Remembering Frank Auerbach (1931–2024) 

We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of Frank Auerbach (1931–2024), one of the greatest artists of his generation.

Born in Berlin, Auerbach was sent to school in this country as a seven-year-old boy in 1939 by his German-Jewish parents to escape Nazi persecution. His parents were both killed at Auschwitz and as a teenager after the war Auerbach made his way to London to study art. During the 1950s, he emerged as a highly original and uncompromising modern painter, alongside his artist-friends Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff. At this time, his life-long practice of making and remaking his paintings and large-scale drawings over many months and sometimes years started to crystallize, leading to works of great depth and visual impact. Auerbach’s unwavering commitment to painting and drawing people he knew well and areas of London that were the fabric of his life also began at this time and has sustained his art for more than seventy years.

Earlier this year, The Courtauld Gallery was honoured to stage a major exhibition of Auerbach’s early work, Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads (February – May 2024). This exhibition presented, for the first time, the remarkable series of Auerbach’s hauntingly beautiful, large-scale charcoal drawings that he produced as a young artist in post-war London in the 1950s and early 1960s. The exhibition received widespread critical and public acclaim with many people being deeply moved by the emotional range and profound humanity of the works.

This show of Auerbach’s portrait heads followed an earlier exhibition, mounted at The Courtauld Gallery in 2009, of the artist’s extraordinary paintings of post-war London, Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites. It brought together his epic post-war paintings of London as it was being reconstructed following the destruction of the Second World War.
These two exhibitions of Auerbach’s early work demonstrated the beginnings of his intense commitment to his art and to the subjects he chose to draw and paint. This deep engagement continued unabated throughout his long career and his work is now widely celebrated nationally and internationally.

Dr Barnaby Wright, Deputy Head of The Courtauld Gallery and the Daniel Katz Curator of 20th century Art, who curated these two exhibitions, said: “From his earliest work to his last, Frank Auerbach was driven by a desire to convey the vitality and richness of life. To do so, he created his own unique way of drawing and painting, producing some of the most remarkable works of art of modern times, perhaps of any time.”

In a rare interview for The Courtauld recorded earlier this year, Auerbach reflected on his life and artistic legacy.

The Courtauld Gallery has a major painting by Frank Auerbach as part of its collection, Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, 1962, which is on display in its 20th-century gallery.