Frank Auerbach, one of Britain’s pre-eminent postwar painters, who for more than 60 years single-mindedly painted a small circle of intimates and the streets and parks near his London studio, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 93.
His death was announced by his gallery, Frankie Rossi Art Projects, in a news release.
Mr. Auerbach, who was mentioned in the same breath with his near-contemporaries Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, pursued his artistic agenda with a doggedness that made him a byword for artistic dedication. He painted seven days and five evenings a week in a studio in Camden Town, in north London, that he had taken over from his friend and fellow artist Leon Kossoff in 1954. He rested one day each year, taking the train to Brighton on England’s southern coast to catch a whiff of sea air, then returning to London to resume his painting schedule.
From the opening of his first show, in 1956, to his death, Mr. Auerbach never wavered in his preoccupations. Working with subjects who sat for him for decades, he turned out thickly painted portraits — usually heads and reclining figures — whose outlines struggled to emerge from dense, knotted swaths of impasto that could look like primordial ooze animated by lightning strokes of pigment.
At the same time, working from drawings made during walks around his neighborhood — Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill provided his favorite themes — he turned out feverish, intensely observed streetscapes and park scenes, dark and muted in the early years, brilliantly colored and brushy after the late 1960s.
His working methods were nearly fanatic, a slow building of surface on surface until, in the early paintings, the canvas resembled a bas-relief and required several galley assistants to hang them on the wall. His “Head of E.O.W.,” one of many portraits of his longtime lover, Estella Olive West, completed in 1955, required 300 sittings over two years.
If the elements did not coalesce to his satisfaction, he often finished the day by wiping the paint off his canvas, erasing 10 or more hours of work. “I don’t think that one produces a great picture unless one destroys a good one in the process,” he told the critic William Feaver for the 2009 monograph “Frank Auerbach.”
His tortoiselike ways and adamantine sense of purpose prompted the critic Stuart Morgan to call him “the ultimate pigheaded Englishman” in 1986, the year Mr. Auerbach was chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, where he shared the top painting prize with the German artist Sigmar Polke.
Four years later, the critic Robert Hughes called Mr. Auerbach “one of the most admired artists working in England today.” With the death of Mr. Bacon in 1992 and Mr. Freud in 2011, he became a leading contender for the unofficial title “greatest living British artist.” (Mr. Bacon and Mr. Freud were also born elsewhere but classified as British artists.)
Prizes and acclaim left him indifferent. Press attention annoyed him, as did any interruption of his studio time.
“My only ambition is to make one memorable image,” he told The Guardian in 2001, when the Royal Academy of Art presented a retrospective of his work. “And then from there I hope to make another memorable image. And pray to God to make another. That’s all. Nothing else.”
Frank Helmut Auerbach was born on April 29, 1931, in Berlin, to Jewish parents. His father, Max, was a successful patent lawyer. His mother, Charlotte (Borchardt) Auerbach, had been an art student before her marriage.
The family’s comfortable circumstances became precarious after Hitler’s rise to power, and Frank was sent to England in 1939. Letters from his parents stopped in 1942. He later learned that they had perished at Auschwitz.
He attended the progressive Bunce Court School in Otterden, Kent, where his main interests were art and drama. After graduating in 1947, he took classes at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute. A teacher recommended him to St. Martin’s School of Art in London, which accepted him for the 1948 fall term.
To fill in the gap, Mr. Auerbach took courses at Borough Polytechnic Institute (now London South Bank University), where he studied with the Vorticist painter David Bomberg and met Mr. Kossoff, a soul mate with whom he made drawing expeditions to the National Gallery for decades.
Under the name Frank Ashley, Mr. Auerbach appeared in walk-on parts with small theater companies, portraying a Russian general’s aide in a production of Peter Ustinov’s play “House of Regrets.” Ms. West was a fellow cast member.
He continued to study twice a week with Mr. Bomberg while attending St. Martin’s and the Royal College of Art, from which he graduated in 1955.
In 1958, he married Julia Wolstenholme, whom he met when both were art students at the Royal College of Art. They separated soon after the birth of their son, Jake, as Mr. Auerbach returned to Ms. West, though he reunited with his wife two decades later. Ms. Wolstenholme died this year. Mr. Auerbach is survived by his son, a filmmaker.
