FRANK AUERBACH

Random and bite-sized facts on all things from the mythical figure that was Frank Auerbach. Totally random but totally fascinating if you're into it. Do you know Frank Auerbach now?

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In a 2019 interview, Auerbach said he threw away about 95% of his preparatory drawings. He deliberately didn't want to leave thousands of routine sketches behind.

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He would often paint, scrape the entire surface away and start again. The extraordinary thickness we see can therefore be the residue of repeated destruction rather than simply months of adding paint.

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Auerbach took over Leon Kossoff's Camden Town studio in 1954 and continued working there for the rest of his life. The same studio had previously been used by photographers and painter Frances Hodgkins.

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Stella West sometimes sat for him all night. For the large charcoal heads he began in 1956, Stella West would sit in her bedroom while Auerbach knelt on the floor, with his drawing board propped on an old chair, working late into the night.

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Auerbach could make 200 drawings for one landscape . Some landscapes required as many as 200 preliminary drawings. He didn't simply copy them when painting; he said they reminded him of what he had actually experienced at the location.

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Auerbach's early colours were partly dictated by money. The dark browns and greys of his early paintings weren't entirely an aesthetic decision. He could only afford those colours in the quantities his method required. Later, an annuity allowed him to buy more expensive cadmium and chromium colours.

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He Used a Polaroid Camera

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Auerbach was known to use a Polaroid camera to record poses of his sitters. He could then use these photographs as a record while developing his portraits in the studio.

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He Thought Reproductions Could Be Misleading

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Auerbach became fascinated by paintings in the National Gallery, but he believed reproductions could give a fundamentally false impression of an original. He preferred to draw directly in front of the actual painting.

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He Made Hundreds of Drawings in the National Gallery

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Auerbach began drawing in front of paintings at the National Gallery as a student. By 1995 he had made many hundreds of these drawings, including studies of works by Rembrandt, Titian and Rubens.

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He Turned a Rembrandt Into a Six-Foot Painting

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Auerbach made a huge painting based on Rembrandt's The Lamentation over the Dead Christ. The original is only a little over a foot high, while Auerbach's version stands at more than six feet.

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He Couldn't Easily Read His Own Old Painting

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When asked about his Rembrandt-inspired painting in 1995, Auerbach said he found it as difficult to read as anybody else because it had been made so long before.

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His Painting Method Changed

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In the 1950s and early 1960s Auerbach generally allowed paint to build up on the canvas, sometimes reaching several inches in thickness. Later he increasingly scraped previous attempts away before starting another session.

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He Once Painted Over a Charcoal Drawing

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A portrait of his cousin Gerda Boehm began as a charcoal drawing that Auerbach worked on for months. Frustrated with it, he eventually painted oils directly over the drawing and finished it quickly.

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His Second Solo Exhibition Was Almost Entirely Drawings

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In 1957 Auerbach's second solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London was devoted to his large charcoal heads. At the time, drawings were still often treated as secondary to paintings, but Auerbach regarded these works as having equal status.

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He Made Two Self-Portraits in Charcoal

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During the late 1950s Auerbach made two large charcoal self-portraits alongside portraits of Stella West, Leon Kossoff, Julia Wolstenholme and his cousin Gerda Boehm.

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He and Leon Kossoff Studied Under David Bomberg

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Auerbach and Leon Kossoff both attended David Bomberg's evening life-drawing classes at Borough Polytechnic after the war. Bomberg's approach to drawing became a major influence on both artists.

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Gustav Metzger Had Used His Studio Before Him

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The Mornington Crescent studio Auerbach took over in 1954 had previously been occupied by his friend Leon Kossoff and, before Kossoff, by Gustav Metzger, another German-Jewish refugee who had studied under David Bomberg.

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He Called His Studio His Shell

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Auerbach became so attached to his Camden studio that he said losing it would be like being “a snail without a shell”. He described the surrounding part of London as his world.

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He Kept His Subjects Very Close to Home

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Auerbach deliberately restricted many of his landscapes to the area around his Camden studio. Mornington Crescent, Camden Town and Primrose Hill became a remarkably small but endlessly revisited world.

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He Didn't Treat Drawing as Preparation

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For Auerbach, drawing wasn't simply something done before painting. He considered his charcoal portraits to have the same importance as his paintings and moved between the two mediums throughout his career.

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He Worked on the Same Sitter for Years

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Auerbach's portraits weren't usually one-off encounters. He repeatedly returned to a small group of people, allowing relationships with his sitters to develop over many years and producing numerous different drawings and paintings of the same person.

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One Drawing Could Be Destroyed and Recreated at Every Sitting

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His major charcoal heads were reworked from top to bottom during each session with the sitter. The image was repeatedly created and destroyed until Auerbach decided that the drawing was finished.

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He Nearly Became an Actor

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Before settling on art, Auerbach had ambitions to become an actor. At 17 he even appeared in a small role in Peter Ustinov's play House of Regrets at the Unity Theatre in St Pancras.

