Frank Auerbach did not often think about how he would be remembered. “When I was young, when I started out I thought the aim was to be gorgeous and famous like everyone else, but that’s completely obsolete now,” she told the BBC in an interview earlier this year. “I live a pretty surprisingly restrictive life and I go about it very quietly; if “If this interview had not forced me to make these bold and pretentious statements, I would be innocently slipping away in the next room (with knowledge, that is) pleasure and success are in the feeling of having done something.”

Auerbach was the realist stereotype of the painter’s painter, who continued to paint with limited interruptions for eight-tenths of a century. He has managed to be that rare thing: an artist who stands outside the noise of his own moment and yet produces some of the most enduring and insightful observations about what it means to be alive in his own time.

Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931, the only child of elderly Jewish parents, Max, a patent lawyer from a family of lawyers, and Charlotte, a Lithuanian art student. He spent the first few years of his life in Wilmersdorf, a middle-class district of Berlin. After Hitler came to power, the Auerbachs arranged for their seven-year-old son to move to England; Charlotte sewed a red cross on the larger items in her suitcase to indicate when she was growing up, and two crosses on the sheets and tablecloths for when she was getting married. Auerbach’s safe passage to London, KindergartenThe coordinated rescue effort that brought nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Nazi-controlled European territory was only possible with the blessing of the famous Anglo-American writer Iris Origo.

Auerbach was sent to Brunce Court in the sleepy Kent village of Otterden, a Quaker-led boarding school that he affectionately described as “a little republic”. Here he fell in love with British painting and first encountered a black and white reproduction in JMW Turner’s Arthur Mee children’s encyclopedia. Fighting Temeraire (1838), which made him want to “do better and be less superficial.” His parents were killed in a concentration camp in 1942. “(I was) not shocked or overwhelmed at any point,” he reflected much later, “It gradually leaked out to me that they had been killed, taken to a camp, and I don’t know which, probably Auschwitz.”

After Bruce Court, Auerbach moved to London, where he was supported by his much older cousin Gerda Boehm, who would become an important muse and the subject of much of the early “Coalheads”; these were exhibited together at the Courtauld Gallery. 2024.

Auerbach enrolled in art classes at the Hampstead Garden Suburban Institute and even began acting, appearing in Peter Ustinov’s play. House of Regrets and in productions at the radical 20th Century Theater in Westbourne Grove. But it was the picture that kept calling him back. After wandering for hours through the entrances of the capital’s art schools with his portfolio under his arm, Auerbach was accepted into St Martin’s College and Borough Polytechnic Institute, where the affable headmaster Mr Patrick prepared a course schedule for him: “I think I’ll put you in with David Bomberg for a day”, it’s as if “Bomberg is a bit risky, but you never know; you might just get along with him.” as if to say. The aging Vorticist Bomberg was risky indeed, and master and apprentice often clashed in life lessons in the old engineering rooms, but traces of Bomberg’s early influence – his sharp lines on the human form, his outsider observations of English life – can be traced throughout Auerbach’s training.

Auerbach’s breakthrough came in the summer of 1952, when he painted two formative paintings. EOW Naked, He describes Estella Olive West, whom he describes as his greatest influence, during an anxious sit-down in which he found within himself “enough courage to repaint the whole thing in an irrational and instinctive way”: after all, having completely reworked the canvas, “I found that there was a photograph of her.” “

His second epiphany came when he found a place to continue his studies at the Royal College of Art (1952-55). During a “crisis” of overconfidence in complying with the College’s conservative demands, Auerbach turned on his heel and looked down at the excavations and scaffolding leading to a cavernous construction site at Earls. ‘ Court Road. Give or take, it would be his intensely studied and reworked portraits of female sitters, as well as the frenetic urban activity of a transforming London, that would define his contributions to the British figurative tradition. From then on he rarely sought subjects elsewhere.

After his breakthrough, Auerbach wanted to spend every moment in the studio. He explored monastic life and devoted himself to it. He always went to bed at nine and got up at five, if not earlier. “Mondrian did not have a life,” he assured himself: becoming an artist was a decision, and it was crucial to reject social demands and domestic concerns. For more than half a century since his final year at the Royal College, from which he graduated with a silver medal, Auerbach lived in a studio in an alley behind Mornington Crescent in Camden.

