Frank Auerbach
Painted the same few heads and the same few London streets for sixty years, and scraped most of it off.
Frank Auerbach was sent from Berlin to England on the Kindertransport in 1939 at the age of seven and never saw his parents again. He studied under David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic, then at the Royal College, and from the mid-1950s worked in the same Camden Town studio almost every day until shortly before his death in 2024. The subjects barely changed: a handful of sitters who came weekly for decades, known in the titles by their initials, and a handful of motifs within walking distance — Mornington Crescent, Primrose Hill, the building sites of post-war London. The early paint is famously thick, built up and scraped back over months.
Condition questions with Auerbach are structural rather than cosmetic. The heavy early works are on board for good reason, the paint moves, and any relining, cradling or past restoration needs to be understood before an estimate means anything. The charcoal heads are the other major body of work, and they are heavily reworked, rubbed through and sometimes patched with paper by the artist himself — that is characteristic of how they were made and is not damage, though it is regularly mistaken for it. Etchings exist in small editions. Marlborough handled the work for most of his career.
If you own a work by Frank Auerbach
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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