Frank Auerbach – Portraits Imbued With Raw Emotional Depth
Frank Auerbach (1931–2024) was a German-born British painter whose portraits and North London cityscapes transformed prolonged observation into urgent, highly worked images. Although he is famous for thick impasto, his method was not simply to accumulate paint: he repeatedly scraped back and repainted an image until its forms felt coherent and alive. That demanding process also shaped his charcoal drawings, which he erased, redrew, and sometimes patched after the paper tore.
Key Takeaways
- Auerbach concentrated on a small circle of regular sitters and on streets, parks, and building sites near his Camden studio.
- He worked through repeated drawing, erasure, scraping, and repainting; the thick surface was often a consequence of revision rather than an end in itself.
- His early charcoal heads and postwar London building-site paintings established the subjects and working habits that sustained his seven-decade career.
- Often associated with the School of London, Auerbach remained an independent figurative painter and shared the Golden Lion at the 1986 Venice Biennale.
Early Life and Education
| Birth | April 29, 1931 |
| Death | November 11, 2024 |
| Place of Birth | Berlin, Germany |
| Genre of Work | Painting |
| Nationality | British; born in Germany |
| Education | St Martin’s School of Art; Royal College of Art; evening classes with David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic |
| Principal Media | Oil paint, charcoal, chalk, graphite, and printmaking |
| Known For | Portraits and North London cityscapes |
Frank Auerbach was born into a Jewish family in Berlin on April 29, 1931. Sent to England in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution, he became British in 1947 and settled in London. His mature work joined close observation to continual revision, whether the subject was a familiar face or a street near his studio.
In 1954, Auerbach took over Leon Kossoff’s studio near Mornington Crescent and worked there for the rest of his life. Camden streets, Primrose Hill, Mornington Crescent, and the people who returned to sit for him became recurring subjects. Although critics often place him within the School of London, this was a loose and debated grouping rather than a movement with a shared program.
Childhood in Berlin and Kindertransport
Frank Auerbach’s parents sent him to England at age seven through a private rescue scheme associated with the Kindertransport era. He attended Bunce Court, a school in Kent that became a refuge for many Jewish children displaced by Nazism. His parents remained in Germany and were later killed in the Holocaust. Auerbach seldom treated that loss as an explicit subject, but displacement and postwar reconstruction form essential historical contexts for his life in Britain.
Studies Under David Bomberg
Auerbach attended David Bomberg’s evening life-drawing classes at Borough Polytechnic from 1947 to 1953. Bomberg’s emphasis on experiencing the subject as a physical mass encouraged Auerbach to treat drawing as an active search rather than a preliminary exercise. The classes also strengthened his friendship with fellow painter Leon Kossoff.
Bomberg’s teaching helped turn direct observation, physical structure, and repeated drawing into the foundations of Auerbach’s practice.
St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art
Auerbach studied at St Martin’s School of Art from 1948 to 1952 and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955 while continuing Bomberg’s evening classes. He also drew from paintings in London’s museums, beginning a lifelong engagement with Old Masters that would later become central to his 1995 National Gallery exhibition.
Career and the School of London
Auerbach’s first solo exhibition opened at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956. He developed close friendships with Kossoff, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud, but shared friendships and a commitment to figurative painting did not amount to a unified style. R. B. Kitaj proposed the idea of a School of London in connection with his 1976 exhibition The Human Clay; Auerbach and the other painters resisted being treated as a formal group.
Artistic Style and Techniques
Frank Auerbach remained committed to observed figures and places even as his marks approached abstraction. His art is often described as expressionist because of its vigorous handling, but the brushwork was not a spontaneous display of emotion: it emerged from extended looking, drawing, scraping, and remaking.
Developing a Distinctive Expressionist Approach
From his early portraits and building-site paintings, Auerbach sought an image that could register both a subject’s physical weight and the artist’s changing perception of it. Sweeping lines might summarize a head, body, road, or crane, while dense passages anchor that movement. Figuration and abstraction therefore operate together: a face or street remains recognizable, yet the viewer also encounters the pressure, speed, and direction of the marks.
Impasto Technique and Portraiture
Auerbach is particularly associated with impasto, in which paint projects visibly from the support. Yet his paintings were not made by steadily preserving every layer. During a sitting he often repainted the whole image; when it failed, he scraped the surface back and began again. Early works can be deeply encrusted, while later paintings may be thinner and more fluid. What remains consistent is the revision of the entire image until no passage feels inert. His methods included:
- Repeated scraping back and repainting
- Large, directional brushstrokes that structure the whole image
- Charcoal, chalk, and erasure used to build light, mass, and tension
Old Masters at the National Gallery
Auerbach repeatedly drew in front of paintings by Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, and other Old Masters at the National Gallery. These sheets were not faithful copies. He used them to remember a painting’s structure and then reimagined it in the studio, translating another artist’s composition into his own scale and rhythm. The 1995 exhibition Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters paired this sustained practice with his painted responses; 141 related drawings were later given to the museum.
Auerbach’s engagement with Old Masters was an active process of looking, remembering, and rebuilding rather than an imitation of surface style.
Major Works and Exhibitions
Frank Auerbach’s most important bodies of work grew from subjects close at hand: postwar construction sites, Camden streets and parks, a small circle of sitters, and paintings he studied in museums. Repetition did not produce replicas; each return forced him to test how a familiar subject appeared on a particular day.
