The German-British Jewish painter has died at the age of 93. Art historian Monica Bohm-Duchen looks back at his life and vital contribution to European art

Hearing the news last week of the death of artist Frank Auerbach at the age of 93 filled me with great sadness and the sharply poignant, even painful sense, of the end of an era.

Born Frank Helmut Auerbach in Berlin on 29 April 1931 to lawyer Max Auerbach and art school trained Charlotte Nora Borchardt, he was separated from his middle-class assimilated German Jewish parents shortly before his 8th birthday. In April 1939, he was put on a ship sailing from Hamburg that would take him to the safety of England. Once here, he attended Bunce Court, a progressive school brought to the UK from Germany by the redoubtable Jewish-turned-Quaker educationalist Anna Essinger. In 1943, he would learn that his parents had met their deaths at Auschwitz.

Auerbach went on to attend both St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London – where Leon Kossoff, born in England to a Russian Jewish immigrant family, became a lifelong friend – as well as classes at the Borough Polytechnic run by David Bomberg, a leading member of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ generation. The latter’s emphasis on the physicality of the painted surface, combined with the importance of what he described as “the spirit in the mass”, would exert a profound and lasting influence on both students. Auerbach and Kossoff would in turn become prominent members of what American-born Jewish artist RB Kitaj in the 1970s dubbed the 'School of London', a group of expressionistic, staunchly figurative painters (also including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon) dominated by those born elsewhere.

To the end, Auerbach spoke and wrote very little about his profound experience of dislocation and loss. In his own words: “I think I did this thing, which psychiatrists frown on: I am in total denial. It’s worked very well for me.” Nevertheless, several commentators on his work have chosen to interpret his obsession in the immediate post-war era with images of construction sites – emblematic of the rebuilding of London after the destruction wrought by the Blitz – as an oblique response to the need to rebuild his own life in that period.

His gradual move from a sombre, almost muddy palette (also due, it must be said, to financial constraints) to a more colourful and life-affirming one could also be construed as a move away from a psychological darkness into the light. Similarly, his reclusiveness, his choice of a working method that involved almost endless reworking, and his tendency to focus on a very limited number of geographical locations, motifs and sitters, could be seen, in part at least, as a legacy of early trauma. Indeed, the poet Stephen Spender (himself partly of European Jewish origin) once commented that all Auerbach’s sitters seem “burdened with perhaps terrible experience…like refugees conscious of concentration camps”.

However much the artist himself would have baulked at such interpretations of his work, the fact remains that with his passing, that remarkably creative generation of European, mostly Jewish refugees seems truly on the cusp of disappearing. Yet Auerbach’s work remains visible in numerous public collections; while in the wake of his death, the outpouring of tributes to him testifies to the admiration with which he is regarded outside the Jewish world, in the UK and far beyond.

By Monica Bohm-Duchen

Header image: cross section of Head of JYM ll by Frank Auerbach, 1984-85