Reflecting on the ‘mystical’ process of Frank Auerbach’s captivating art

“Art is a rather mysterious means of communication,” says Frank Auerbach. He’s contemplating a painting in the National Gallery and admiring the artist’s technique: “Some bits, rather lovingly detailed. Some bits – like the sky – might’ve been done in ten minutes with something that was not a brush.” He’s referring to Turner’s atmospheric oil painting “The Fighting Temeraire” (1839), but could almost be describing his own work when he says: “One of the things I’ve noticed about the good paintings in this room is how unsmooth the surface is; how very much the working is still in the painting, so that as one looks at it more and more, one almost feels the breath of the artist as he‘s wrestling with the picture and, of course, the extraordinary sense of elation when it all comes together.”

The scene is from the documentary feature film Frank Auerbach: Life and Death, by the late, great artist’s son, Jake Auerbach. As you may imagine, it’s an intimate film, told through a series of candid interviews with Auerbach senior – many of which were conducted in the privacy of his studio – and his friends, family and longtime sitters, with whom he shared deep, decades-long relationships. 

The film traces the painter’s story, from his childhood as an orphaned refugee to his glittering success as a world-renowned artist. Born in 1931 into a liberal, bourgeois Jewish family living in Wilmersdorf, a leafy district of Berlin, the pleasant early life he recalled vaguely but fondly was capsized by the violent rise of fascism. As the persecution of the Jews continued to escalate with terrifying rapidity, Auerbach was sent by his parents to a progressive boarding school in Britain, as one of six children sponsored by the British writer Iris Origo. The film details how his mother sewed red crosses into the larger garments in his suitcase to indicate they were for when he was older, and two crosses on bed sheets and tablecloths intended to furnish him in adulthood. Looking back, he couldn’t recall what happened to those linens, so carefully packed. Nor did he ever see his mother and father, Charlotte and Max, again. They were murdered in Auschwitz. 

So there is immeasurable poignancy at the heart of the latest Auerbach show, Frank Auerbach, curated by distinguished art historian and lifelong friend of the artist, Catherine Lampert, which opened at the Galerie Michael Werner during Gallery Weekend Berlin alongside the debut of Jake Auerbach’s documentary. Not only is it his first posthumous exhibition (the artist died in November 2024, aged 94), but also the first major exhibition of his work in the city of his birth.

Yet perhaps the pathos of the show’s timing and setting is more something for visitors and critics to project onto the exhibition – part of the mythologising that grows around the life stories of famous figures – rather than something the artist himself indulged in. Auerbach was pragmatic and unsentimental about his past. The idea for the Michael Werner exhibition was conceived of during his lifetime and, while he had never returned to Germany, he welcomed the notion of his work being shown in Berlin. “I think that there are as many different responses to that catastrophe as there are victims of it,” reflects Jake Auerbach. “My father was always one who concentrated on the work at hand and the road ahead, taking few glances in the rear-view mirror.”

There is a frisson in seeing the pictures in real life. Being in the presence of my father’s work does reveal the evidence of the hard work that went into their making... these pictures are wrestled into being

The expansive exhibition includes significant institutional and private loans, beginning with work from the 1960s and including many of the intensely moving self-portraits Auerbach completed in his last years, alongside portraits of “persistent” sitters, including Lampert, his wife, Julia, Jake, and scenes painted around his beloved Mornington Crescent studio. “The guiding principle was to have a range of paintings with a number of surprises,” says Lampert. “There are pictures never seen in exhibitions for decades, if ever.”

Taking in this broad selection of paintings spanning six decades, one of the striking things about the exhibition is the impact of seeing these paintings in real life. You may have seen photographs of Auerbach’s paintings, but looking at them up close is a very different experience. “There is a frisson in seeing the pictures in real life,” Jake Auerbach tells us. “Working on the film, I have been seeing the paintings in reproduction on screen for hours every day, and although the quality is very high, nothing can replicate the experience of having them in front of you. Being in the presence of my father’s work does reveal the evidence of the hard work that went into their making... these pictures are wrestled into being. I made a film with Allen Jones, who made strenuous efforts to hide the hard work involved in making his pictures... my father didn’t do that.”

Seeing the brush strokes and appreciating the surface of the paint itself feels integral to the work’s potent and evocative effect. “When someone pauses to look for a period at one of Auerbach’s works, the sense of space and forms that are real and tangible fills the air, not because of any traditional perspective or realism, more than you sense the life captured and held,” Lampert says. “After weeks of failed attempts, each painting he let into the world was realised in a matter of hours. So, it reflects passion and frustration, in the vigour of the brushstrokes, the quirky graphic marks, the variety and clashing structures of the built environment. In a way, the work is quite humble – it is about the quick duration of a lifetime, in his case, hoping that the work, when seen many years from now, would bring the past into the present.”