London Building Sites and Camden Landscapes
Between 1952 and 1962, Auerbach drew London construction sites and developed the sketches into paintings in his studio. Bomb damage and redevelopment made excavation, scaffolding, and cranes part of the city’s daily appearance. In works such as Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (1962), the labor of scraping and rebuilding paint echoes the destruction and reconstruction of the site without reducing the image to an illustration of postwar history. Later paintings of Mornington Crescent, Primrose Hill, and nearby streets made familiarity itself a testing ground: weather, light, memory, and the movement of paint altered each return.
Significant Paintings and Drawings
Mornington Crescent (1965), oil on board, belongs to Auerbach’s sustained examination of the streets around his studio. Head of J.Y.M. II (1984–1985), oil on canvas, shows how his mature portraits could combine decisive linear strokes with a physically worked surface. In both, the subject is less a fixed motif than the focus of repeated encounters.
Auerbach’s large charcoal heads of the 1950s and early 1960s are independent works, not preparatory studies subordinate to paintings. He worked on them over many sittings, repeatedly erasing and redrawing; torn sheets were patched so that revision remained materially visible. The Courtauld brought this group together in the 2024 exhibition Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads, showing the close exchange between his drawing and painting.
I feel there is no grander entity than the individual human being… I would like my work to stand for individual experience.
— Frank Auerbach, quoted by The Courtauld for The Charcoal Heads
Notable Exhibitions and Awards
Auerbach’s career was shaped by a sequence of exhibitions that gradually expanded recognition of his work:
- 1956: His first solo exhibition opened at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London.
- 1978: The Arts Council organized a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London.
- 1986: Auerbach represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and shared the Golden Lion with Sigmar Polke.
- 1995: The National Gallery presented Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters.
- 2001: The Royal Academy of Arts held a retrospective of his paintings and drawings.
- 2015–2016: A major retrospective traveled from Kunstmuseum Bonn to Tate Britain.
- 2024: The Courtauld presented the first comprehensive exhibition of his early charcoal heads.
Auerbach exhibited with Marlborough Fine Art for decades, while museums including Tate, The Courtauld, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art hold his work. The National Gallery relationship was distinctive: Auerbach drew repeatedly from its collection, exhibited there in 1995, and is represented in its holdings by a substantial group of drawings after Old Masters.
Personal Life and Legacy
Frank Auerbach organized his working life around the studio and the people who returned to it. His portraits depend on long relationships, but they do not offer conventional biography or social description. The sitter’s presence, posture, and changing expression gave him a subject resistant to formula.
Relationships and Frequent Sitters
Only a small number of people sat for Auerbach regularly, often on fixed days over many years. They included E.O.W., J.Y.M., his wife Julia, his son Jake, Leon Kossoff, David Landau, and the curator and art historian Catherine Lampert, who began sitting in 1978. These sustained appointments made the portrait a record of repeated attention rather than a single captured likeness. The sitter was not merely a passive model: endurance, familiarity, and subtle changes from session to session helped determine the work.
Legacy and Recognition
Auerbach’s legacy lies in his refusal to separate sustained observation from radical handling. His work kept portraiture and cityscape open to revision during decades when abstraction, Conceptual art, and new media repeatedly challenged the status of painting. The physical intensity of his surfaces makes him a useful point of comparison with later figurative painters such as Jenny Saville, although visual affinity should not be mistaken for a documented line of influence. His place in contemporary art rests on the specificity of his method, his recurring subjects, and the international recognition secured by exhibitions and the 1986 Golden Lion.
Auerbach died at his home in London on November 11, 2024, after more than seventy years of sustained work. His achievement is clearest not in the simple label of impasto, but in the relationship between repetition and difference: the same studio, streets, sitters, and museum paintings repeatedly generated images that had to be discovered anew.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Techniques Are Characteristic of Frank Auerbach’s Artwork?
Auerbach repeatedly drew, erased, scraped back, and repainted his subjects. His early oil paintings often have thick, sculptural surfaces, but the thickness resulted largely from revision rather than from a plan to build up paint for its own sake. In charcoal drawings, he used erasers and white chalk to pull light from dark fields, then patched paper that tore during months of reworking.
Who Were E.O.W. and J.Y.M. in Frank Auerbach’s Portraits?
E.O.W. and J.Y.M. are the initials Auerbach used in titles for two of his most important regular sitters. E.O.W. was Stella West, while J.Y.M. identifies a professional model and friend whose full name varies across published records. Both returned for repeated sessions over many years, allowing Auerbach to pursue presence and changing perception rather than produce a single definitive likeness.
Was Frank Auerbach Part of the School of London?
Auerbach is commonly associated with the School of London, but it was not a formal movement. R. B. Kitaj advanced the term in the 1970s for loosely connected London-based figurative painters, including Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, and Michael Andrews. Their friendships and commitment to figuration were real, yet their methods differed and the artists resisted being treated as a unified school.
Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.
Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.
Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team.
Cite this Article
Isabella, Meyer, “Frank Auerbach – Portraits Imbued With Raw Emotional Depth.” Art in Context. May 20, 2024. URL: https://artincontext.org/frank-auerbach/
Meyer, I. (2024, 20 May). Frank Auerbach – Portraits Imbued With Raw Emotional Depth. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/frank-auerbach/
Meyer, Isabella. “Frank Auerbach – Portraits Imbued With Raw Emotional Depth.” Art in Context, May 20, 2024. https://artincontext.org/frank-auerbach/.
