Frank Auerbach
Though a figurative painter, Auerbach is not concerned with verisimilitude. Indeed, many of his portraits hold only the most tenuous resemblance to their sitters. As in Head of Julia II, the figure’s face is more often reduced to the barest of details necessary to their suggestion. Two circles for eyes, a line for a mouth, a vaguely defined beehive upstyle – the invocation of Julia rather than her image. Naturalism is of little interest to Auerbach, who is preoccupied instead with a compositional overallness. “I want everything in the painting to work, that is, every force, every plane, every direction to relate to every other direction in the painting,” he says. "I feel very strongly that if a painting is going to work, it has to work before you have a chance to read it.”
b.1931, Berlin; d.2024, London
“What I wanted to do,” the painter Frank Auerbach said, “was to record the life that seemed to me to be passionate and exciting and disappearing all the time.” Over the past sixty years, Auerbach has worked within a narrow range of subjects; painting urban scenes from North London and making studio portraits of friends and family. An inner-city recluse, he seldom leaves the Camden Town studio where he has painted all these decades and has few friends beyond an intimate gathering of fellow painters and the familiar cast of people who appear in his portraits. His early paintings are notable for their extraordinarily thick impasto paint, made in the accumulative revisions of an image. In some, the weight of the paint all but threatens to slide off the canvas. Since the 60s, however, he has scraped off imperfect attempts rather than paint over them – the day’s work more often ending up an oily residue in the studio bin. Auerbach’s finished paintings, while made in only a single sitting, are the result of many such reworkings, each a rehearsal in colour, line and form.