London's Hidden Layers: He Saw What We Missed. ✨🏙️
Play & learn about Frank Auerbach's arty refugee experience 🎮
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Back Story
Frank Auerbach, who passed away just last year in 2024, was a London-based painter most famous for his portraits and urban landscapes in thickly layered paint. He worked side by side with Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud and all three artists are closely associated with the School of London; all three were absolutely essential to the London art scene of the twentieth century.
Born in 1931 to Jewish parents in Berlin, Auerbach became a refugee of the Nazi regime by age 8. He was sent to England without his family to study at Bunce Court, a German-Jewish boarding school in Kent. He ended up staying in England after the war and enrolled in St Martin’s School of Art in 1948. Auerbach took over his friend Leon Kossoff’s studio, tucked away in an alley of Camden Town in 1954. He rented it for 36 years and finally managed to buy it in 1990. In it, he endured working conditions that were less than ideal – the studio got extremely cold and it could take the painter over an hour to begin his day of work while he was just trying to warm up. It is said he rarely left the country.
In much the same way as he treated his models – painting portraits of the same three women throughout his whole career – Auerbach’s landscapes depict the same streets, the same neighbourhoods over and over again. He captured the city from different angles with impressive dedication and variety. Auerbach treated the topography of the country that welcomed him in his childhood with attention, patience, maybe even tenderness. His work is inseparable from London and perhaps it wouldn’t be so much of a stretch to say that the painter himself slowly became ingrained in the city’s fabric, too.
His works have been exhibited at Tate, Courtauld, Malborough, Hayward, Offer Waterman, Ben Uri, and Whitworth galleries in the UK. Currently running exhibitions range from Paris to Perth, taking Auerbach’s legacy across the globe.
Sources:
Riggs, Terry. ‘Frank Auerbach: Artist biography’ from Tate Britain: Modern and Contemporary Art. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/frank-auerbach-676 [accessed: 17/03/2025].
Rosenthal, Norman. ‘Auerbach and His History’ in Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001 (Italy: Graphicom srl, 2001)
In this article Glikeriia (Lika) highlights the arty refugee experience of Frank Auerbach. She is a citizen journalist on a placement with us organised by Oxford University Career Services. She also organised the micro game to make the journalistic experience interactive.
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