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He Arrived in England Without His Parents

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Auerbach was sent from Germany to England as a child refugee in 1939. He never saw his parents again; they remained in Germany and were later killed at Auschwitz.

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His Mother Had Studied Art

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Auerbach's mother, Charlotte Nora Borchardt, had attended art school before marrying his father, a patent lawyer. His own decision to become an artist therefore had an earlier family connection.

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He Came to London From a Rural Boarding School

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After arriving in Britain, Auerbach attended Bunce Court School in Kent, a boarding school for Jewish refugee children. He later moved to London in 1947.

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David Bomberg Changed His Approach to Drawing

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Auerbach's evening classes with David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic were particularly important. Bomberg encouraged him to use charcoal as an expressive medium, something that became central to Auerbach's drawing throughout his career.

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He and Kossoff Took Turns Sitting for Each Other

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Auerbach and Leon Kossoff wanted to work with models over long periods. They sometimes spent days taking turns sitting for one another, giving each artist the opportunity to study the same person at length.

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He Asked a Stranger to Sit for Him

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Stella West introduced Auerbach to her friend Helen Gillespie. He wanted to challenge himself by drawing someone he did not already know intimately.

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Gerda Boehm Was His Only Relative in England

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When Auerbach arrived in England, his cousin Gerda Boehm was his only relative there. She later became one of his sitters, beginning to pose for him in 1960–61.

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He Had Hundreds of Drawings in the National Gallery

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Auerbach began drawing directly in front of paintings at the National Gallery while he was still a student. By 1995 he had made hundreds of these studies, and 141 were eventually given to the Gallery.

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He Distrusted Reproductions of Paintings

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Auerbach said that the more he visited the National Gallery, the more he realised that reproductions were misleading. He believed that something essential about an original painting was lost in reproduction.

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He Drew From Rembrandt and Titian

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Auerbach's National Gallery drawings weren't limited to one period. He made studies after works by artists including Rembrandt, Titian and Rubens, later developing some of these observations into his own paintings.

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He Shared the 1986 Venice Biennale Prize

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In 1986 Auerbach represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. He shared the Biennale's main prize, the Golden Lion, with the German artist Sigmar Polke.

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David Bowie Owned One of His Paintings

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David Bowie owned Auerbach's Head of Gerda Boehm as part of his private art collection. Following Bowie's death, the painting was sold at auction in 2016 for £3.8 million.

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He Was Offered a Knighthood More Than Once

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Auerbach was offered a knighthood several times during his career but declined it.

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He Taught at the Slade

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Auerbach supported himself partly through teaching during his early career. He taught at several British art schools, including Camberwell College of Arts and the Slade School of Fine Art.

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His First Real Fame Came Quite Late

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Auerbach had his first solo exhibition in 1956, but the National Portrait Gallery notes that he did not achieve serious fame until the 1970s, despite having spent many years developing his distinctive style.

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He Never Painted His Landscapes Outdoors

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Although Auerbach repeatedly drew the streets and buildings around Camden, he did not paint outdoors. He made numerous drawings at the location and then developed the paintings back in his studio.

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He Could Make Hundreds of Drawings of One Place

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For some of his landscapes Auerbach made up to a couple of hundred drawings of the same subject. He used them to gather information about the place before returning to the studio to paint.

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He Didn't Copy His Drawings

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Auerbach said his drawings of places were not blueprints for paintings. Instead, they reminded him of what he had seen, allowing him to re-imagine the subject when he was back in the studio.

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He Described London as an “Unpainted” City

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Auerbach once described London as an extraordinary, “marvellously unpainted” city, fascinated by its unfinished buildings, unexpected structures and constantly changing streets.

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He Repeated the Same View in Different Seasons

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Auerbach sometimes painted the same London motif from different angles and in different seasons and light. The familiar subject became a way of exploring constant change rather than simply recording a location.

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He Worked With a Knife as Well as a Brush

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Although broad brushstrokes dominate many of his paintings, Auerbach also used the end of a brush and a knife to manipulate the paint. In some works, marks were scratched directly into the thick surface.

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He Scratched Dates Into Paint

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In Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II, Auerbach scratched the date “2004” into the paint with the end of his brush. The mark became part of the physical surface of the finished painting.

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He Saw His Paintings as Records of Experience

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For Auerbach, the finished painting wasn't simply an image of a person or place. His process was intended to preserve his accumulated experience of looking at that subject over time.

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His Drawings Could Take Place Over Months

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Auerbach's major charcoal heads were not completed during a single sitting. Each was worked on repeatedly over many months, with the entire image reworked from top to bottom whenever the sitter returned.

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He Made Paintings and Drawings of the Same People

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Auerbach did not regard his portraits and charcoal drawings as separate worlds. He often worked on paintings and drawings of the same sitter alternately, giving both forms the same sustained attention.

