“Only the true looks new, otherwise it looks like a picture”, believed Frank Auerbach, the celebrated German-British artist who died at his home on 11 November at the age of 93. Nothing could be more painterly than his work; his pigments stand proud of the canvas like a sea at the beginning of a storm, with paint cresting and falling messily. Few artists made such physical work, so tactile, gloopy and hefty with paint so thick it is three-dimensional. But his images rarely look like a picture.
Auerbach was uninterested in the picturesque, in prettiness, indeed for someone so defined by surfaces he was unconcerned with exteriors because they were unreliable – or not always true. He defined his intention by way of analogy: “If you are in bed with somebody, you are aware of their substance in some way in terms of weight; I actually think that is the difference between good paintings and less good ones in whatever idiom.” He wanted to paint weight, both physical and psychological.
Auerbach was the last survivor of the School of London (a branding he disavowed), comprising his great friend Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Michael Andrews. These painters identified the atmosphere of the post-war city and they made either its inhabitants or its ruined fabric the subject of much of their work. “Because everybody who was about had escaped death in some way, there was a curious feeling of liberty,” Auerbach said. “It was sexy in a way, this semi-destroyed London. There was a scavenging feeling of living in a ruined city.”
Auerbach, like Freud, had indeed escaped death. He was born in Berlin in 1931 and in 1939, with the help of the writer Iris Origo, his parents sent him to England: they both died in Auschwitz in 1942. He started painting when he arrived in London from boarding school at 16, first at St Martin’s School of Art, then the Royal College of Art and then under David Bomberg, whose heavy impasto was to prove so influential.
Success was slow in coming and one of the reasons his earlier canvases are both so dark in hue and laden with paint is that he could afford only to buy subfusc and earth tones in bulk, and didn’t have the funds to scrape off paint and start again – although later he would become an obsessive scraper. “Poverty is very easily borne when one’s young,” he said, “but it does take up a lot of time.”
As a result he “simply assumed persistence”, and it was a habit that stuck. For decades he would sequester himself in the studio he used from 1954 onwards and paint the streetscapes of his patch of north London around Camden Town or portraits of a small cluster of people close to him, who he would identify publicly only by their initials – a modest reward for sitting weekly for two hours over many months. Neither his subjects nor his method changed much over the years because he found that the more he looked at buildings or faces, the more interest he discovered there.
Auerbach had none of the bawdiness or intemperateness of Bacon and Freud and, partly as a result, he found himself for years in their shadow. His work may have been less provocative but it was perhaps more consistently profound. The exhibition of his large charcoal portraits at the Courtauld Gallery last year confirmed him as a painter of disquieting seriousness and bottomless determination. He would never let a painting go until he felt it was right and had passed what he termed his “shit detector” test.
Auerbach assumed a spartan existence, granting himself a single day’s holiday each year, taking the chill off his studio (a mess rather than a spotless factory for art production busy with assistants) with a small oil stove or sometimes an oven with the door open, and limiting his interactions with others – especially with those who weren’t as fixated on painting as him.
When success did come – he had his first retrospective exhibition, at the Hayward Gallery, in 1978, and was Britain’s representative at the Venice Biennale in 1986 – he said he had been living his ascetic life for so long that it was too late to change his ways despite money becoming more plentiful.
The paintings, when they finally emerged after numerous abortive attempts, arrived in a hurry. The final image was often the work of a day, overlaid on top of the previous efforts. He arrived at the process, he said, “irrationally and instinctively” and knew he had transmitted what he wanted when he surprised himself. His best paintings, of bomb-damaged buildings and faces that seem to shudder as though rippled by G-forces, have a tangible presence, but still manage to contain the paradox of being both instantaneous yet the product of concerted, intense looking.
[See also: Why painting (still) matters]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone