The only Berlin exhibition of the artist Frank Auerbach, which was largely unknown in his hometown, took place in the Berlin youth rooms in 1983: many young new romantics probably wondered who they actually watched when they looked at the cover of the Dilom on the canvas of the English synthesizer group “Japan”. Drawn, painted with a large amount of color, distorted by the head, the skin is very white, rough black lines and bends allow the eyes, nose, mouth to guess, gives the face of contours that not a single AI could attribute to the person who was sitting here. In addition, the floor or age remain unclear – figurative and still far from the realistic representation, the earthly colors of the shoulders and the background remind of the landscape – in fact more internal, and the task arises with the question of whether this image makes such intense.
If you looked at the back of the cover, you could read the “Painting Coverage, the Head of Jim II” of 1980 Frank Auerbach, which was at least solved by the puzzle of the authorship of the picture, but not yet with the person depicted. It was Julia Yardley Mills, who was a model of the artist twice a week since 1957, as well as about a dozen other people who devoted portraits. With this, he became world famous – simply not in Berlin, his hometown.
Born in 1931, he spent the first few years in the House of Wilmersdorf’s parents; His father was a lawyer, his mother studied art, one of his cousins was Marseille Reich Radik. From their Jewish origin, parents decided in 1939 to protect their son from the persecution by the Nazis and sent him to England. They themselves remained in Berlin, were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and killed there. In London, Frank Auerbach studied art since 1948, first at the Saint Martin Art School, later at the Royal College. With his figurative, very expressive drawings and scenes on the street and portraits of paintings, for example, from friends, he was included in the 1970s, in addition to artists such as Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon, the London School. The artist represented the UK in the Venice Biennale or showed his drawings in the National Gallery.
The first exhibition after his death
Frank Auerbach died in London in November; Now the Berlin department of the Gallery of Michael Werner shows the first exhibition after his death – and in fact the first exhibition in Auerbach in Berlin. A few weeks before their opening, the London art historian Katherine Lampert tells TAZ in the halls of the gallery of the exhibition, which she oversees. Lampert not only wrote a biography about Auerbach and developed a retrospective of the artist, which was shown in 2015/16 in Bonnne (Kunstmuseum) and London (Tate Britain) that it was also a model for more than 40 years, from 1978 to September 2024, the Aurbach exhibition was already planned earlier. He would like the idea in Berlin, but he did not come. He reluctantly traveled, just recently only once a year a day to Brighton. For the first time in Germany, he was again in 1986 and 1987, at his exhibitions in Hamburg and Essen, and then no longer. He was not present at his retrospecting Tate at the opening.
During the hours of model meetings, Auerbach quoted the Irish poet William Batler Yates, while he juggled his brushes and performed one layer of paint after another, and then scratched it until the picture was finished for him, but he was more invitations for dinner. His tactile portraits, which he himself in comparison with the late work of Goya, and the other already reminded of the Clombi Terracotta objects, did not want to make his work be associated with his biography; He denied the implicit influence of the Holocaust on his work.
Among the photographs shown in Michael Verner, there is also a portrait of Katherine Lampert, one of his wife Julia and the picture that fixes the landscape near his studio in Kamen -Town, in which – without assistants – from 1954 to the end of seven days a week he worked on his photographs. And one of his independent cartridges is shown, the choice of motives that he inevitably deepened during the pandemic. He was created shortly before his death, from which he did not want to pay much attention. There was no state funeral, even private, it was not important for him, Lampert says.
The fact that his son Jake, who has already documented his father’s desire to create twice as a director, calls his new film “Frank Auerbach: Life and Death”, is only indirectly connected with his death.
