Frank Auerbach

This is the most comprehensive publication to date, and the only book in print, on the work of Frank Auerbach, a painter who has become one of the pre-eminent artists of our age, widely admired for his vivid, impulsive depictions of the world around him. His is, ostensibly, a narrow world, a small area of north London where he has lived and worked for more than fifty years, but within it he achieves images of marvelous poignancy and feel. "I’m hoping," Auerbach has said, "to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing." Auerbach, who was born in Berlin in 1931 and came to Britain when he was eight, repeatedly paints people he knows well and places he is familiar with. His drawings and paintings are strikingly immediate; their impact has urgency; they relate in various ways as much to certain preferred Old Masters as to the contemporary artists with whom he tends to be associated, notably Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The book includes 200 color plates together with a separate reference section comprising around 900 images—Auerbach’s complete works to date—many of them not previously reproduced. Writer and art historian William Feaver discusses Auerbach’s work both in its immediate context and in relation to the great tradition of painting. Extensive conversations with the artist are also included.

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Artists Biography

(b Berlin, 29 April 1931). British painter and printmaker of German birth. He was sent to England in 1939 and moved from school in Kent to London in 1947, where he began attending art classes at Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute and acting in fringe theatre. From 1947 to 1948 he studied at Borough Polytechnic under David Bomberg, whose teaching was especially valuable in its emphasis on risk and on seeking an organic, unified form. Auerbach continued in Bomberg’s evening life classes while at St Martin’s School of Art (1948–52). He considered his first original achievement to have been Summer Building Site (1952; Mrs P. Hill priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat., p. 8), of a scene at Earls Court; this was rather geometric and painted in formal, prismatic colour, but much of his early work was thickly and laboriously impastoed in earth colours, as in Head of E. O. W. (1955; U. Cincinnati, OH). He studied from 1952 to 1955 at the Royal College of Art and had his first exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, in 1956.

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