He has painted the same people over and over, sometimes for 40 years, dabbing, rubbing out, then starting again. Although the great artist now has to hold on to his easel to work, he still hopes to die with a brush in his hand
Frank Auerbach once said that London after the second world war was a “marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags, full of drama”. It’s a description that could just as easily apply to his own aged face, judging by the works that have just gone on display at a new show in the city.
Entitled Twenty Self-Portraits and showing at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert gallery, the exhibition comprises paintings on boards and drawings on paper, all done since 2017. Here he is looking like a bird; there, like a tree; there, a boulder unmoved by a storm. The artist, just turning 92, still lives where he works, as he always has done – alone in a north London studio. I call him at 9am on Good Friday. He picks up on the first ring.For decades, writers have struggled to find the right words to describe Auerbach: a hermit, a recluse, a monk, an obsessive. His daily routine seemed like it would never change: up before 7am to draw in quiet streets, then work in the studio – every day of the year – with one of the handful of people who have sat for him over the decades. As one veteran sitter, the art historian Catherine Lampert, puts it: “He’s all by himself, every evening, by choice.”
