Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.

Biography

Auerbach was born in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist. Under the sponsorship of the British writer Iris Origo

Iris Origo

Dame Iris Margaret Origo, Marchesa of Val d'Orcia, DBE , née Cutting, was an Anglo-Irish writer, who devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce, near Montepulciano, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s.-Origins and upbringing:Origo was the daughter of...

, his parents sent him to Britain

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 in 1939 under the Kindertransport

Kindertransport

Kindertransport is the name given to the rescue mission that took place nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig...

 scheme, which brought almost 10,000 mainly Jewish children to Britain to escape from Nazi persecution. Left behind in Germany, Auerbach's parents later died in a concentration camp.

In Britain, Auerbach became a pupil at Bunce Court School

Bunce Court School

The Bunce Court School was an independent, private boarding school in the village of Otterden, in Kent, England. It was founded in 1933 by Anna Essinger, who had previously founded a boarding school, Landschulheim Herrlingen in the south of Germany, but after the Nazi Party seized power in 1933,...

, near Faversham

Faversham

Faversham is a market town and civil parish in the Swale borough of Kent, England. The parish of Faversham grew up around an ancient sea port on Faversham Creek and was the birthplace of the explosives industry in England.-History:...

 in Kent

Kent

Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...

, where he not only excelled in art but in drama classes. Indeed he almost became an actor, even taking a small role in Peter Ustinov

Peter Ustinov

Peter Alexander Ustinov CBE was an English actor, writer and dramatist. He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, stage designer, author, screenwriter, comedian, humourist, newspaper and magazine columnist, radio broadcaster and television presenter...

's play House Of Regrets at the Unity Theatre

Unity Theatre

-United Kingdom:In the United Kingdom, the Unity theatre movement developed from workers' drama groups in the 1930s, seeing itself as using theatre to highlight the issues of the working class being produced by and for working class audiences...

 in St Pancras, at the age of 17. But his interest in art proved a stronger draw and he began studying in London, first at St Martin's School of Art from 1948 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art

Royal College of Art

The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...

 from 1952 to 1955. Yet, perhaps the clearest influence on his art training came from a series of additional art classes he took at London's Borough Polytechnic, where he and fellow St Martin's student Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff is a British expressionist painter, known for portraits, life drawings and cityscapes of London, England....

 were taught by David Bomberg

David Bomberg

David Garshen Bomberg was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington...

 from 1947 until 1953.

From 1955, he began teaching in secondary schools, but quickly moved into the visiting tutor circuit at numerous art schools, including Ravensbourne, Ealing, Sidcup and the Slade School of Art. However, he was most frequently to be found teaching at Camberwell School of Art, where he taught from 1958 to 1965.

Auerbach's first solo exhibition was at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1956, followed by further solo shows at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1959, 1961, 1962 and 1963, and then at Marlborough Fine Art in London at regular intervals after 1965, at Marlborough Gallery, New York, in 1969, 1982, 1994, 1998 and 2006, and Marlborough Graphics in 1990.

In the early 1960s, he contributed to X magazine

X (magazine)

X, A Quarterly Review was a British arts review published in London which ran for seven issues between 1959-1962. It was founded and co-edited by Patrick Swift and David Wright...

, founded by the painter Patrick Swift

Patrick Swift

Patrick Swift was an artist born in Dublin, Ireland. Patrick Swift was a painter and key cultural figure in Dublin and London before moving to the Algarve in southern Portugal, where he is buried in the town of Porches...

, along with fellow artists Bacon, Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...

, et al. In 1978, he was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, and in 1986 he represented Britain in the Venice Biennale, sharing the biennale's main prize, the Golden Lion, with Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer.Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matter and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint...

. Further shows have included taking part in the exhibition Eight Figurative Painters, held at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, USA, in 1981, alongside Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Patrick George, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow, and a retrospective exhibition at the Kunstverein, Hamburg, in 1986, comprising paintings and drawings made between 1977 and 1985 originally shown at the 42nd Venice Biennale also in 1986. This show then toured, with some additional works, to the Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid in 1987. Exhibitions were also held at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, in 1989, the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, in 1991 and the National Gallery, London, in 1995. He was included in the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2001, and held a solo show entitled Frank Auerbach Etchings and Drypoints 1954-2006 at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which toured to the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, during 2007-08, and another solo show at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in 2009.

