Painting Time: How Frank Auerbach Captures the Passage of Memory

Born in Berlin in 1931 to Jewish parents, Auerbach's formative years were profoundly marked by loss and displacement. At the age of seven, he was sent to England to escape Nazi persecution, a separation made permanent by the subsequent deaths of his parents in Auschwitz. This early experience of trauma and uprooting became a significant influence on his artistic vision. Auerbach's work reflects an enduring engagement with themes of memory, resilience, and the impermanence of existence, set against the backdrop of a post-war world grappling with destruction and renewal.

Auerbach's portraits present a deeply intimate engagement with memory, featuring subjects drawn from the core of his personal life. These included his wife, Julia, the enduring model Juliet Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.), and his close friend Estella Olive West (E.O.W.), whose repeated sittings contributed to the depth and continuity of his artistic exploration. These sitters engaged in a prolonged artistic exchange, becoming collaborators in his rigorous process of uncovering their essence. Each painting reflects a slow, almost meditative distillation of character, built over countless sittings. Similarly, Auerbach’s urban landscapes of London capture the city’s post-war transformations, weaving his personal connection to its streets and its scars into a broader narrative of change and resilience. These works are as much about Auerbach’s deep-rooted attachment to place as they are about the city’s evolving identity.

Balancing Permanence and Impermanence

Auerbach’s artistic process is a relentless dialogue with time, an extraordinary meditation on its fleeting and enduring nature. His approach to both drawing and painting involves intense cycles of creation and destruction, transforming his surfaces into layered testaments of persistence and change. In his drawings, typically rendered in charcoal with occasional touches of chalk, the process of erasure and reapplication takes on a physicality that wears the paper down to the point of near disintegration. Auerbach would glue sheets of paper together to strengthen them, patching, repatching, and smoothing the surface repeatedly as he gouged through layers and edges became frayed. Over time, the surface became a battlefield, marked by scuffs, tears, and wrinkles; a material history of his creative struggles. These distressed surfaces, far from being incidental, become integral to the expressive power of Auerbach’s work. He regarded the marks, repairs, and abrasions as reflective of the intensity of his process, describing the drawings as “rising out of the battle into being an image that stands up for itself.” Friends, lovers, and close acquaintances emerge from these reworked and reimagined surfaces with a visceral presence, their portraits infused with a sense of resilience that transcends the ruin of the paper. His relentless practice of working and reworking his canvases transforms the act of creation into a deeply immersive process, where each surface carries the residue of previous iterations, creating a visual palimpsest where traces of what came before shadow the final composition.

In his paintings, Auerbach’s method of layering thick impasto echoes this interplay of destruction and creation. Built over months or even years, his canvases carry the memory of countless iterations, forming dense, sculptural surfaces that seem to anchor time itself. These tactile layers assert a sense of permanence, grounding the work in physicality and offering a glimpse into the sheer labor of their making. At the same time, the final image retains a feeling of provisionality, as if still in flux, capturing the ephemeral moments of his interactions with sitters or the shifting light of a cityscape.

Auerbach’s ability to balance materiality and transience creates a compelling tension in his work. His paintings and drawings do not freeze time but embody its passage, layering memory and experience into their fabric. Through his unique techniques, Auerbach transforms his surfaces into dynamic spaces where permanence and impermanence coexist, challenging viewers to engage with time as a layered, living, and deeply human experience.

As a figure in the influential School of London, Auerbach forged close bonds with fellow artists such as Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud, and Francis Bacon, shaping a dynamic era of figurative painting. Beyond his immediate circle, Auerbach’s profound influence extends to a new generation of painters, including Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown, Adrian Ghenie, and Antony Micallef, who continue to explore the complexities of the human body and flesh. Auerbach’s relentless observation and experimentation with materials have inspired these artists to delve into the personal and universal aspects of their work, ensuring his legacy remains a cornerstone of contemporary art.

Auerbach’s paintings remain relevant because they speak to universal human experiences; the passage of time, the fragility of memory, and the resilience of the human spirit. His ability to imbue his works with layers of emotion and history makes them timeless, inviting viewers to engage with the richness of life and its fleeting moments. In Auerbach’s art, the past is not distant, it is palpably present, woven into every stroke of paint.