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Frank Auerbach

Frank Helmut Auerbach (29 April 1931 – 11 November 2024) was a German-born British painter. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, he became a naturalised British subject in 1947. He is considered one of the leading names in the School of London, with fellow artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, both of whom were early supporters of his work.[1][2]

Frank Auerbach
Auerbach c. 2010
Born
Frank Helmut Auerbach

(1931-04-29)29 April 1931
Berlin, Germany
Died11 November 2024(2024-11-11) (aged 93)
London, England
Citizenship
Education
Known forPainting
MovementSchool of London
Spouse
Julia Wolstenholme
​
​
(m. 1958; died 2024)​
ChildrenJake

Early life and education

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Auerbach was born on 29 April 1931 in Berlin, Germany,[3][4] the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Borchardt, who had trained as an artist.[5] Under the influence of the British writer Iris Origo, his parents sent him to Britain in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme (although he has stated it was by private arrangement),[6] which brought almost 10,000 mainly Jewish children to Britain to escape from Nazi persecution.[7] Aged seven, Auerbach left Germany via Hamburg on 4 April 1939 and arrived at Southampton on 7 April.[8] His parents stayed behind in Germany, and were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942.[9][10]

In Britain, Auerbach became a pupil at Bunce Court School, near Faversham in Kent, where he excelled in not only art but also drama classes. Indeed, he almost became an actor, even taking a small role in Peter Ustinov's play House of Regrets at the Unity Theatre in St. Pancras, at the age of 17. But his interest in art proved a stronger draw and he began studying in London, first at St Martin's School of Art from 1948 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. Yet, perhaps the clearest influence on his art training came from a series of additional art classes he took at London's Borough Polytechnic, where he and fellow St Martin's student Leon Kossoff were taught by David Bomberg from 1947 until 1953.[11]

Career

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In 1955, he began teaching in secondary schools, but he quickly moved into the visiting tutor circuit at numerous art schools, including Bromley, Sidcup and the Slade School. In particular, he taught one day a week from 1958 to 1965 at Camberwell School of Art.[12][13] He was the teacher, influence and sponsor of many artists, including Tom Philips, Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown,[14] Peter Saunders and Ray Atkins. For instance, he wrote to Andrew Forge, senior lecturer at the Slade to say that there were some remarkable students that he might consider, particularly Ray Atkins and Jo Keys, obtaining a place for them there.[15]

Auerbach's first solo exhibition was at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1956, followed by further solo shows there between 1959 and 1963. His work was featured at Marlborough Fine Art in London at regular intervals after 1965 as well as at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1969, 1982, 1994, 1998 and 2006.[16] In 1978, he was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and was included in the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1981.[11] In 1986, he represented Britain in the Venice Biennale, sharing the Golden Lion with Sigmar Polke. Further exhibitions were featured at: the Yale Center for British Art in 1981, alongside Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Patrick George, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow; the Kunstverein in 1986; the Van Gogh Museum in 1989; Marlborough Graphics in 1990;[16] the Yale Center for British Art in 1991; the National Gallery in 1995;[17] the Royal Academy of Arts in 2001.[11]

From 2007 to 2008, Auerbach held a solo show entitled Frank Auerbach Etchings and Drypoints 1954–2006 at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which toured to the Abbot Hall Art Gallery. In 2009, he had another solo show at the Courtauld Institute of Art.[16] Auerbach was the subject of a television film entitled Frank Auerbach: To the Studio, directed by Hannah Rothschild and produced by Jake Auerbach (Jake Auerbach Films Ltd). This was first broadcast on the arts programme Omnibus on 10 November 2001.[18]

London's Tate Britain, in association with the Kunstmuseum Bonn, organised a major retrospective of Auerbach's work in 2015 and 2016. The exhibit was curated by Catherine Lampert together with the artist.[19] David Bowie owned Auerbach's Head of Gerda Boehm as part of his private collection. After Bowie's death in 2016, this piece was among many put up for auction in November 2016, where it was sold for £3.8 million (US$4.7 million).[20] In 2024, the exhibition Frank Auerbach. The Charboal Heads at The Courtauld Gallery showcased a series of large-scale charcoal drawings by Auerbach, created in post-war London during the 1950s and early 1960s.[21]

Style and influences

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Head of E.O.W. IV  [Wikidata], 1961, National Gallery of Scotland

Auerbach was a figurative painter, who focused on portraits and city scenes in and around the area of London in which he lived, Camden Town.[22] Although sometimes described as expressionistic,[23] Auerbach was not an expressionist painter. His work is not concerned with finding a visual equivalent to an emotional or spiritual state that characterised the expressionist movement, rather it deals with the attempt to resolve the experience of being in the world in paint. In this the experience of the world is seen as essentially chaotic with the role of the artist being to impose an order upon that chaos and record that order in the painting.[24] This ambition with the paintings resulted in Auerbach developing intense relationships with particular subjects, particularly the people he paints, but also the location of his cityscape subjects.[25]

