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. Frankie Rossi Art Projects announced his passing on Tuesday without providing 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 swirls of gray, 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.
One of his early gallerists forced one of his paintings from the 1950s and ’60s to exhibit them flat, fearing 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 created them, they simply felt true.” Good paintings challenge facts from a unique perspective. They are bound to appear genuine and in some way actively repellent, disturbing, itchy, and not quite right.
Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin on April 29, 1931, to Jewish parents. 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. Detained and brought to a concentration camp, Auerbach’s parents struggled to communicate 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.”
Auerbach met Estella Olive West, the actress who would become his most famous model, at the age of 17. They embarked on a long-term relationship whose emotional turbulence sometimes played out in the studio—and sometimes even beyond it.
Critic David Sylvester hailed Auerbach’s 1956 solo show as the best one-man exhibition in England since Francis Bacon’s seven years earlier, immediately recognizing Auerbach’s art as a significant advancement. Thereafter, Auerbach did not paint again for nearly two years, only to return to it more forcefully than he did before.
In 1986, Auerbach represented England at the Venice Biennale, where he took the Golden Lion, sharing the prize with German artist Sigmar Polke. In recent years, he started using himself as a model, painting his face against pastel-colored backgrounds, which occasionally reveal his eyes and nose through clustered strokes.
Even though Auerbach had established his credentials by the time he started working in that mode, he maintained his pursuit of a superior painting technique. He told the New York Times, “I always start with the hope of picking up my brushes, putting an amazing momentous image on the canvas, and finishing the painting—and that’s never happened yet.”
With the deaths of Bacon in 1992 and Freud in 2011, Auerbach became a leading contender for the unofficial title “greatest living British artist.” His unyielding work ethic, uncompromising vision, and undeniable impact on British art cemented his legacy as one of the most celebrated painters of the 20th century.