Auerbach, Frank
Frank Auerbach was born in 1931 in Berlin, Germany. In 1939, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, he attended Bunce Court Boarding School near Faversham, Kent, where he was seen as an artistic prodigy. Before beginning at St Martin's School of Art and Design in London, Auerbach attended classes taught by David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic Institute. This experience was to shape Auerbach's artistic practice as he admired Bomberg's exploratory style of painting. Between 1952 and 1955 he studied at the Royal College of Art, during which time he moved into the Camden Town studio.
It was in the 1950s that Auerbach was to become associated with the so-called School of London painters, a loose collection of individual artists working in London in the same figurative style, which included figures such as Michael Andrews and Lucian Freud. Auerbach and Freud have long since been friends and sitters in one another's work. In the 1970s Freud painted Auerbach in what the critic, William Feaver described as 'the supreme act of friendship,' and in 1981 Auerbach reciprocated through a series of portrait etchings of Freud, from which this etching is taken.
Felice McDowell
Lucian Freud
1981