Speaking on this in 2001 he stated: "If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you."[26] This simple statement belies the intensity of the relationship that developed between Auerbach and his subjects, which resulted in an astonishing desire to produce an image the artist considered 'right'. This led Auerbach to paint an image and then scrape it off the canvas at the end of each day, repeating this process time and again, not primarily to create a layering of images but because of a sense of dissatisfaction with the image leading him to try to paint it again.[27]

This also indicates that the thick paint in Auerbach's work, which led to some of the 1950s paintings being considered difficult to hang, partly due to their weight and according to some newspaper reports in case the paint fell off,[28] is not primarily the result of building up a lot of paint over time. It was in fact applied in a very short space of time, and may well have been scraped off very soon after application.[26] This technique was not always considered positively, with the Manchester Guardian newspaper commenting in 1956 that: "The technique is so fantastically obtrusive that it is some time before one penetrates to the intentions that should justify this grotesque method."[29] This intensity of approach and handling also did not always sit well with the art world that developed in Britain from the late 1980s onwards, with one critic at that time, Stuart Morgan, denouncing Auerbach for espousing "conservatism as if it were a religion" on the basis that he applied paint without a sense of irony.[30]

As well as painting street scenes close to his London home, Auerbach tended to paint a small number of people repeatedly, including Estella Olive West (indicated in painting titles as EOW), Juliet Yardley Mills (or JYM)[31] and Auerbach's wife Julia Auerbach (née Wolstenholme).[26] He painted art historian and curator Catherine Lampert regularly from 1978 – when she organised his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery – until his death.[2][32]

A strong emphasis in Auerbach's work is its relationship to the history of art. Showing at the National Gallery in London in 1994, he made direct reference to the gallery's collection of paintings by Rembrandt, Titian and Rubens.[33] Unlike the National Gallery's Associate Artist Scheme, however, Auerbach's work after historic artists was not the result of a short residency at the National Gallery; it has a long history, and in this exhibition he showed paintings made after Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, from the 1970s, to Rubens' Samson and Delilah, made in 1993.[34] Auerbach's personal history, and his painting style, mixed with another person and not with Auerbach's consent, are part of the basis for the character "Max Ferber" in W. G. Sebald's award-winning collection of narratives The Emigrants (1992 in Germany, 1996 in Britain).[35] He is celebrated in his obituary in The Times as a "reclusive giant of modern art."[36]

Personal life

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He met Julia Wolstenholme at the Royal College of Art; they were married from 1958 until her death in January 2024.[37][38] They had one son, Jacob,[39] a film director, professionally known as Jake Auerbach.[40]

Auerbach died in London on 11 November 2024, at the age of 93.[41][42][43]

Bibliography

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  • Frank Auerbach, British Council, The British Council Visual Arts Publications (1986), ISBN 978-0-86355-037-9
  • Frank Auerbach, Robert Hughes, Thames & Hudson Ltd (1990), ISBN 978-0-500-27675-4
  • Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954–2001, Catherine Lampert and Norman Rosenthal, Royal Academy of Arts (8 October 2001), ISBN 978-0-900946-99-8
  • Frank Auerbach: The London Building Sites 1952–1962, Barnaby Wright, Paul Moorhouse and Margaret Garlake, Paul Holberton Publishing (2010), ISBN 978-1-903470-94-7
  • Frank Auerbach: Early Works 1954–1978, Paul Moorhouse, Offer Waterman & Co (2012), ISBN 978-0-9574188-0-6
  • Frank Auerbach, T.J. Clark and Catherine Lampert, Tate Publishing (2015), ISBN 978-1-84976-271-7
  • Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, Catherine Lampert, Thames & Hudson (2015), ISBN 978-0-500-29399-7
  • Frank Auerbach, William Feaver, Rizzoli International Publications (2009); (2022), ISBN 978-0-8478-7210-7
  • Frank Auerbach: The Sitters, Piano Nobile Publications (2022), ISBN 978-1-901192-62-9