In the documentary, Auerbach says: “Perhaps for biographical reasons, I felt that was life slipping by and, however many glimpses of glory one got, the mere fact that time was devouring it and it was all slipping away made it terribly sad unless one did something to pin it down.” Viewing his paintings on display in Michael Werner’s gallery, you feel that he did succeed in preserving an overwhelming sense of time and place, particularly in the scenes of London, as if the painting process, which he described as “a bit mystical”, has left a tangible presence of the London light and a sense of movement and energy, changing seasons, weather and people on the streets. “He persisted with each painting or large drawing until something unexpected occurred that embodied an idea and a very exacting configuration,” Lampert tells us. “Some are intimate, quiet works; others are radical in formal ways, particularly the urban landscapes which concurred with what he said, ‘Nothing is planned, and nothing needs to be justified. It’s all done on one’s nerves.’”

When someone pauses to look for a period at one of Auerbach’s works, the sense of space and forms that are real and tangible fills the air, not because of any traditional perspective or realism, more than you sense the life captured and held

The life he created for himself in Britain seemed to be one of regularity and quiet diligence – what might be called ‘slow’. Governed by routine and an obsessive commitment to his work (he described not “doing it” [painting] as “intolerable”), he tended to see the same sitters at regular weekly intervals, rising early to get the papers when the newsagent opened at 6:30am, spending long hours in his studio. “In Mornington Crescent, he led a very normal life – going to the same barbers, going to Morrisons, recognising people in the street, drawing clubbers leaving Koko,” Lampert tells Dazed.

She sat weekly for Auerbach for 46 years. Recalling these times, she says, “There aren’t singular special memories, our lives were happening. Much could be communicated, two ways, as if by telepathy. We shared friendships and admiration for artists we both knew well, like Lucian Freud and Michael Andrews. Frank kept in his head every single work he saw, and when he spoke about Titian, Rembrandt, Daumier, Rodin, Delacroix, Morisot or Monet, it was as if they were still around, and he aspired to work with the same inventiveness and courage.”

Jake Auerbach was also one of his father‘s regular subjects. He describes how there was “something special about working together”; these intense intervals became foundational to forging his adult relationship with his father. “I started sitting on Saturday mornings and then moved to be the Tuesday evening sitter. I would arrive, put on my ‘sitting top’ – a grey sweatshirt which lived at the studio –  he found the way that the collar worked interesting and I wore it for all my sessions. I would sit down, and he would start,” Jake remembers. “We would spend the first hour catching up with news, work, films, books, etcetera. If he hadn't finished it already, we would also join forces to complete the Times crossword. There would be a short break, then I would sit for another hour in virtual silence. There was a large mirror in the studio, so I normally got an idea of what was going on with the picture, but I didn’t volunteer any thoughts. If Frank felt that there was a chance a picture might be finished, he sometimes laid it on its back on the studio floor and asked for my reaction. When he had finished his clearing up, we would sometimes go out for a drink, or in more recent times, have a drink in the studio.”

This detail touches on one of the reasons he felt compelled to make a documentary about his father, and one of the misunderstandings that seems to have perpetuated about the artist. “The film affirms at the beginning that Frank was not insular and taciturn but in fact ‘good company’,” says Jake. “I hope and believe that the rest of the film provides a great deal of evidence to support that statement.” While his documentary, Frank Auerbach: Life and Death, conveys the artist’s magnetism and charisma, the exhibition is testimony to the depth of his friendships and the loyalty he gave and inspired. “I’ve not yet adjusted to his death, even though he warned me while still in his 60s, it would happen, and unless he could stand up to paint for a minimum of two hours, he didn’t see any point in living,” says Lampert. “I like watching or hearing recordings of him speak about what he did, but the spaces in Mornington Crescent and Finsbury Park where he worked now register as just empty shells. Asking collectors for loans and gallerists for help revealed how loyal and dedicated people are to the artist.”

Something of this is communicated in the work and the privileged sense of gazing briefly, through the paintings, at the world through his eyes; seeing the brush strokes forming his loved ones’ faces – the many, many hours spent capturing them on the canvas – and the vibrant impressions of light, movement and life in his cityscapes. Having been lucky enough to be walked round the rooms of Michael Werner‘s gallery by Lampert herself, the first thing I wrote in my notepad upon leaving the Berlin gallery was, “I wish I had known Frank Auerbach.” I urge you to do the next best thing and see his work in real life, if ever you can. 

Frank Auerbach is running at Galerie Michael Werner, Berlin, until 28 June 2025.