Frank Auerbach

Frank Auerbach is one of Britain's pre-eminent Twentieth Century painters. Like Bacon and Freud, he has stuck to figurative painting while all around them were losing theirs...

Unlike Bacon however, Auerbach's work is less darkly symbolic or relentlessly despairing, and more than Freud he seeks to push the medium of figurative oil painting as far as it can go towards abstraction.

Auerbach was born in Berlin but came to England in 1939 to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. He became friends with Leon Kossof whilst studying at St Martin's. In 2003 it emerged that Auerbach had turned down a knighthood, and- unlike today's objectors - didn't bang on about it in the media.

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