When I found out Frank Auerbach was dead I thought once more of the heartbreaking story of his parents Max Auerbach and Charlotte Nora Borchardt, who saved his life by putting their child on a train from Berlin to London in 1939. Auerbach told his friend William Feaver they packed things he would need in his future life, including linen for when he married. They knew they would never see him grow up, or be there for any of his future. They believed they would soon die. And they did, in the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews.
What a future they missed. The son they saved became one of the greatest British artists of modern times who painted with a fury for life and a gravitas of grief, as if his lust and sorrow were fighting it out in each mighty brushstroke. Slashes of red or black streak across a pair of mid-period canvases, bringing savage bolts of lightning to a lime parkland or a grey heath in violent pastoral scenes that make a spring day seem like pure agony. And that’s in his mature art, when he was more reconciled to life and the healing act of painting itself.
In his devastating early work the wound is wide open. In the late 1950s and early 60s, as London was rebuilt after the Blitz and bombsites became shiny new shops and cinemas, he painted a series of resolutely un-swinging building site scenes. Instead of seeing these busy locations as optimistic signs of renewal, he paints them as holes in the world. Girders feebly raised into the sky are dwarfed by the swarming cavernous voids dug out of the bomb-blasted 20th-century soil. You can’t resist the power of these paintings, or doubt for a second that they speak of the lost, the destroyed, the murdered. Auerbach simply refuses to join in the fun as a new consumer society prepares to forget and move on. He’s stuck in the mud.
Auerbach’s building sites, with their almost unreadable lattices of half finished structures and matted, caked brown spaces are almost, you might say, “abstract”. They rival the American abstract expressionist paintings that were then storming Britain – yet they cleave to the real world, with a bitter, wild tenacity. Abstraction haunts Auerbach like a madness: it’s the easy way out and instead he must bring his masses and dashes of paint back from the cliff edge to portray … the cliff edge itself.
In all of Auerbach’s paintings, from his earliest raw stabbing at the form of a human head to the self-portraits he did in his 90s, an abstract impulse to let rip in unrecognisable bursts of energy is in tension with a duty to depict real people and places. “Duty” is the fitting word. For Auerbach the depiction of the human face is not an easy thing. It is not what his free, imaginative drawing or painting hand wants to do, but this person must be recorded.
His first images of people look ancient. EOW Nude, painted in 1953-4, could have been found in the ruins of a city destroyed by fire. It is ashen, charred, a grey ghost of a nude model.
But of course it does come from a ruined, burnt out world: mid-20th century Europe. Young Auerbach, orphan of the Holocaust, sees in his models and friends a pummelled, almost-eradicated humanity that impossibly lives on. Head of EOW I, painted in 1960, actually introduces bright colour – lashings of mustard yellow, defining smears of blood red, immaculate white. You might even compare it with the lurid colours of the Hammer films enlivening British screens at the time. Like a horror film, it packs a macabre punch.
The paint is piled up so thick it juts out far beyond the wooden board it’s been layered on to. It becomes not a picture but an object, almost a sculpture. Into its colours the features of the woman Auerbach calls EOW – full name Estella West – are engraved like a photographic negative or the shadow of an atom bomb victim.
It is wrong to see Auerbach as a “figurative artist” in a tame English way. At times, as in a 1970s portrait of Rimbaud that depicts the French modernist poet on a fascistic poster in what looks like a totalitarian dance hall, he reminds me of a German artist, with a lot in common with Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer – who, like him, cannot forget what lies beneath the successful new postwar western Europe. Auerbach rethought the human image for a world in which the human might be doomed. He painted faces, or as he titled them “Heads”, as if fumbling for their essence. Meeting any of his regular portrait subjects, you realise there’s no simple visual resemblance at all – to pose for Auerbach was to lend yourself as a near-anonymous icon of the human presence.
The radical courage of Auerbach’s modern art of the head, and the whole person, made him part of a brilliant group who produced profound, unforgettable art in postwar London. Leon Kossoff, who shared his fascination with the capital city, his fellow Berlin child Lucian Freud, and their elder and leader, Francis Bacon, put blood into Britain’s previously pallid art. Now it’s pretty clear to almost everyone these were our modern art greats – what could be more modern than a harrowing Auerbach head?
He is an artist whose reputation will grow with time. His later art was surely a work of therapy: from the bombsites-become-building sites in which he saw the scars of a still suppurating horror, he found peace of a sort in the open spaces and familiar streets of north London. His paintings of Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath are tremendous reckonings with the roiling cloudy landscapes of John Constable. Yet they also make me think of the London settings of John le Carré’s spy novels: you can imagine Smiley meeting a double agent in his Hampstead painting The Origin of the Great Bear. Like a spy novel, his urban pastorals are shadowed by chills.
In fact his happiest scenes are the city places, like Mornington Crescent, that he saw pretty much every day on his way to his studio. A whole series of works is entitled To the Studios and depicts in splashy, happy colours his walk to work.
Auerbach painted past his 90th birthday and unveiled heroic, sensitive, pitiless self-portraits in his very last years. At a recent book launch I went to, it was announced: “Frank can’t be here: he’s working.”
There will be time for the curatorial reassessments, the exhibitions, the awestruck books. I bet you any money that each of these raises his reputation a little higher until we see him as Constable and Picasso rolled into one – a supreme modern painter.
Right now we should mourn the orphan of the 20th century who lived to the full the great life he was given by a train ride out of Berlin. I like to think Auerbach hasn’t gone: he’s painting.
