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Frank Auerbach, who died on Monday aged 93, was the last surviving member of the London group of postwar artists, which included Auerbach’s close friends Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff. Painting portraits and landscapes from life and from a limited repertoire of subjects and places, they received little attention for many decades, then from the 1990s were globally recognised as inventive late custodians of the European figurative tradition.
The Charcoal Heads, Auerbach’s exhibition of large-scale early drawings last winter at the Courtauld Gallery, demonstrated his gifts from the start as an exceptional draughtsman and psychologist, probing both the nature of appearance and character. “I feel there is no grander entity than the individual human being,” he explained when the show opened. “I would like my work to stand for individual experience.” So it did, for more than half a century, and against art’s prevailing winds of pop, conceptualism, irony and spectacle.
By the time of Tate Britain’s retrospective in 2015, Auerbach’s painterly world of sites and sitters — the buildings and park around Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill, sometimes depicted in brilliant sunburst hues; his lover Stella (Estelle) West and wife Julia — had become one of modern art’s instantly recognisable personal landscapes.
The achievement was the more compelling because his method — piling on and scraping down layer after layer, heavy impasto, staccato strokes, until the moment, he said, when the painting “speaks back” — created hard-won, contingent, only just cohering images. Auerbach once gave his gallerist a diagram of a Mornington Crescent picture annotated “hole”, “man with wheelbarrow”, “distant houses” and “I can’t remember if that is a man or a cement mixer”.
Frank Helmut Auerbach was born in 1931 in Berlin, only child of a Jewish lawyer and his wife. He was sent alone to England in 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution, and given a home at Bunce Court, an eccentric, warm-hearted boarding school of mostly refugees in Kent. Until the end, he retained his German accent and a charm, courtesy and intellectual articulacy evoking mid-century Mitteleuropa.
His parents died at Auschwitz in 1942. He coped, he said, “by total denial”; nonetheless, “I was always aware of death because of my background. And in some curious way the practice of art and the awareness of the imminence of death are connected. Otherwise we would not find it necessary to do the work art finally does — to pin down something and take it out of time.” He painted, he said, against “the sense that life is slipping away . . . I’m hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing”.
He attended St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art from 1948-55. More important influences were classes at Borough Polytechnic led by expressive painter David Bomberg, and Stella West, whom he met, aged 17, at an amateur dramatic society when she was 32. The “EOW” of numerous agitated, sparky portraits, she sat for him three times a week in her Earl’s Court basement flat: “I really became a painter by painting her,” he said.
In 1958 Auerbach married Julia Wolstenholme and they had a son, Jake, but soon drifted apart. Auerbach continued his relationship with Stella, then reconnected with Julia in 1976, though he continued to spend several nights a week alone, working and sleeping in his Mornington Crescent studio, inherited from Kossoff in 1954 and kept until his death. An initial subject was London’s postwar building sites; architectonic paintings holding structure and colour in balance characterised all his urban vistas. He rarely left London, painted the same few sitters weekly, and worked 365 days a year.
His first solo exhibition was at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956; he was represented by Marlborough Gallery from 1965, though he “had no money at all . . . through early middle age I would wake up in the night wondering how I would be able to afford materials to paint”. This changed with the Hayward Gallery’s retrospective in 1978, and the 1986 Venice Biennale, where he represented Britain and won the Golden Lion. Recently his paintings have sold for seven figures; a 1969 “Mornington Crescent”, £5.56mn in 2023, holds the record.
Auerbach remained unaffected by the market, painted slowly as ever, digging deep into his few motifs, and rarely gave interviews. For a Lunch with the FT in 2012 he invited me to bring a Marks and Spencer takeaway — “these sandwiches are a terrific luxury” — to the studio. “I’ve been extraordinarily lucky,” he said. “If I hadn’t been able to devote myself to painting, I’d have felt I had wasted my life.”