Frank Auerbach death: Famed painter who fled Nazis dies, aged 93

‘A true giant is gone, but his remarkable legacy will continue to inspire and endure.’

Frank Auerbach in his studio last November last year (Geordie Greig)

Frank Auerbach, the renowned figurative painter who fled Nazi Germany as a child, has died aged 93.

Having escaped to Britain on the Kindertransport scheme, Auerbach enjoyed a highly acclaimed career spanning seven decades with works displayed at every major national gallery around the world.

Known for his portraiture, as well as street scenes of Camden in north London where he kept a studio for 50 years, Auerbach rubbed shoulders with the likes of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon in Soho during the 1970s.

“Frank Auerbach, one of the greatest painters of our age, died peacefully in the early hours of Monday 11 November at his home in London,” said Geoffrey Parton, director of Auerbach’s gallery Frankie Rossi Art Projects.

“We have lost a dear friend and remarkable artist but take comfort knowing his voice will resonate for generations to come.”

In his final exhibition held last year in London’s Mayfair, he reflected that “when one is young, one is excited by drama, when one’s old, truth is exciting.”

One of the most celebrated painters in Britain, Auerbach narrowly escaped being killed during the Holocaust.

If he had not been evacuated, aged seven, on a small boat from Germany to England in 1939, he would likely have died in a concentration camp, as happened to his parents who stayed behind.

Artist Frank Auerbach in his studio, Camden, London, 1962 (Getty Images)

Aged 10, Auerbach found out his parents had been killed when their letters stopped arriving.

“I can’t even remember someone saying your parents are no longer alive. It was just gradually leaked to me,” the reclusive painter told The Independent editor-in-chief Geordie Greig, in an interview with the Evening Standard in 2009.

“There’s just never been a point in my life where I felt I wish I had parents,” he said referring to a common psychological tension between an artist and their parental figures.

“I am aware of a sort of conflict and trouble that I’ve been spared.”

Although few photographs of his parents remained, he was not sentimental about his belongings saying, “I don’t keep anything. It may be due to my background. I absolutely believe that you keep forging on, forwards, and that if you look back you turn into a pillar of salt.”

Frank Auerbach in his studio last November last year (Geordie Greig)

He was considered a significant member of the postwar artists, including Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, and Lucian Freud, whose creative originality made the UK a major pulse for art.

Part of the bohemian scene, Freud and Auerbach shared a deep friendship that spanned more than fifty years, with the artist owning one of the greatest private Auerbach collections.

The artist kept a small circle, and rarely painted anyone outside of his relatives and friends. Three of his most significant models include professional model Julia Yardley Mills, whom he met in 1957 (referred to as JYM), his wife Julia, and his close friend Estella (Stella) West who is referred to as EOW in his works.

His unique method of painting included an elaborate and painstaking process of creation and destruction. Each day, he would scrape off all the paint from his work the day before, to start from scratch, and repeat the process until completion.

A gallery employee looks at a painting by Frank Auerbach called 'EOW., SAW, and JJW. in the Garden I', 1963, at a photocall for a new exhibition by the British artist at the Tate Britain in London. (PA)

Portraits followed a similarly thorough style, with some taking years to complete.

“To paint the same head over and over leads to unfamiliarity,” he said. “Eventually you get near the raw truth about it, just people only blurt out the raw truth in the middle of a family quarrel.

“I try to paint things with which I have a great familiarity, partly because they mean more to me than anybody else.”

Although his works have fetched as much as £1.9m over the years, Auerbach was often penniless in his early career, spending almost all of his money on paint, with barely enough left for food. He barely left his studio, and rarely travelled outside of London.

“Until I was 50, I never had a bank account, always lived from hand to mouth,” he said. “I used to lie awake at night wondering if I’d be able to go on with my paintings or whether the paint would run out.”

A woman poses between E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown V, 1963 (PA)

But despite living a hermit-like existence, Auerbach was able to live out his dream, one saying: “There is nothing else that I want to do but to paint every day.”

Mark Hudson, The Independent’s chief art critic said: “Auerbach’s early portraits of his lover, referred to as EOW, which get so much thick paint on the canvas it looks like it will never dry, are some of the genuinely great British figurative paintings of the 20th century.

“His equally thickly encrusted views of postwar building sites take us to the bombed-out London of the 1950s and its tentative renewal, more powerfully than any other works of art.

“While some might argue that he didn’t significantly move on from these seminal works, that one Auerbach painting looks much like another up and down the decades, as a model of hard work and absolute dedication to his art, Auerbach was an example and an inspiration to subsequent British artist, young and old.”

Hannah Rothschild, former chair of the National Gallery, who made a documentary on Auerbach, said: “It is deeply sad that Frank Auerbach, one of the most influential British artists of the post-war era, has died.

“His unique style and relentless pursuit of the human condition were both devastating and captivating, reshaping the language of art. A true giant is gone, but his remarkable legacy will continue to inspire and endure.”