Frank Auerbach, best known for his impasto renderings of London and his atmospheric portraits and self-portraits, has died at the age of 93. Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany when he was seven years old; he never again saw his parents, who were murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. At the age of 16 he decided to become a painter and enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art in 1948 and then the Royal College of Art, taking additional classes at the Borough Polytechnic. It was here that he came under the influence of the artist David Bomberg, whose decisive, linear brushwork had an important effect on his own work. In a rare interview with the BBC, broadcast in January 2024, Auerbach spoke of Bomberg as an inspirational teacher: ‘He talked to people as though they were trying to make masterpieces on a National Gallery level.’ In 1954 Auerbach took up residence in a studio in Mornington Crescent, north London, where he would live and work every day for the rest of his life. He began to make a name for himself in the 1950s – alongside his near contemporaries Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff – with his semi-abstract depictions of London, developing a highly physical style of mark-making style. He used a similarly vigorous technique in his portrait painting, and around the same time began rendering large-scale portrait heads in ghostly, shadowy charcoal. Auerbach had his first retrospective in 1978, at the Hayward Gallery in London; eight years later he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. He worked every day, all his life, painting a series of distinctive charcoal self-portraits during the Covid lockdowns. Auerbach once said that he strove for his paintings to be ‘stonking’; it is generally agreed that he succeeded.
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