The studio gave Auerbach enough space to work on two genres simultaneously, in an area of ​​only twenty feet by twenty feet. But that doesn’t mean Auerbach hasn’t gone out. The city of London remained his favorite subject. He was constantly inspired by the Blitzed ruins, with their hollow houses and gutted grandeur. “London looked magnificent,” Auerbach recalled of his early years in the city: “like chalk pits, caves and holes in the highlands. Magnificent: a mountain landscape.” He made photo essays of porters at Smithfield Market shouldering carcasses with blood on their white coats. He wandered around Soho at night. The early years of poverty led him to paint from five-litre cans almost entirely in earth colours. “That’s what my life was like,” he thought, “I destroyed London and had intense relationships with a few people.”

One of these few, Julia Wolstenhome, who was one year below Auerbach at the Royal College, began succeeding him in 1959 and continued to do so until the end of her life. They married and had a son, Jake, who became a film producer, but they soon separated. Auerbach’s claim that he thought of “painting as something that happens to a man working in a room alone with his actions, his ideas, and perhaps his model” did not help a happy married life, but a deeper respect sustained their bond. Wolstenhome likens the experience of sitting next to her estranged husband to “washing dishes”: something that is necessary (whether you like it or not) and takes more time than you might want on midweek evenings and slow weekend afternoons. Juliet Yardley Mills (or JYM) would soon become a model of choice after meeting Auerbach at the Sidcup School of Art in the 1950s. These fleshy, Soutine-influenced paintings were often called “heads” rather than “portraits” and often showed JYM fully bent over, as if daydreaming, with his neck extended, his eyes turned into thin slits, and with almost half-eyes. its direction was hidden from view.

When Catherine Lampert curated a mid-career retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1978 (an underestimate in retrospect), she was asked to sit in on Monday evenings and then Friday afternoons for 25 years. (Then there were Jake’s Tuesday afternoons). “During the first few years that I sat for Frank Auerbach, it was difficult to reconcile listening to someone who was so knowledgeable, so gifted at expressing his thoughts and memories, and someone who spent almost all of his time concentrating his entire being on something so complicated, so complex that it took place in a cramped room, both physically and emotionally.” “It’s also a mentally challenging process.” Lampert curated subsequent retrospective exhibitions with Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy in 2001 and at the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, and Tate Britain in 2015. I’m amazed every morning,” Jonathan Jones wrote in a review for Guard: “The master reveals that art is a work that never ends and an eye that never dulls.”

Auerbach will be remembered as an important part of the much-mythologized generation of the London School, an outcast group of predominantly non-Londoners who found in the sand and grime of their adopted city enough materials to revive a national passion for modernist painting. They re-embraced the figure, moving away from contemporary fashions for pure abstraction and minimalism. Auerbach was for a long time particularly close to Leon Kossoff, with whom he shared a passion for channeling dark valleys; saw the gregarious Francis Bacon twice a week for fifteen years; He received rare praise from the Berliner-Jewish refugee Lucian Freud, who wrote of his friend: “Motivated by enthusiasm and love for great works of art rather than by the need for support, Frank Auerbach uses his past paintings to diversify and expand his obsessive subject.” Auerbach described these sparring but productive relationships as being like “being a boxer in the ring with them, as Hemingway said.”

However, Freud was right about him. Auerbach was always more comfortable around his friends, the Rembrandts, Titians and Rubens, who constantly took long walks through the great rooms of the National Gallery, than he was around the artists of his own time. In 1965, David Wilkie, an insurance officer in the city, commissioned Auerbach to paint a painting based on Titian, which resulted in the donation of a number of other works to the Tate. Bacchus and Ariadne (1971). Exhibition after thirty years Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Chasing the MastersIt was structured around the drawings he made from the paintings in the collection. In 2013-14 six of Auerbach’s paintings were exhibited alongside several Rembrandts in the Dutch Gallery of Honor at London’s Ordovas and then at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.

Auerbach might have wished he had done only one thing, to paint, and to continue painting, but he went far beyond the modest standard he had set for himself. In a 2024 BBC interview, Auerbach wrote of “a hunchbacked dwarf in Alexander Pope, an illiterate farm laborer in John Clare, or a misfit woman who kills herself by drinking a bottle of disinfectant in Charlotte Mew” but still “calls them great poets” “It’s Muse. Despite his stubborn silence after the tragedies of his childhood, Auerbach was summoned by the Muse to take his place among these disparate outsiders on the margins and Old Master heroes in the decorated halls of art history. He will be remembered as an irrepressible light in both chambers and as a dedicated artist whose contribution to portrait and landscape painting throughout his long life was unparalleled.

Frank Auerbach; He was born in Berlin on April 29, 1931; London died 11 November 2024