Auerbach & The Art of Painting

Frank Auerbach has finally found himself in the limelight after half a century's quiet dedication to his art writes Louise Jury, in The Independent. He rarely gives interviews, avoids the art world party circuit and has lived and worked in the same small north London studio without a telephone for the best part of half a century. But despite the efforts of Frank Auerbach to avoid the spotlight, Sotheby's auctioneers this week predicted that the 75-year-old painter is set to become the next of the older generations of British artists to break the £1m barrier in the salerooms. Like Bridget Riley and Peter Doig, who both made that leap last year, he has long been an important figure. He represented Britain at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1986 and has enjoyed retrospectives at the Hayward Gallery in 1978 and, more recently, at the Royal Academy. His work is represented in major art collections around the world. Like Leon Kossoff, his close friend since art school, he has won the quiet respect of the art cognoscenti. But he has achieved neither the celebrity nor the prices of another long-standing friend, Lucian Freud. Auerbach's working method might seem eccentric. He builds the work in layers, then scrapes the paint off to leave only an imprint of what has gone before to build on. Rosenthal described it as a paradox. "There is endless painting and drawing," he said. "What he does is he rubs them off then suddenly decides to do the painting on top of the remnants of the lost painting. It's a mixture of the hard-won image and spontaneity." "My only ambition is to make one memorable image," he said at the time of his last retrospective. "And then from there I hope to make another memorable image. And pray to God to make another. That's all. Nothing else." It seems the art market has finally realised that that is precisely what he has done. (For the full article click the headline) Irish Art