The Berlin-born painter Frank Auerbach died at his dwelling in London yesterday, November 11 on the age of 93. His demise was confirmed by Frankie Rossi Artwork Tasks in London.
“We have lost a dear friend and remarkable artist but take comfort knowing his voice will resonate for generations to come,” mentioned Geoffrey Parton, director of the gallery and the artist’s buddy and portrait topic.
Auerbach, who was Jewish, was spirited away from Germany to the UK as a toddler to flee the Nazi demise camps, the place each of his dad and mom had been killed in 1942. It was in north London that he made his dwelling and stored the identical studio for greater than half a century, which formed him and gave him a lot of his material. Not like his buddy Lucian Freud, he was a deeply non-public man, though his topics would generally report that he possessed histrionic tendencies which tended to return to the fore throughout prolonged sittings for portraits within the studio. He would usually develop into extraordinarily agitated in his actions, nearly dancing round his sitter, and exclaiming aloud as he labored — “Yes! No!” — as if the battle to appreciate some elusive interior model could be a life-long battle.
Frank Auerbach, “Head of J.Y.M.” (1984–85), oil on canvas, 26 x 24 inches (66 x 61 cm) (photograph by Tristan Fewings/Getty Pictures for Sotheby’s)
A few of his earliest nice work had been made within the Fifties. He was very poor, and colours had been attractive forbidden fruits, tantalizingly past his attain. Auerbach’s material, then and for a lot of his life, was melancholic, consisting at this early level in his profession of evocations of the ruins of the buildings of central London — malls in Oxford Avenue, for instance, laid waste by repeated waves of German bombs courtesy of the Luftwaffe.
The vary of his palette was tonally very slender, principally composed of moist earth, black, and grey or a bitter, clayey brown. His work, then and later, had been characterised if not outlined by heavy texturing, as if gouged into form after which scored into by fingers or perhaps a spade — woundings, rawnesses, stuff lumpishly heaved and slopped. These shell-like ruins appeared to bear the pains of their onerous issue. There may be solely this scabby, mucky remnant of the as soon as nice days of stylish street-posturing that their look appears to be suggesting.
There may be nothing fairly or elegant concerning the work of Auerbach, and definitely no proof of frivolousness. Like his buddy and Saint Martin’s College of Artwork peer Leon Kossoff, he usually selected to color on board, whose onerous floor is unyielding and unbending. It resists, and holds regular, within the enamel of extreme assault. An incredible sense of extreme fragility was the hallmark of lots of his most attribute portraits, too: They rise in entrance of us like skeletal ghosts of themselves, scaffolding stripped naked of its pores and skin, their humanity nearly withdrawn into an odd half-light. The scarification of Marsyas as painted by Titian involves thoughts. It was as if Auerbach, life-long, was within the throes of striving to shuck off a burden nearly too nice to bear, one among which he would by no means fairly be rid — the survivor’s burden, maybe.
For all that, he was additionally capable of paint these life-affirming scenes of the streets of north London neighborhood so acquainted to him: the hustle and bustle of Mornington Crescent, for instance. Life on the transfer, and ceaselessly going someplace pressing.
Auerbach had his first retrospective exhibition on the Hayward Gallery in London in 1978 and acquired the Golden Lion, the Venice Biennale’s high prize, in 1986. The artist’s large-scale early drawings had been the topic of Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads on the Courtauld Gallery this yr and his self-portraits had been exhibited at Frankie Rossi Artwork Tasks in 2023. Auerbach is survived by his son, the filmmaker Jacob Auerbach.
