Frank Auerbach’s paintings, each one wrested from chaos over weeks and months of struggle, place the artist firmly in the English tradition stemming from Constable, who had the same feeling for the material world and the materials of art.
Auerbach’s almost lumpen approach to his subject matter (portraits, nudes and cityscapes), mediated by his teacher, David Bomberg, who advised his students to seek “the spirit in the mass”, changed almost imperceptibly during his 70-year career, yet his reputation never faltered; in fact it increased.
He wanted, he once said, to create art with a density equivalent to feeling the physical form of the subject in the dark, though he admitted in the same breath that Matisse could do just that by painting thinly. Auerbach, in contrast to Matisse, would take a mundane subject such as a descending set of concrete steps at Euston station, trowel the drab pigment on like mortar, and finish with a canvas transformed by its densely observed presence.
But despite the Englishness of his work, and his belonging to a group of painters dubbed the School of London by RB Kitaj, Auerbach, who has died aged 93, was in fact born in Berlin, and had arrived in England alone, aged eight, in 1939. His parents had sent him to Britain for safety, choosing to remain themselves in Germany on the assumption that Hitler would moderate his policy on the Jews. In 1943 they were both transported to Auschwitz and killed.
After that traumatic beginning, the source material for his work was to be found within an area of London not much more than five miles across, from Bethnal Green to Camden Town and Primrose Hill, and with only a few human models, almost exclusively long-term friends, lovers and his wife.
Auerbach became, along with two of those friends, Leon Kossoff (whom Auerbach painted in the early days) and Lucian Freud (also born in Berlin, also a refugee from Hitler), a leading figure in the School of London, which was neither a school nor composed particularly of Londoners, except by adoption, and had little in common except figuration.
As well as these three, the group included Francis Bacon, Kitaj himself, and Michael Andrews. What they had in common was that they stood out against prevailing trends throughout their careers, especially through the years of pop, op, hyper realism, conceptualism, minimalism, neo-expressionism, and innovation-for-the-sake of-innovationism.
Although they were figurative painters, they were more concerned with communicating the experience of their subject matter – portrait heads, nudes, townscape – than with making a likeness. Auerbach, especially, created parallel identities for his subjects rather than replications, both in the oils with their thick accretions of pigment that, without exaggeration, turned many of his early portraits and nude studies into bas reliefs, and in his charcoal drawings, worked on for many sittings, scrubbed out and begun again, rubbed until holes appeared in the paper. Then they were reworked once more until the haunting image of a head appeared out of the Stygian shade.
Of Auerbach’s middle-class parents, Charlotte (nee Burchardt) was an artist, and his father, Max, was a lawyer. A family friend offered to sponsor his place at a liberal co-educational boarding school, Bunce Court in Lenham, Kent, and so he was sent to Britain; he never saw his parents again.
Bunce Court gave Auerbach security and a liking for art, but when he left in 1947 he was ill-equipped either for further education or for a career. He drifted into the leftwing Unity theatre in London and made himself useful designing sets, among other productions for Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters. At the beginning of 1948 he gained a place at St Martin’s School of Art, but, unable to wait until September to begin painting, he enrolled as a student at the Borough Road Polytechnic (now London South Bank University). This was to be the making of him. Bomberg, a Vorticist before the first world war and, at this point, aged 57, embittered and regarded as a burnt-out case, was a brilliant master for an aspiring artist.
In these postwar years English painting was, too often, illustrative naturalism crammed into a provincial interpretation of cubist space. Bomberg encouraged his students to work fast and big, to take risks, to work from primary vision confronted with the motif rather than through preconceived notions of what art should look like. It was tough work and only the better students survived. Auerbach was one of them.
He continued with Bomberg’s classes while at St Martin’s, and encouraged his fellow student and friend Kossoff to attend them. When Kossoff failed a year at St Martin’s, Auerbach remarked in retrospect: “I had a very limited art education, but I knew what artists were. Artists were people who failed exams, got thrown out of art school, and were not subservient to their teachers.” He himself went on to the Royal College of Art, and left in 1955 with first-class honours and a silver medal.
Kossoff and Auerbach became close friends, painted each other’s portraits, though not for long (neither could afford the time to sit for the other), but for some years regularly visited each other’s studios. Tate Britain has a portrait of Kossoff that Auerbach painted at St Martin’s, in browns, black, yellow and a touch of red – the cheaper pigments that he could afford. It is a timeless image of concentrated power, a quite extraordinary artistic achievement let alone for a 20-year-old student.