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His Second Solo Show Was Devoted to Drawings

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Auerbach's second solo exhibition, held at London's Beaux Arts Gallery in 1957, consisted of his charcoal heads. This was unusually significant because he was giving drawings the same status as his paintings.

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He Made Self-Portraits Alongside Portraits of Friends

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In the late 1950s Auerbach made two large charcoal self-portraits at the same time as drawings of people close to him, including Stella West, Leon Kossoff, Gerda Boehm and Julia Wolstenholme.

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He Used Charcoal as Something More Than a Sketching Material

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David Bomberg encouraged Auerbach to treat charcoal as an expressive medium rather than simply a way of preparing for a painting. That idea became fundamental to Auerbach's large-scale charcoal heads.

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He Made Prints With Studio Prints

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In the 1960s and 1970s Auerbach worked with Studio Prints, a London printmaking workshop founded by Dorothea Wight in 1968. Other artists connected with the workshop included Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Paula Rego.

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His Paintings Preserved Earlier Versions Beneath Them

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During his early method Auerbach often painted directly over the previous day's work. The finished image could therefore contain numerous earlier versions of the same painting buried beneath its final surface.

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Later He Started Rubbing the Paint Down

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Auerbach later changed his working method. Instead of simply adding another layer each day, he increasingly rubbed down paintings between applications, allowing traces of earlier attempts to remain while reducing the accumulated thickness.

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His Studio Was Shared by Three German-Jewish Refugees

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Auerbach's Mornington Crescent studio had previously been occupied by Leon Kossoff and, before Kossoff, by Gustav Metzger. All three artists had arrived in Britain as refugees from Nazi persecution and had studied with David Bomberg.

He Once Made 300 Drawings for One Painting

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For Park Village East, Auerbach made probably around 300 drawings of the subject. He pinned the drawings to his studio wall, replacing older ones with new ones as he worked.

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His Studio Was Only Three Minutes From the Subject

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When working on Park Village East, Auerbach could make an on-site drawing and then walk back to his studio in about three minutes to paint from it.

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He Drew Constable's Hay Wain Dozens of Times

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Auerbach repeatedly drew Constable's The Hay Wain at the National Gallery. Years later he noticed an unexpected compositional resemblance between it and one of his own London paintings.

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He Tried to Fight an Influence He Had Already Discovered

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After noticing similarities between Park Village East and Constable's The Hay Wain, Auerbach tried to resist the connection. He eventually admitted that the resemblance was still there.

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He Never Used a Photograph of Titian's Painting

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When working on his version of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, Auerbach went to the National Gallery before every studio session and made fresh drawings from the original painting.

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He Made a New Drawing of Titian Every Day

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Auerbach deliberately refused to work from a photographic reproduction of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. He made new drawings at the National Gallery each day so that the original painting would remain a fresh experience.

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He Called Drawing an Act of Invention

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Auerbach said that drawing was not simply a way of recording what he saw. In his words, “Drawing isn’t a question of recording, it’s a question of invention.”

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He Sometimes Thought He Had Been Drawing for Five Minutes

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Auerbach said that when drawing outside he could feel as though he had been working for only five minutes. Looking at his watch, he would discover that 35 or 45 minutes had passed.

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He Said He Had a Poor Visual Memory

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Auerbach explained that his drawings became increasingly important because he felt his visual memory was not very strong. The drawings helped him remember the relationships between forms when he returned to the studio.

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He Sometimes Drew in Several Different Materials

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Auerbach could begin a drawing in pencil, return the next day to add ink and then work over it in colour. A single drawing could therefore be the result of several separate sessions.

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He Said the Painters of the Past Were Still His Community

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In later life Auerbach described artists such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Picasso as being almost like people in the room with him. He regarded the great painters of the past as an ongoing artistic conversation.

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His First Painting That Felt Truly His Was From 1952

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Auerbach later identified Summer Building Site, painted in 1952, as the first time he felt he had made a painting that was genuinely his own.

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He Thought He Might Never Paint Another

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After finishing Summer Building Site, Auerbach remembered feeling that he had broken through into something new. He also wondered whether he would ever manage to make another painting like it.

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He Painted Almost Every Day Into His Nineties

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Even in his early nineties Auerbach was still painting regularly. In a 2024 interview, he described painting as something he found more enjoyable than anything else.

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He Sometimes Continued Working in His Sleep

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Late in life Auerbach said he sometimes found himself continuing to work things out in his sleep, dreaming about what he should do with a drawing.

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He Thought of Paintings as Something Physical

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Auerbach wanted his paintings to convey the solid, physical reality of people and places rather than simply provide a visual description. He used drawing to help him re-imagine that physical experience on a flat surface.

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He Could Spend Months Remembering One Place

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Auerbach said that after making perhaps a hundred drawings of a subject over several months, he developed specific memories of the relationships between its forms. Those memories then fed into the painting.

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