Frank Auerbach

London after World War II was home to an exceptional group of figurative painters, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, and R. B. Kitaj. Of an older generation, Bacon was their unacknowledged leader and inspiration, having burst onto the London gallery scene in 1945 with his savage triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Half a century later, in 1995, I curated an exhibition in Edinburgh of all six of the above-named artists. Bacon had died three years earlier but the other five were alive and at the peak of their creative powers when I started working on the show, although Andrews, sadly, died of cancer a few days before the opening.

The show was entitled From London, after a painting by Kitaj from 1975, and the catalogue featured as its frontispiece John Deakin’s famous photograph of four of the artists—Bacon, Freud, Andrews, and Auerbach—at a table in the Soho restaurant Wheeler’s in 1963. This was the spur for an exhibition I curated at Gagosian, London, in the autumn of 2022, Friends and Relations, consisting of forty-three paintings by all four artists, from a 1941 portrait by Freud of his patron Peter Watson to a 2021 self-portrait by Auerbach. Deakin’s photo included a fifth man, Timothy Behrens, who was represented in the show by one of Freud’s portraits of him. Younger than the others (Bacon was nearly thirty years older), Behrens had only recently graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art and was painted by Andrews as well as Freud.

When I interviewed Auerbach in the summer of 2022—he was then the only one of the four still alive—he told me he had been painting self-portraits because he had had to cancel his sitters during the covid crisis. In their liberties with color and form, and their poignant evocation of old age combined with irrepressible life, these portraits were perhaps the most personal and radical things he had ever painted. In 1995, in an exhibition called Working after the Masters at the National Gallery in London, he showed paintings and drawings inspired by works in that museum’s collection. In a note in the catalogue, his close friend Lucian Freud wrote,

It is the architecture that gives his paintings such authority. They dominate their given space: the space always the size of the idea, while the composition is as right as walking down the street. The mastery of these compositions is such that in spite of their often precarious balance, like a waiter pretending to slip while carrying a huge pile of plates, the structure never falters. It is the viewer who has to hold tight.

The weather changes, so does the light. The times of day and night are recorded, the mood is one of high-spirited drama. In fact his work is brimming with information conveyed with an underlying delicacy and humour that puts me in mind of the last days of Socrates.¹

Auerbach’s commitment to art—to his family of regular sitters, and to the endlessly changing north London landscape—was absolute. Yet he was generous with his time to those who had questions about his painting, or who just wanted to hear him reminisce, in the precise, articulate, and witty manner that he had, about the follies of life in the Soho of the 1950s and ’60s. Tall, good-looking, with lively eyes, a commanding voice, and a winning smile, he was easy to imagine onstage, as he had been in his youth. London has lost an illustrious inhabitant and the world an exceptional artist.