References

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  1. ^ Richard Morphet, The hard-won image (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1984), p. 54
  2. ^ a b Cole, Joshua. "From the Archive: Examining the Importance of Frank Auerbach, 1931–2024". Thames and Hudson, 3 October 2019. Retrieved 16 November 2024
  3. ^ "Frank Auerbach". Munzinger Biographie (in German). Retrieved 15 November 2024.
  4. ^ Ruthe, Ingeborg (12 November 2024). "Frank Auerbach ist tot: Der Maler, der als Berliner Junge den Nazis entkam". Berliner Zeitung (in German). Retrieved 14 November 2024.
  5. ^ Jones, Jonathan (12 November 2024). "'He painted with a fury for life' – how Frank Auerbach put lust and sorrow into every brushstroke". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
  6. ^ BBC Radio 4 Front Row interview dated 4 October 2013
  7. ^ Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with Frank Auerbach, BBC Radio 3, archived from the original on 26 September 2013
  8. ^ Robert Hughes, "The Art of Frank Auerbach", The New York Review of Books vol. 31, issue 15, 11 October 1990. Retrieved 30 May 2013
  9. ^ Eric L. Santner, On creaturely life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 100, note 2
  10. ^ Jones, Jonathan (29 August 2014). "Frank Auerbach: a painter's painter of horrors and joy". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 18 November 2024.
  11. ^ a b c Catherine Lampert and Norman Rosenthal, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954–2001 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2001), p. 20
  12. ^ Sarah MacDougall, "'Seen by the eye and felt by the heart': The Émigrés as Art Teachers", in: Monica Bohm-Duchen ed., Insiders Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and Their Contribution to British Visual Culture (London: Lund Humphries, 2019), cited in "Frank Auerbach, artist", Ben Uri Research Unit database, Ben Uri Gallery & Museum. Retrieved 28 November 2021.
  13. ^ Geoff Hassell, Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts: Its Students and Teachers 1943–1960 (Woodbridge: The Antique Collectors' Club, 1998), p. 31
  14. ^ "Frank Auerbach Paintings, Bio, Ideas". The Art Story. Retrieved 5 August 2022.
  15. ^ Ray Atkins : a long view : from Bromley, Reading, Cornwall to the Pyrenees. London: Art Space Gallery. 2011. ISBN 978-0-9563072-6-2.
  16. ^ a b c Barnaby Wright et al., Frank Auerbach: The London Building Sites 1952–1962 (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2010), p. 80
  17. ^ Colin Wiggins, Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery (London: National Gallery Publications, 1995)
  18. ^ "BBC Programme Index". BBC Programme Index. 10 November 2001. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
  19. ^ T.J. Clark and Catherine Lampert, "Frank Auerbach" (London: Tate Publishing, 2015).
  20. ^ "Bowie Art Auction Nets $41 Million: Sotheby's", Luxuo, 13 November 2016. Retrieved 14 November 2016
  21. ^ "Frank Auerbach. The Charcoal Heads". The Courtauld.
  22. ^ "Art View" in The Economist, 3 February 2007
  23. ^ Ben Lewis, "Exuberant unpredictability", in The Daily Telegraph (London), 30 April 2006. Also see John Gruen, "Too Many Spooks", in New York, 13 October 1969, p. 54
  24. ^ Richard Dorment, "Heads above the rest", in The Daily Telegraph (London), 19 September 2001.
  25. ^ Sawa, Dale Berning (25 April 2023). "'I'm doing what may be my last paintings': Frank Auerbach on his new self-portraits and turning 92". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
  26. ^ a b c John O'Mahony, "Surfaces and depths", in The Guardian (London), 15 September 2001
  27. ^ Ben Lewis, "Exuberant unpredictability", in The Daily Telegraph (London), 30 April 2006
  28. ^ Moira Jeffrey, "Still laying it on thick", in The Herald (Glasgow) 1 February 2002, p. 21
  29. ^ Unsigned review, "Large paintings in narrow confines", in The Manchester Guardian, 11 January 1956
  30. ^ Stuart Morgan, "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes", in frieze, issue 21, March–April 1995
  31. ^ Hannah Rothschild, "Man of Many Layers", in Telegraph Magazine, 28 September 2013
  32. ^ Lampert, Catherine. "Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting". London: Thames & Hudson, 2015.
  33. ^ Bevan, Roger (1 July 1995). "Frank Auerbach, a modern master inspired by the Old Masters, on show at London's National Gallery". The Art Newspaper. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
  34. ^ Tom Lubbock, "After you, master, after you", The Independent (London), 1 August 1995
  35. ^ "The Guardian Profile: WG Sebald". The Guardian. 22 September 2001.
  36. ^ "Frank Auerbach: Reclusive giant of modern art". The Times. 13 November 2024. Retrieved 15 November 2024. Reclusive giant of modern art whose faithful sitters returned regularly and whose vibrant landscapes were limited to his locality
  37. ^ "Julia Auerbach (née Wolstenholme)". National Portrait Gallery. 1959.
  38. ^ Langer, Emily (13 November 2024). "Frank Auerbach, revered painter of single-minded devotion, dies at 93". The Washington Post. Retrieved 15 November 2024.
  39. ^ "Frank Auerbach: British-German painter dies aged 93". BBC News. 12 November 2024. Retrieved 15 November 2024.
  40. ^ "Frank Auerbach; Jake Auerbach". National Portrait Gallery. 1978.
  41. ^ "Frank Auerbach, leading figurative painter who fled Nazis, dies aged 93". The Guardian. 12 November 2024. Retrieved 12 November 2024.
  42. ^ Alex Greenberger (12 November 2024). "Frank Auerbach, Painter Who Redefined Portraiture, Dies at 93". ART News.
  43. ^ William Grimes (12 November 2024). "Frank Auerbach, a Celebrated and Tireless Painter, Dies at 93". The New York Times.
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