For all the similarities between Kossoff’s work and Auerbach’s, the differences became more apparent. Kossoff, a native Londoner, opened up the city’s crowds and activities, its trains and its swimming pools; Auerbach, the boy who had arrived clutching one little suitcase, hugged his loneliness close, and initially painted a series of building sites. However, he clung to his freshly won identity, painting obsessively a single head, a single figure, a single townscape motif over and over and over, typically Mornington Crescent close to his studio, accreting layers of paint, scraping them off and starting afresh, slowly covering the floor in a thicker impasto even than his canvases, keeping alive by spells of teaching in Bromley and Sidcup, and later the Slade.
His personal paradise was Primrose Hill, his first painting of which is practically monochrome and looks like a relief sculpture in need of urgent cleaning. But the palette of some late paintings – images of Park Village East, Hampstead Road, Mornington Crescent – is so hot they would drive a fireman backwards.
He had not been able to afford anything but those ochres, umbers and greys until Helen Lessore, a friend to young painters and director of the Beaux Arts gallery, gave him a contract worth £1,200 a year, at which point he was able to relieve his earth colours with Veronese green, cadmium red and chrome yellow. His touch became more fluid, more “masterly”, especially after he had studied the Willem de Kooning canvases in the Abstract Expressionist room of the New American Painting show at the Tate in 1959.
When he was 17 Auerbach had been cast in a Peter Ustinov play at the Unity. Another cast member was Stella West, a widow 15 years his senior. He became her lodger and her lover; she was his model for a long-running series of portraits, usually called Head of EOW (E for Estella) with the date appended, and nude studies including a magnificent EOW Nude Lying on Her Back (1959), in which the writhing accretions of white pigment with a solitary punctuation of black denoting her pubic hair all laid in against a dun background constitute a life-affirming presence. He and Stella continued together until they broke up acrimoniously in 1973, 15 years after he had married Julia Wolstenholme, a fellow RCA student. Julia bore him a son, Jake, but they separated shortly after. Then, in 1976, they resumed a loving relationship and she too became his model.
In 1963 he had met Joan Yardley Mills, who also became his model; in 1973 for the first time he painted her initials on to a canvas, as he had done with EOW “for the same reason that you carve people’s name on trees,” he wrote, “… one writes the name of the person or people that one is in love with.” Despite this, the relationship between Mills and Auerbach was always platonic, rather than romantic.
After the Beaux Arts years, Auerbach was taken up by the Marlborough gallery and gained increasing recognition abroad, typified by the award (shared with Sigmar Polke) of the Golden Lion prize at the 1986 Venice Biennale. Still, the deep seriousness of his art brought respect rather than love from most critics, but that changed when the Royal Academy gave him a retrospective exhibition in 2001.
The show was in galleries next to one of Rembrandt’s portrayals of women. Auerbach had always painted with the masters in mind. He often worked in the National Gallery, making studies that might later become Auerbachian versions of Rembrandt, Rubens or Titian. Walking between those later two exhibitions confirmed that Auerbach’s canvases constitute some of the noblest painting of our times.
A Constable exhibition at the V&A in 2014 reinforced Auerbach’s connection to art history – a literal one when, as a student at the RCA, he would walk through “a secret tunnel” that joins the college with the museum to view the permanent collection. In an interview prior to the show opening Auerbach said that he loved Constable for his “doggedness”, that in his paintings, like his own, “He seems to have walked every path, measured every distance between every tree. Everything has been worked for and made personal so you sometimes feel that Constable’s own body is somehow inside the landscapes there.”
In 2015, another Auerbach retrospective was held at Tate Britain; the exhibition consisted of six rooms, each showing eight paintings from a decade of Auerbach’s output. A collection of work from the Tate’s vaults, Frank Auerbach: Unseen, was shown in 2022 at Newlands House Gallery, in Sussex. In his 90s he turned to self-portraits with a series of 20 new works presented at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert gallery in 2023. Earlier this year, the Courtauld brought together his charcoal portraits from the postwar period in Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads.
Julia died in January. Auerbach is survived by his son, Jake.
• Frank Helmuth Auerbach, artist, born 29 April 1931; died 11 November 2024
• This article was amended on 14 November 2024 to correct the name of Joan Yardley Mills and to clarify the nature of her relationship with Frank Auerbach.