In 2001, Auerbach was the subject of a television film entitled Frank Auerbach: To the Studio, directed by Hannah Rothschild and produced by Jake Auerbach (Jake Auerbach Films Ltd). This was first broadcast on the arts programme Omnibus

Omnibus

Omnibus may refer to:Law* Omnibus bill, a single legislative document containing many laws or amendments* Omnibus spending bill, a single legislative document that sets the budget of many government departments* Omnibus clause* Omnibus hearing...

 on BBC 2 on 10 November 2001.

Style and Influences

Auerbach is a figurative painter, who focuses on portraits and city scenes in and around the area of London in which he lives, Camden Town. Although sometimes described as expressionistic, Auerbach is not an expressionist painter. His work is not concerned with finding a visual equivalent to an emotional or spiritual state that characterised the expressionist movement, rather it deals with the attempt to resolve the experience of being in the world in paint. In this the experience of the world is seen as essentially chaotic with the role of the artist being to impose an order upon that chaos and record that order in the painting. This ambition with the paintings results in Auerbach developing intense relationships with particular subjects, particularly the people he paints, but also the location of his cityscape subjects. Speaking on this in 2001 he stated: "If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you." This simple statement belies the intensity of the relationship that develops between Auerbach and his subjects, which results in an astonishing desire to produce an image the artist considers 'right'. This leads Auerbach to paint an image and then scrape it off the canvas at the end of each day, repeating this process time and again, not primarily to create a layering of images but because of a sense of dissatisfaction with the image leading him to try to paint it again.

This also indicates that the thick paint in Auerbach's work, which led to some of Auerbach's paintings in the 1950s being considered difficult to hang, partly due to their weight and according to some newspaper reports in case the paint fell off, is not primarily the result of building up a lot of paint over time. It is in fact applied in a very short space of time, and may well be scraped off very soon after application. This technique has not always been considered positively, with the Manchester Guardian newspaper commenting in 1956 that: '"The technique is so fantastically obtrusive that it is some time before one penetrates to the intentions that should justify this grotesque method."

This intensity of approach and handling has also not always sat well with the art world that developed in Britain from the late 1980s onwards, with one critic at that time, Stuart Morgan, denouncing Auerbach for espousing 'conservatism as if it were a religion' on the basis that he applies paint without a sense of irony.

As well as painting street scenes close to his London home, Auerbach tends to paint a small number of people repeatedly, including Estella Olive West (indicated in painting titles as EOW), Joan Yardley Mills (or JYM) and Auerbach's wife Julia Auerbach (née Wolstenholme). Again a similar obsession with specific subjects, and a desire to return to them to 'try again' is discernable in this use of the same models.

A strong emphasis in Auerbach's work is its relationship to the history of art. Showing at the National Gallery in London in 1994 he made direct reference to the gallery's collection of paintings by Rembrandt, Titian and Rubens. Unlike the National Gallery's 'Associate Artist Scheme', however, Auerbach's work after historic artists was not the result of a short residency at the National Gallery, it has a long history, and in this exhibition he showed paintings made after Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, from the 1970s to Rubens's Samson and Delilah made in 1993.

Further reading

• Hughes, Robert, Frank Auerbach, Thames and Hudson (1990, ISBN 0-500-09211-7), reissued 1992 (ISBN 0-500-27675-7)

• William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. (2009, ISBN 978-0-8478-3058-9)

• Barnaby Wright et al., Frank Auerbach: The London Building Sites 1952-1962, Paul Holberton Publishing (2010, ISBN 978-1903470947)

• Catherine Lampert and Norman Rosenthal, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, Royal Academy of Arts (2001, ISBN 978-0900946998)

External links

• Marlborough Art Gallery, artists' page