Greatest living artist Frank Auerbach dies aged 93 in Camden

For seven decades he worked in the same Mornington Crescent studio, painting a small band of regular sitters, and the cityscapes outside his door.

Like his friend Lucian Freud, he was a post-war figurative painter, who fled Nazi-occupied Europe as a child.

But Auerbach's process was quite different, dedicating himself to his work 365 days a year - obsessively applying layers of paint then scraping it off at the end of each day in works that took months to get "right".

Frank Auerbach's studio where he worked for 70 years. Picture courtesy of Frankie Rossi Art Projects. (Image: Geoffrey Parton)

His subjects were familiar scenes he saw each day; Mornington Crescent, Primrose Hill, Hampstead Road, Park Village East, and his friends were fellow 'School of London' painters Francis Bacon, RB Kitaj, and Freud, who liked and crucially admired him.

Geoffrey Parton, Director, Frankie Rossi Art Projects, who worked closely with Auerbach for five decades, organising many of his exhibitions including a 2023 show of self-portraits, hailed him as one of the greatest painters of our age.

“We have lost a dear friend and remarkable artist but take comfort knowing his voice will resonate for generations to come," he said.

Camden Theatre Cold Spring 1977. (Image: Frank Auerbach)

Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was sent to London in 1939 by his German-Jewish parents Max and Charlotte, who had trained as an artist.

He was one of six children sponsored by the writer Iris Origo but both parents were killed at Auschwitz in 1943 while he was still at school.

Upon leaving at 16, Auerbach enrolled at art school, and between 1948 and 1955 studied at St Martin's School of Art then the Royal College of Art while also taking drawing classes with David Bomberg at London's Borough Polytechnic.

In 1954 he took over his friend Leon Kossoff's studio. It was an intensely private space where he lived and worked until his death, once commenting: "The studio is my sanctuary. It’s where I can immerse myself completely in the act of painting without any distractions."

Frank Auerbach self portrait 2022. (Image: A.C.Cooper/Courtesy Frankie Rossi Art)

Auerbach drew and painted regular sitters there including Kossoff, his lover Stella West, his older cousin Gerda Boehm, and Julia Wolstenholme whom he married in 1958.

Like his paintings the richly textured charcoal drawings of heads were the result of dissatisfaction and struggle over months of working, erasing and reworking, sometimes breaking through the paper before patching it up and carrying on.

He once said of his work: “I feel there is no grander entity than the individual human being… I would like my work to stand for individual experience."

His debut solo show was at Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956 followed by further exhibitions there and at Marlborough Fine Art in the 1960s.

His first retrospective exhibition was at the Hayward Gallery in 1978, he was awarded the Golden Lion prize at the 1986 Venice Biennale, and earlier this year his Charcoal Heads were exhibited at the Courtauld Gallery to great acclaim.

The Ben Uri Gallery in Boundary Road, St John's Wood, which celebrates the work of immigrant artists, holds several of his works including sketches of heads, and the painting Mornington Crescent Summer Morning II (2004).

They paid tribute to Auerbach's "remarkable career and rarity of talent which elevated him to be recognised as one of the few great and seminal artists of our time".

"This is simply to express our sadness, admiration, respect and endless appreciation of his long-standing support for Ben Uri.

"We owe our fine collection of his works to him and his long standing dealer and friend Geoffrey Parton and these will be a constant tribute to a rare man whose interest was solely in his practice rather than himself."

Frank Auerbach 1931 to November 11th 2024 is survived by son Jake Auerbach.