By admin 
LONDON – Frank Auerbach, who fled Nazi Germany for Britain as a child and became one of the most important artists of the 20th century, has died at the age of 93.
Auerbach’s gallery, Frankie Rossi Art Projects, said Tuesday that the artist died the day before at his home in London.
Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931 and came to England in 1939 as one of six children sponsored by the writer Iris Origo. It was part of a movement known as the Children’s transport who rescued thousands of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe in the months before World War II.
Auerbach was 7 and never saw his parents again. Both were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“I did something that psychiatrists disapprove of, which is blocking things out,” Auerbach told the BBC eight decades later. “In my case, life is too short to worry about the past.”
He attended a Quaker-run boarding school in England with other refugees and war orphans, and after studies at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, he devoted his life to painting.
He lived and worked in the same north London studio from 1954 until his death, working 364 days a year, according to his gallery.
Together with the other post-war artists of the “School of London”, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, he concentrated on figurative painting, regardless of changing artistic fashions. Auerbach smeared canvases in thick layers of paint to produce almost abstract but recognizable landscapes and somber, enclosed portraits.
Auerbach told the BBC earlier this year that the paintings’ “eccentric thickness” was “an involuntary byproduct of the fact that I went on and on and painted the whole picture from top to bottom over and over again.”
“All art comes from dissatisfaction,” he said.
Auerbach exhibited his work from the 1950s, but did not gain fame for another twenty years. His first retrospective was at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1978. He represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1986, winning the top prize of the Golden Lion. His most recent exhibition, Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads, opened at the Courtauld Gallery in London in February.
Later in life his work brought high prices. In 2023, “Mornington Crescent” – one of many paintings inspired by the streets near his home – sold at Sotheby’s for $7.1 million, a record for the artist.
“We have lost a dear friend and remarkable artist, but we can take comfort in knowing that his voice will resonate for generations to come,” said Geoffrey Parton, director of Frankie Rossi Art Projects.
Auerbach is survived by his son Jacob Auerbach.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.