made absolutely beautiful paintings, drawings and sculptures,” he said.
“Frank was a really great man as well as a great artist. He was a towering figure of integrity in the British art world. He was totally devoted to his work with no interest in fame and money. He was a person without any affectations or pretensions, he was never holier than thou. Being an artist was his calling, and he didn’t let anything distract him from that path. I treasured that respect for the work.”
Craig-Martin, whose own 60-year career is currently being exhibited in a retrospective at the Royal Academy, said Auerbach “drew and painted virtually every day, right until the very end”.
He added: “He was always very generous towards me, which was a huge compliment because I looked up to him. There are a small number of people who posed for him regularly over the decades, and they all became totally devoted to his work as well. They must be very sadly bereft. I know several of them and they’d do anything not to miss a session. It’s an extraordinary relationship, I can’t think of any other example in art of such long term engagement with sitters.”
The writer and illustrator Ed Vere said Auerbach was an “incredible painter who dedicated his life to painting. Luckily for those of us who love his resonant paintings and deeply powerful charcoal drawings.”
