Joe Tilson, from Six Etchings of Heads , Reclining Figure II , Get the latest news on the events, trends, and people that shape the global art market with our daily newsletter. Biography Frank Auerbach is one of the most influential painters of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, in Berlin, Germany to Jewish parents and at seven years old was sent to Britain to escape Nazi persecution—his parents remaining behind, only to be killed in concentration camps before they could join their young son abroad.
Auberbach went on to study at St. In , he received his first solo show at Beaux Arts Gallery, and by , was the subject of a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London.
As a popular and dedicated contemporary artist, he has several times been offered and refused knighthood. He continues to live and work in London, United Kingdom. In this instantiation, the undulating hills and roiling clouds occupy nearly equal parts of the picture plane, though springing from those hills are arboreal shapes silhouetted against the sky.
The hill itself is comprised of ochre and forest green brushstrokes, with glimmers of bright yellow near the ridge. There is an unequivocal sense of movement, as the brushstrokes of the landscape sweep horizontally and those of the clouds swoop and streak as if they were reforming themselves every few seconds. No human figures break up the expanse and dominance of nature.
Auerbach's debt to English landscape painter John Constable is clear. He stated that, over time, Constable "has meant more and more to me Art critic T. Clark wrote, "Auerbach is a landscape painter, but a peculiar kind. Nature for him seems to be instantaneous. It leaps out of the void. Juliet Yardley Mills, or J. This is one of the most notable works of her, and though she is not as abstracted as, say, the aforementioned E. Both the subject and style of the painting pack a visual punch; the aesthetic impact derives from the graceful but slightly disturbing curve of her neck and head back into the picture plane, the moody grays and blues of Picasso's "blue period" palette, and the heavy, undulating daubs and smears of paint that constitute her visage.
She does not look at either the artist or the viewer, but instead gazes off into the distance, her staring eyes and slightly downturned mouth conveying melancholia or mournful contemplation. Critic Becca Rothfield calls this work "exquisite but excruciating" and "bafflingly ethereal.
Rothfield explains that his "method is phenomenological: he presents people and places as syntheses of their manifestations at discrete moments in time Recognition occurs at the intersection of expectation and experience We must look beyond the powerful presence of the paint on canvas in order to see J.
Auerbach delights in painting his immediate surroundings of Camden, the borough in London where he lives and works. He has painted numerous works of the street of Mornington Crescent, here depicting it on a frosty, barren morning. The viewer stands as if on a street corner, looking up at a precipitous chimney that leans dramatically into the rear of the canvas. On the left is the curve of the street, lined with buildings full of dark windows. Auerbach conveys the chill of the morning in the muted light of the dirty, beige sky and the absence of people.
Strong black lines outline fences, gates, and the chimney itself, but the image never seems to come together as a whole; rather, it seems as if it might dissipate at any moment. Like his portraiture subjects, Auerbach's landscapes are about the concepts of seeing and remembering, both of which are prone to indecisiveness, ambiguity, subjectivity, and ephemerality. Auerbach told art historian Catharine Lampert, "The problem of painting is to see a unity within a multiplicity of pieces of evidence and the very slightest change of light, the very slightest, tiniest hairs-breadth inflection of the form creates a totally different visual synthesis.
Wittgenstein wrote, "The concept of seeing makes a tangled impression I look at the landscape; my gaze wanders over it, I see all sorts of distinct and indistinct movement; this impresses itself sharply on me, that very hazily.
How completely piecemeal what we see can appear! And now look at all that can be meant by 'description of what is seen!
He arrived in England in , but his parents remained behind and perished in Nazi death camps. Auerbach became a British citizen in His images are rendered chaotic with extremely heavy applications of paint and thick brush strokes, smeary attacks, bizarre angles, blurred edges, and so forth. Like many artists, Auerbach favors painting the same subject over and over again. He has specific models which he has painted hundreds of times.
West also reports that Auerback would spend hours or days on a single aspect of a portrait only to often scrap the whole effort and start over. While his portraits are abstract and figurative, Auerbach is strongly influenced by classical artists, especially Rembrandt, Titian and Rubens.
He never saw his parents again. Their sporadic, highly censored letters delivered via the Red Cross stopped arriving in and he learned later they had both died that year in Auschwitz.
At school Auerbach was known for both acting and painting but received no proper tuition. When Auerbach left school in he had some support from his wider family but was essentially on his own in London. But people were pretty nice to me and, if you went to the cinema or to a pub, somebody would tell you about a room you could rent.
There was a curious feeling that the barriers had broken down and we were all naked, bare-footed animals together, people who had survived the war. The following year he enrolled in art school, where one of his tutors was David Bomberg, and began the process of learning to draw.
For me it was an education not in drawing the figure, but in thinking about art. I think what we call painting is basically drawing in various media.
Look at Rembrandt or Ingres , drawing has changed very little, but it can go in lots of directions and is dependent on temperament and thought and the needs you have at the time.
The business of catching her, as she felt to me to be, became far more urgent than producing a painting or drawing. It put on extra pressure. There was the desire to capture the experience, and the desire to make something that formally measured up to the things that one admired.
By the early s, Auerbach thought his paintings of Stella represented a breakthrough, which he replicated in his pictures of postwar London.
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