Mr. Auerbach’s obsessions revealed themselves early. The bombed-out landscape of London after the war enthralled him, and building sites all over town inspired some of his early paintings, notably “Summer Building Site” (1952) and “Shell Building Site” (1959). “It was sexy in a way, this semi-destroyed London,” he told the journal Apollo in 2009. “There was a scavenging feeling of living in a ruined town.”
His thickly applied paint and muted palette lent a spectral majesty to these scenes, poised midway between destruction and rebirth. “Building Site, Earl’s Court Road, Winter” (1953), a return to the same construction project depicted in “Summer Building Site,” bordered on satanic.
“Almost completely black, smeared with clods of dark oil paint that look as if they’ve been scraped off the soles of a builder’s boots, it’s a slab of pessimism so unlit and heavy that you have to take its maker’s word for what it depicts,” the critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote on his blog in 2015. “You can’t actually see the building site. You can only feel it.”
At the same time, Mr. Auerbach executed “E.O.W. Nude” (1952), his first portrait of Ms. West. Like his first building site paintings, it arose from a sense of crisis as he tried to find his footing as an artist, and resolved itself only when he abandoned caution. The combination of endless revision, painterly scrupulousness and the mad dash for glory characterized his painting from that point forward.
“What I wanted to do was record the life that seemed to me to be passionate and exciting and that was disappearing all the time,” he told Mr. Feaver, the critic, describing his early work. “It’s the same thing that makes other people invent stories for themselves and adhere to religions. I just couldn’t bear the idea that all this was finite. So I would try to pin down the people I was involved with because those were my most intense experiences.”
Mr. Auerbach’s first solo show, at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London, in 1956 attracted notice, not all of it favorable. The thickly painted surfaces repelled some critics. “The technique is so fantastically obtrusive that it is some time before one penetrates to the intentions that should justify this grotesque method,” The Manchester Guardian wrote.
But the critic David Sylvester, best known as a champion of Mr. Bacon, called the event “the most exciting and impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon in 1949.”
He added, “These paintings reveal the qualities that make for greatness in a painter — fearlessness; a profound originality; a total absorption in what obsesses him; and, above all, a certain authority and gravity in his forms and colors.”
Mr. Auerbach, decade after decade, continued to work his main themes, returning to the same sitters again and again, adding one or two as the years went by, and rendering, again and again, the same streets and trees of Primrose Hill, adding brilliant colors as his income grew. To the blacks and browns and gray-greens — Rembrandt and Hals colors, as he described them — he added the flashing reds, burning reds and intense blues that made his later Primrose Hill paintings visually ravishing.
Unable to earn a living solely through his paintings until the late 1960s, he taught, worked at a frame maker, took a job at the Kossoff family bakery in East London and at one point sold ice cream on Wimbledon Common.
He began showing at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 1965 and steadily built a European reputation, ratified by important shows: a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1978 and a traveling retrospective organized by the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 1986. After the 2001 retrospective at the Royal Academy came a grand career survey, in 2015, that originated at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn and traveled to Tate Britain.
In the United States, his work remained unfashionable. The Times critic Hilton Kramer, reviewing Mr. Auerbach’s first New York show in 1969, dismissed him as provincial and called the work “heavy suet pudding.”
Resistance abated somewhat over time. With Mr. Freud, Mr. Bacon, Mr. Kossoff and others, he was included in “Eight Figurative Painters” at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven in 1981. In 2020, the Luhring Augustine gallery in Manhattan presented an ambitious survey of his work from the late 1970s onward.
He was the subject of a 2001 documentary directed by his son, “Frank Auerbach: To the Studio,” a visual record of one of the most restless, relentless, obsessive figures in modern art.
“I sometimes think of doing other things, but actually it’s much more interesting to paint,” Mr. Auerbach told The Guardian in 2015. “It is just a marvelous activity that humans have invented and now, as I get older and can’t work the hours I did when I was younger, I do sometimes think about the aged Clemenceau passing a beautiful woman in the street in Paris and saying to his companion, ‘I wish I was 70 again.’”
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