Friday, November 22, 2024

Frank Auerbach, last of the ‘London school’ of figurative painters, known for his encrusted canvases

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The only child of a patent lawyer, Frank Helmuth Auerbach was born in Berlin on April 29 1931. When the Germans began killing Jews, his parents arranged for him to be sent to England in 1939, one of six children sponsored by the writer Iris Origo. He was brought up at Bunce Court, a Jewish-Quaker school in Kent.

His parents were sent to a death camp. For a while he continued to receive notes. Then these stopped.

Auerbach had a happy time at Bunce Court, which looked after many other orphans. He recalled that there was “no oppressive presence of noxious grown-ups”. During the war the school was evacuated to Shropshire, where boys spent their days playing long games of Monopoly or staging battles between Greeks and Trojans with dustbin lids and sticks. He said he soon forgot about his parents.

In 1947 he moved to London, where he studied acting and art. His life changed when he met David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic.

Bomberg, then considered an eccentric failure, impressed upon Auerbach the seriousness of the artist’s vocation, a necessary respect for tradition and an obligation to be true to the world as he saw it. It was a fine, tormenting balance, between the past, the self and the world, that was to inform all of Auerbach’s work.

“Paintings come out of painting,” observed Auerbach. “But it doesn’t turn into painting until the person who does it has had an experience of their lives.”

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