Frank Auerbach, Painter Who Redefined Portraiture, Dies at 93

Frank Auerbach, a towering figure of British art history who plotted new paths for painting with his thick, smeary portraits, died on Monday in London at 93. His passing was announced on Tuesday by Frankie Rossi Art Projects, which did not state a cause of death.

Auerbach’s paintings of a select group of models redefined portraiture, a genre that has traditionally lent itself to psychological clarity and close attention to detail. But starting in the 1950s, Auerbach began making portraits of people close to him that were so dense with paint that they bordered on abstraction. Facial features faded into way into swirls of grey, and roiled backgrounds threatened to consume the sitters posed before them.

These works made Auerbach one of the foremost figures of the School of London, a loose crew of British painters who rose to fame during the postwar era. Like his colleagues Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff, and Lucian Freud, Auerbach committed himself to figurative painting at a time when more conceptually driven movements like Pop received more attention.

His paintings from the 1950s and ’60s were so bombarded with paint as to be sculptural, forcing one of his early gallerists to exhibit them flat under the assumption that his materials might slip off the canvas when hung upright. “Thicker even than van Gogh’s” was how New York Times critic Jason Farago described Auerbach’s brushstrokes when the artist was the subject of a rare US solo show in 2021 at Luhring Augustine gallery in New York.

Of Auerbach’s art from the postwar era, his paintings of Estella Olive West, an actress with whom he led a longtime relationship, remain the most famous. E.O.W. Nude (1953–54), a painting currently on view at Tate Britain in London, represents West as a blobby form of chunky gray paint pitted against a field of black. That the work represents a naked woman, let alone a human being, is impossible to determine without first reading the work’s title.

Later works from the ’50s would clarify West’s form, albeit only slightly. His beloved “Head of E.O.W.” pictures depict West’s face against streaks of uncleanly mixed white and black. “The thickest paintings one is ever likely to see,” wrote critic John Russell when Auerbach showed works like these.

“I can see now why people thought there was something in some way blatant or indigestible about them,” Auerbach told the Guardian in 2001. “But I can assure you that when I did them they simply felt true. Good paintings do attack fact from an unfamiliar point of view. They’re bound to look genuine, and in some way actively repellent, disturbing, itchy and not right.”

Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin on April 29, 1931, to Jewish parents. His father was a chemist, his mother, a former art student. With the Nazis having risen to power in Germany, in 1939, Auerbach’s parents sent him to England, where he enrolled at Bunce Court, a boarding school in the Kentish village of Otterden. Auerbach’s parents were detained and brought to a concentration camp, where they were barely able to communicate at all with their young son. In 1942, Auerbach lost touch with them; he believed his parents were killed around that time, though he said that by then, he had “more or less forgotten them.”

At Bunce Court, Auerbach began to drift toward the arts, performing in school productions and making paintings. Then, at age 16, he set off for London on his own, blithely bopping around in an attempt to become an artist. He got into the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute, the only art school that would take him, and eventually found a way of becoming a student at St. Martin’s and, later, the Royal College of Art. During the interim, he took classes with the artist David Bomberg.

Auerbach was 17 when he met Estella Olive West, the actress who would become his most famous model, who was 32 at the time. They embarked on a long-term relationship whose emotional turbulence sometimes played out in the studio—and sometimes even beyond it. She admitted in interviews to having physically abused him.

West recalled that Auerbach would ask him to model for her, then scrap the work he had began and start all over again. “That used to upset me terribly,” she told the Guardian. “I wondered what I was doing it all for.” (Later on, one of his models, the critic William Feaver, would offer an explanation for that unusual behavior: “He wants each painting to be something new and unprecedented. He’s not content with just getting by.”) Auerbach and West were together for 23 years, with one brief break when he married Julia Wolstenholme, with whom he had a son named Jake, who would also go on to model for his art.

Almost immediately, Auerbach’s art was viewed as a major step forward—the critic David Sylvester called Auerbach’s 1956 solo show the best one-man exhibition in England since Francis Bacon’s seven years earlier. Some speculated that Auerbach’s traumatized mindset contributed to the violent way he wielded paint, but he denied that that was the case.

Thereafter, Auerbach did not paint again for nearly two years, only to return to it more forcefully than he did before. His heads veered even further toward abstraction, and he began painting London cityscapes that dissolved into tangles of multicolored strokes.

During the ’70s, Auerbach began to wipe away portions of paint and then load more of the stuff onto his canvas, in an effort, he said, to obtain something that was “alive and true.” Having broken up with West in 1973, Auerbach got back together with his ex-wife Julia in 1976. All the while, he continued to rise in England, with a Hayward Gallery retrospective in 1978.

In 1986, Auerbach represented England at the Venice Biennale, where he took the Golden Lion, sharing the prize with German artist Sigmar Polke. Not everyone was pleased with that outcome. The Italian art critic Ida Pacinelli wrote in Artforum, “I believe this is a sad sign of the times. Today, appearances—the surface—win out over depth.”

And in general, although Auerbach holds pride of place within British art history, his work has not achieved quite as much acclaim beyond England. Across the pond, in the United States, he has never had any institutional shows. By contrast, in England, he has had multiple retrospectives, including one at Tate Britain in 2015. “The survey reveals Auerbach as a painter who succeeds, in his moments of profoundest localism, in being transhistorical and international,” wrote James Cahill in Art in America.

Auerbach worked well into his final years, spending hours in his studio every day. In the past few years, he began taking himself as a model, painting his face against pastel-colored backgrounds that can sometimes be seen amid the clustered strokes meant to stand in for his eyes and nose.

While Auerbach’s bona fides were certain by the time he began working in that mode, he claimed he was still searching for a better form of painting. He told the New York Times, “I start always in the hope of picking up my brushes, putting an amazing momentous image on the canvas, and finishing the painting—and it’s never happened yet.”