The death of Frank Auerbach on Monday leaves a deep hole at the centre of art. In the final stretches of his long career he was regularly called “the greatest living artist”, an elastic and blurred title, yes, but one for which vanishingly few are shortlisted. You need to be especially potent, especially important, especially respected. Auerbach was all of these.
The gods of art favoured him too because they gave him the most valuable gift at their disposal: an unusually lengthy stint on the front line. He was 93 and had spent seven decades toiling away. The big players, Michelangelo, Titian and Picasso, were also given that kind of number. In heaven, these are the presences that will keep him company.
Auerbach would have loved that. He had a passion for the old masters and wished at every step to learn from them and to join them. It made him stand out.
As the art being made around him grew poppier, sillier, more adolescent, as it fled ever further from the truths and textures of reality, his work went bullheadedly in the opposite direction. Towards depth. Towards profundity. Auerbach wasn’t only a superb example as an artist. He was a superb example as a spirit: a moral compass.
Mind you, the same friendly gods of art who gave him a long stint also ensured that his life was problematic. Born in 1931, in Berlin of all godforsaken places, he watched his childhood torn up by history. When he was seven, his Jewish parents sent him to England for safekeeping while they stayed behind, foolishly hopeful that the antisemitism of the Nazis would abate. He never saw them again. Both perished in Auschwitz.
Forced to make his own way in a foreign land, he took a while to find his calling. His first creative stint was painting the sets in a London theatre. He even tried his hand at acting. But during regular wanderings around the National Gallery in London, the spirit of Rembrandt grabbed him by the hand and tugged him towards the dark and trembly path of art.
All through his career he had only two subjects: people and views of the city. That’s it. His first notable paintings depicted the bombed-out buildings and demolition sites of post-Blitz London. Working with huge amounts of dark colour from the cheaper end of the oil paint spectrum — browns, greys, blacks — he would pile on layer after layer of oily tarmac till the pictures grew close to sculpture. His work in the 1950s was unusually and even ridiculously dense. Often he would scrape it all off and start again. He once estimated that 95 per cent of his paint ended up in the bin.
In 1953 he moved into a small studio in Mornington Crescent, around the corner from the same dingy Camden where Walter Sickert, a hero of Auerbach, had painted his grim series of Camden Town Murders, including What Shall We Do to Pay the Rent. That London became his London too — rainy, grimy, melancholy, yet somehow heroic in its struggle. Like a seed germinating in dark clods of earth, life seemed always to lurk at the centre of an Auerbach darkness.
Remarkably, he never moved from that studio. For 70 years it was his world. The people he painted there formed a claustrophobic cast of lovers, family, friends. Returning to the same models again and again, year after year, decade after decade, he kept regular hours with his tiny team of sitters. They would traipse over once a week for extraordinary sessions of routine and intimacy. I know a couple of them pretty well. But they’re hard to spot in Auerbach’s art. They’re in there somewhere but it is not obvious: shipwrecks covered in barnacles; humanity at its most basic.
Auerbach’s approach to work was madly monastic. He never went on holiday, never went to openings, never accepted knighthoods or trivial gongs. He simply went to the studio and painted. That was the example he set.
