LONDON — Frank Auerbach, who fled Nazi Germany for Britain as a child and became one of the major artists of the 20th century, has died at 93. Auerbach’s gallery, Frankie Rossi Art Projects, said on Tuesday the artist died at his home in London the day before. Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach 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 the Kindertransport that 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’ve done this thing that psychiatrists disapprove of, which is blocking things out,” Auerbach told the BBC eight decades later. “Life is too short, in my case, to brood over the past.” He attended a Quaker-run boarding school in England alongside 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 and, according to his gallery, worked 364 days a year. Along with the other “School of London” post-war artists including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, he focused on figurative painting regardless of changing artistic fashions.
Auerbach slathered canvasses in thick layers of paint to produce near-abstract but recognizable landscapes and broo.
