Last week, on November 11th 2024, the world lost Frank Auerbach, one of the greatest figurative painters of our time. He was 93.
Auerbach arrived in Britain as a child, sent by his parents in 1939 as part of the Kindertransport scheme. His parents were later murdered at Auschwitz.
Frank Auerbach's rich life of art and experience took in teaching posts at secondary schools and art colleges in his early years. He ascended to become one of the leading figures of the 'School of London', alongside illustrious colleagues such as Howard Hodgkin, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and he helped launch the careers of many next-generation British artists including Jenny Saville and Cecily Brown. Auerbach settled in the artistic hub of Camden in North London.
Best-known for his compelling, searching portraits, often existing in multiple renderings of the same sitter, Auerbach's work ranges from profound charcoal drawings displaying a potent combination of contemplative stasis and flurried energy, to craggy, expressionist oil studies in the thickest of impasto.
During the 1950's Auerbach produced many charcoal drawings of Stella West, the actress with whom he maintained a long and intense relationship. The artist has stated that none of his portraits exhibit a greater intensity that those he made of Stella, because the connection between them was so powerful.
He described the atmosphere in the studio with Stella (known as E.O.W) as one in which clouds of charcoal dust hung chokingly in the room as he knelt on the floor, a drawing board balanced on a chair in front of him. He was perpetually frightened that Stella would refuse to sit any longer; on occasions, the artist would pretend a finished drawing was incomplete and secretly begin a new one, seeking to capitalise on the stolen moments before Stella, ultimately, did rebel, forcing Auerbach to turn to paint.
It seems that Frank Auerbach had a deep-seated fear of sitters abandoning the studio. “Sloshing around with paints”, he said, “may make the sitter feel that the whole process is so idiotic and unreadable and messy, and that they might lose faith in the procedure”.
Auerbach's style is arguably among the most iconic and recognisable of our time.
Let us leave the last word to David Bowie, who owned the portrait of Gerda Boehm illustrated above:
“My God – I want to sound like that painting looks!”
CHARCOAL DUST AND IMPASTO PEAKS copyright Haydn Dickenson 2024
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