Michael Roemer, another German refugee who was friends with Auerbach at Bunce Court, became an early collector of his works and went on to buy more than 20 of pieces. By phone from his home in the United States, Roemer, 95, said that he felt “a kinship of some kind,” with Auerbach and his work, adding that, as Jewish survivors of the war, “It had to do with being nobody and knowing it. I think Frank was compelled to paint. He had to prove his existence.”
In the postwar years, Auerbach found exhilarating subject matter in the bombed sites that still littered London, and evoked the city’s postwar reconstruction in dynamic compositions of thrusting diagonals and verticals balanced by geometric forms. Later, his focus shifted to portraying angular street scenes and city parks that seem convulsed in movement, animated by abstract slashes or sweeping zigzags.
His relief-like portraits from this period are dominated by Estella West, a widow with three children whom Auerbach met in 1948. For the next 25 years, West was Auerbach’s lover and model, sitting for him three nights a week. He invoked her in turbulent whorls of paint, picturing swollen heads with deeply sculpted eyes and full-length nudes in which West’s pale, curvaceous figure is engulfed by her surroundings. Later, he made portraits of other intimates, including his wife, Julia, a fellow artist whom he married in 1958, and Jake, the son they had together.
Auerbach’s paintings and drawings are visceral distillations of reality that emerge instinctively from a deep engagement with his subjects, rather than from a preconceived idea. “Very often I’ve finished something and found that it has some connotation, either sad or vigorous or cheerful, but I haven’t been aware of it at the time. All I’ve been aware of is the business of making,” he said, adding that he hates “pictures that try to persuade you of something. I don’t think they’re genuine art.”
Auerbach has swapped views on what makes a good painting with some of the most important British artists of the 20th century. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he developed competitive friendships with Bacon and Freud, spending time with them in the bohemian drinking dens of London’s Soho district. Auerbach recalled that Bacon was full of opinions, “some inane and banal, many of them absolutely inspired and illuminating.”
Bacon, who was already well established and enjoyed the good life, bought the younger artist many meals in swanky restaurants over 15 years, “until he got fed up with my work and I found his behavior also a little tiresome,” Auerbach said, pointing to Bacon’s tendency to disparage his friends’ paintings.
