Frank Auerbach, one of the finest and indeed most challenging painters of the postwar era, has died aged 93. He lived one hell of a life, he never stopped being interesting, he gave everything to his art over a career spanning seven decades, the British-German artist was known for his portraiture, as well as paintings from the Camden area of north London where he worked in the same studio for something like fifty years. He had an almost unique way in terms of the language of his art, it was always special to see his work in the flesh, to have a conversation with him via his painting.

Geoffrey Parton, director of Auerbach’s gallery Frankie Rossi Art Projects, said: “Frank Auerbach, one of the greatest painters of our age, died peacefully in the early hours of Monday 11 November at his home in London. We have lost a dear friend and remarkable artist but take comfort knowing his voice will resonate for generations to come.”

Auerbach was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1931 but arrived in Britain eight years later under the Kindertransport scheme. His father, an engineering patent agent, and mother, who trained as an artist, were both murdered in the concentration camps at Auschwitz. He attended Bunce Court in Kent, a progressive boarding school for Jewish refugee children, where his talent for art and drama shone through. In 1947 Auerbach became a naturalised British subject and a year later began his formal training in London – St Martin’s School of Art in the day, with extra night classes taken at Borough Polytechnic. During this time he took a role in the then 19-year-old Peter Ustinov’s debut play, House of Regrets, but painting would become his true calling and he continued his studies at the Royal College of Art.

“Auerbach fell in with Soho’s artistic crowd, which included Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud: when the latter died in 2011, a proportion of his vast Auerbach collection was given to the British government in lieu of £16m death duties. In 1956 Auerbach received his first solo exhibition at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery. Some visitors were unimpressed with his excessive application of paint but he found a fan in critic David Sylvester who called it “the most exciting and impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon in 1949”.

Surviving the war was a key influence on Auerbach; he would journey through the capital’s bomb sites and feel an urge to capture the scenes; to somehow document the nation’s collective trauma. Auerbach developed similarly intense relationships with his sitters and preferred to paint only a small circle of friends and family, chief among those his wife, the painter Julia Wolstenholme, the model Juliet Yardley Mills and Estella Olive West, with whom he had a romantic relationship that contributed towards him separating from Wolstenholme. His studio was reportedly cramped and cold, with Auerbach turning the oven on during winter to keep it habitable. To sit for him could be an endurance in itself: the weekly two-hour sessions could go on for a year while Auerbach painted, scraped and repainted. “Rather like going to the dentist,” one sitter reported.

After years of struggling financially, things picked up for Auerbach in later life. In 1978 he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, with the curator Catherine Lampert becoming a regular sitter for several decades afterwards. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1986, sharing the Golden Lion prize with the German artist Sigmar Polke. In 2015 London’s Tate Britain staged a major retrospective of Auerbach’s work alongside the Kunstmuseum Bonn. His painting Head of Gerda Boehm fetched more than $5m in 2022.

Auerbach frequently referenced art history in his work and liked to discuss insights on his heroes: Constable, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. There was certainly something old-fashioned about Auerbach’s approach – in an age of international travel and glitzy art openings, he would rarely leave his patch of north London. He was a self-confessed workaholic. While under lockdown restrictions during the Covid pandemic, the 91-year-old took to painting self-portraits”.

There’s a highly recommend interview conducted by the BBC’s John Wilson as a part of the always rewarding This Cultural Life series that really is a treat to listen to (download it while you can, I think I’ve lsitened ot it at least a dozen times over the last year)

– “A rare interview with Frank Auerbach, one of the world’s greatest living painters. At 92 years old, he has been painting for over 70 years and still works every day. A child refugee from Nazi Germany whose parents were killed in Auschwitz, he made his name alongside his friends and fellow painters Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff in the 1950s. He’s well known for the thick layers of the paint used to create his portraits and images of the streets around the studio in Camden Town where he has worked since 1954.

Frank Auerbach talks to John Wilson about his fragmentary memories of his early childhood in pre-war Berlin and his education at the boarding school Bunce Court in Kent, where he arrived aged 7. He recalls the huge impression that a black and white reproduction in a children’s encyclopaedia of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire made on him as a boy, making him want to “do better and be less superficial”. Auerbach also discusses the influence on him of the artist David Bomberg who taught him at London’s Borough Polytechnic, and his friend and fellow student Leon Kossoff. He also talks about his friendships with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and why he still paints and draws in his studio seven days a week”.

Frank Auerbach also had a studio hear in Hackney, I always harboured a hope that I would bump into him in the local supermarket, and get to go talk to him, he was a special painter, an artist to be admired and a life to be celebrated. 

R.I.P Frank Auerbach