Master of accretion

Frank Auerbach (born 1931) is one of the most interesting artists working in Europe today, a philosophical painter of reality who works and re-works his pictures before he discovers something new, something worth saving. William Feaver, in this grand new monograph, calls Auerbach’s paintings ‘feats of concentration’, and stresses the hard work which goes into their construction, despite their appearance of spontaneity. Feaver has a gift for the evocative phrase: ‘Studied yet impulsive, ranging from darkness to radiance and from the declamatory to the subdued, they are keyed to an air of resolve as unguarded as joy, as involuntary as grief.’ This is a book strong on context. Auerbach emerges as a very considerable artist from Feaver’s aphoristic, closely observed and widely referential text.

The writing is kept to a refreshing minimum: I counted about 17 pages of analytical text plus six of lively interview in a volume containing more than 200 full-page colour plates. The introduction offers a portrait of the man, going out every morning to draw a local landscape subject and then returning to his north London studio to work on a series of portraits of his intimate friends and relations. Auerbach says: ‘What I wanted to do was record the life that seemed to me to be passionate and exciting and that was disappearing all the time.’ He couldn’t bear the idea that existence was finite and transitory, so has striven to capture its essence in his poignant and original paintings. The way in which he has single-mindedly pursued this ambition is almost as remarkable as the body of work which has resulted.

Feaver’s enjoyably compact text explores Auerbach’s deracinated background, his arrival in England aged eight, a German Jew whose parents stayed behind and vanished in the Holocaust, and his early years at the co-educational Bunce Court.