Renowned British Painter Frank Auerbach Passes Away at Age 93
### **Frank Auerbach: A Life of Artistic Legacy and Resilience**
The art world is in mourning following the passing of **Frank Auerbach**, the Berlin-born painter who died at the age of 93 in his London home on November 11. Widely regarded as one of the most important post-war British painters, Auerbach leaves behind a legacy that will resonate for generations. Geoffrey Parton, director of Frankie Rossi Art Projects and close friend of the artist, expressed sorrow in his passing but took solace in the timeless impact of Auerbach’s artistic voice.
### **Early Life: Escape from the Holocaust**
Born in Germany into a Jewish family, Auerbach’s early life was shaped by the horrors of World War II. As the Nazi regime escalated its persecution of Jews, Auerbach was sent to the United Kingdom as part of the Kindertransport program, narrowly escaping the fate that claimed the lives of his parents, who were murdered in concentration camps in 1942. This profound trauma forever touched Auerbach’s work, fostering themes of survival, memory, and the precariousness of human existence.
Though he escaped physical harm, the emotional scars from his early life ran deep and may have influenced much of the emotional intensity in his paintings. A sense of rawness and tragedy permeates his art, particularly his somber landscapes of post-war London, a city in ruins, much like his own life, obliterated by war and destruction.
### **Life of Isolation and Possession**
Settling in North London, Auerbach established a lifelong connection to the city, where he lived and worked for over five decades in the same studio. Despite gaining international fame, Auerbach remained a deeply private individual, removed from the limelight that his contemporaries, such as Lucian Freud, often courted. His interactions with his sitters during portrait sessions were known to be intense, with accounts of him appearing “possessed” by the process, almost dancing around his subjects as he worked. Such was his dedication that his portrait sessions could stretch on for weeks or months, driven by what seemed to be an internal battle to harness his elusive visions.
Auerbach’s distinctive process involved a kind of “extreme painting.” He would often rework his paintings multiple times, applying thick layers of paint that gave his pieces a signature three-dimensional quality. Much of his work, particularly his portraits, featured heavy texture, almost as if the image had to fight its way through thick swathes of paint in the same way Auerbach fought to bring the image into reality.
### **Work that Transcends Traditional Beauty**
Throughout his career, Auerbach’s work stood apart from traditional portrayals of beauty. Instead, it confronted viewers with raw, scarred, deeply textured depictions of people and places marked by life’s hardships. During the 1950s, when supplies were scarce, Auerbach painted scenes of post-war London, often using a limited palette of earthy tones—dark blacks, muddy browns, and ashen grays—to depict bombed-out buildings such as those found on Oxford Street, laid waste by the Luftwaffe. These paintings evoke a city ravaged, much like his own internal landscape.
The physical texture of his works further underscored their melancholic mood. His paintings often appeared sculptural, gouged and slathered onto the canvas in vigorous, almost violent strokes. Auerbach built layer upon layer of paint, oftentimes scraping away the surface and starting again, symbolizing a continual effort to wrest meaning from devastation. This method gave his paintings a dark, burdened quality—a kind of ruin in itself, echoing the destroyed London he was painting or the personal experiences of loss that informed so much of his work.
### **Auerbach as a Portraitist**
Auerbach is equally admired for his intense and psychologically charged portraits. Like the ruins he painted of Britain’s capital, his portrait subjects often seem ghostly, a skeletal structure barely held together. His portraits were not traditional; they worked at the boundaries of abstraction and realism, often capturing a kind of spiritual essence rather than a simple likeness of his sitters.
His deep understanding of human fragility led him to create images that embodied a staggering vulnerability. His subjects appear drained but profound, straddling the line between life and death, much like **Titian’s “The Flaying of Marsyas”**, which Auerbach once referenced as an inspiration for understanding human suffering. His close friend and contemporary, **Leon Kossoff**, shared similar themes in his work, both painting subjects who seemed to stand on the precipice of existence, thinly hanging on between worlds.
### **A Return to Life: Landscapes of North London**
While much of Auerbach’s work seems rooted in despair, he was also capable of rendering scenes of life and vitality. His depictions of streets in North