Frank Auerbach – his art was his entire existence

Frank Auerbach, known for his encrusted canvases, a Holocaust orphan, who lived a monkish, solitary life in Camden, London has died aged 93. Seven days a week, 10 hours a day, for decades, he painted and said “I’ve certainly never been lonely by myself. I’m far more likely to be lonely in the company of people who haven’t understood.” He said he had no choice in his career. “If I hadn’t become a painter I would die.”

 He was born 29 April 1931 in Berlin and was sent by his parents to England in 1939 and educated at a Jewish-Quaker school. He never saw them again.

  Art was everything to him, “not a craft, but a philosophical inquiry”.

 One reviewer said ‘All his work was abstracted reality, with the energy of the artist written across the surface in broad, thick swathes of paint, often applied straight from the tubes. His colours were dramatic and the works were often displayed in glass cases, heightening the impression that they were sculpture. One had the desire to touch a painting by Auerbach, as much as look at it.’

 He was a Sun Mercury in Taurus square Mars in Leo giving him a stubborn determination, artistic talent and despite his self-chosen isolation a capacity to attract attention. He also had a confident Jupiter Pluto in Cancer in the tough and inventive generational opposition to Saturn square Uranus and an independent-minded North Node in Aries.

 One could argue that the physicality of his paintings stemmed from his Taurus Sun. But other Taurus painters had different styles – Turner, Gainsborough, Rossetti, Salvador Dali, Braque, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Joseph Beuys.

  An early and seminal influence was painter David Bomberg, an upbeat Sagittarius whose Jupiter in Aquarius connected with Auerbach’s Sun and Mars. He ‘impressed upon Auerbach the seriousness of the artist’s vocation, a necessary respect for tradition and an obligation to be true to the world as he saw it.”

 His global name 22^nd harmonic and leaving-a-legacy 17H are strong but most notable is his creative ‘seeking soul’ 7^th harmonic with a stressed yod of Saturn sextile Mars inconjunct an influential Pluto.  

One of my favourite painters.

Add On: Added above. Self portrait from 2020 and Julia his wife 2021.