.png)
3 hours ago
1
Frank Auerbach is to be the subject of what has been billed as a homecoming show in Berlin, at which some of his final paintings will be displayed in the city he fled as a child.
Auerbach, who died in November last year, never had a show in the city of his birth, which he left due to persecution by the Nazis. Both of his parents were later killed in Auschwitz.
Frank Auerbach in Berlin at Galerie Michael Werner, which opens on 2 May, will include between 25 and 30 works and will be the first posthumous exhibition of the artist, who kept working until his death at the age of 93 last November.
Catherine Lampert, curator and former director of the Whitechapel Gallery, said some of Auerbach’s final self-portraits and portraits of his wife, Julia, will be included, as well as work dating back to the 1960s.
She said: “There’s a picture from 2024, and others from the last five years. The paintings of Julia are in acrylic and they’re in greens and pinks and blues, these very unusual colours – not at all like he was when he painted in oil.
“The pictures of Julia are very poignant, because she wasn’t very well at that time. They’re very free, they seem to be floating in the air, they’re buoyant and beautiful.”
Auerbach arrived in Britain in 1939, as one of six children who were sponsored by Antonio and Iris Origo. He attended Bunce Court in Kent, a progressive boarding school for Jewish refugee children, before studying at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and the Royal College of Art.
He described his approach to art as one of “repeatedly trying, then erasing, then trying again to make an image that is true” while using a palette of bold colours and thickly applied painting style.
In the last few years of his life he had a hugely successful solo show at the Courtauld in London, where his signature charcoal portraits made between 1956 and 1962 attracted large crowds and positive reviews.
Despite never returning to Germany, there were connections between Auerbach and the country of his birth.
While at Bunce Court, he studied under the exiled German actor and theatre director Wilhelm Marckwald, who worked in Berlin and once said Auerbach’s appearance in one of the school’s theatre productions was “one the best young performances he had ever witnessed”.
His cousin was the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto who hid during the war then eventually moved to Germany and became a key cultural figure and commentator during the 20th century who was described as a “peerless friend of literature, but also of freedom and democracy” by Angela Merkel.
“He had memories of Berlin but he never returned and despite there being many fans of his work in the city, there have never been any shows,” said Lampert.
“When I was at his Kunstmuseum Bonn exhibition in 2015, many people talked about what Germany had lost because Frank had to leave, but there aren’t works by Auerbach in German museums, as far as we know. It’ll be interesting to see how his work is received.”
Lampert was one of what Auerbach called his “persistent sitters” and regularly appeared in the work he created in his Camden and Finsbury Park studios in north London.
“I began in May 1978,” she said. “I always left the studio incredibly happy and his company was incredible. In later years he talked more and more, early on he would often talk to himself about how the painting was going or recite poetry.”
