Frank Auerbach once said that London after the second world war was a “marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags, full of drama”. It’s a description that could just as easily apply to his own aged face, judging by the works that have just gone on display at a new show in the city.
Entitled Twenty Self-Portraits and showing at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert gallery, the exhibition comprises paintings on boards and drawings on paper, all done since 2017. Here he is looking like a bird; there, like a tree; there, a boulder unmoved by a storm. The artist, just turning 92, still lives where he works, as he always has done – alone in a north London studio. I call him at 9am on Good Friday. He picks up on the first ring.For decades, writers have struggled to find the right words to describe Auerbach: a hermit, a recluse, a monk, an obsessive. His daily routine seemed like it would never change: up before 7am to draw in quiet streets, then work in the studio – every day of the year – with one of the handful of people who have sat for him over the decades. As one veteran sitter, the art historian Catherine Lampert, puts it: “He’s all by himself, every evening, by choice.”
