Explore the Exhibition

Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was sent to England at age seven to escape Nazism. After the war, he performed in small London theaters and studied painting at the Borough Polytechnic under David Bomberg (famous for his injunction to pupils to discover “the spirit in the mass”), at Saint Martin’s School of Art, and the Royal College of Art. Auerbach’s early work focused on the human figure and numerous building sites in the British capital scarred by the war and undergoing reconstruction. In 1956 he had his first solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery.

I finish pictures again and again several times a day until finally it seems to me that it has got a little something.
Frank Auerbach, in conversation with Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978)

He quickly became known for his thick application of paint. In the 1960s he began employing brighter colors and scraping down entire canvases rather than working on top of previous attempts, thus beginning the entire image afresh at each session and often spending months or years on a single painting. Recurring subjects are regular portrait sitters, Primrose Hill (a part of Regent’s Park in north London), and the streets of Camden Town, where he has been living and working since 1954. He still draws and paints 365 days a year.

Leon Kossoff was born in east London. He studied at Saint Martin’s (where he and Frank Auerbach became close friends), at Borough Polytechnic, and at the Royal College of Art. He had his first exhibition at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery in 1957. From the early 1950s Kossoff began painting a close circle of family and friends, producing pictures in which they acquired a solid, material presence, similar to that of the buildings and streets of London he also often returned to and knew intimately.

Every time the model sits everything has changed. You have changed, the light has changed, the balance has changed.
Leon Kossoff, in Leon Kossoff: Recent Paintings (Edinburgh Scottish Academy, 1987)

He developed a painterly style with thickly applied, constantly reworked layers of paint in characteristic earth colors. Early drawings were intensively worked as he repeatedly erased and restarted the image. He was to develop a similar process in his paintings, working on board and scraping down the paint with a palette knife before reapplying it. Kossoff lives and works in north London.

R.B. Kitaj was born in Cleveland. Among the members of his close family were first- and second-generation European Jewish refuges. Between assignments in the merchant navy and the U.S. Army, he studied painting at Cooper Union and the Academy of Fine Art, Vienna. Afterward, he moved to England to attend the Ruskin School, Oxford, and the Royal College of Art, London. His first exhibition was held at Marlborough Fine Art in 1963. Around this time, Kitaj met Andrews, Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, and Kossoff, who were also with the gallery. During the early 1960s Kitaj concentrated on combining figurative imagery with abstraction and began to incorporate collage into his paintings, drawing on photography and cinema and referring to historical events and political circumstances.

For me, books are what trees are for the landscape painter.
R. B. Kitaj, Time, February 19, 1965.

In the mid-1970s he began to work increasingly from life, moving away from complex compositions to more straightforward figure studies. During the late 1980s he continued to read widely in Jewish culture — studying Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka — and positioned himself more explicitly as a Jewish artist. In 1989 he published his First Diasporist Manifesto, analyzing the Jewish dimension in his art and his position as an outsider. In 1997 he left London and moved to Los Angeles, where he died in 2007.

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents. Bacon’s father, unable to face his son’s homosexuality, drove him out of the family home at age seventeen. After traveling to Germany and France he settled in London. He began painting and drawing in the late 1920s and worked briefly as a furniture and interior designer. He received guidance from an older friend, the Australian artist Roy de Maistre, but was otherwise largely self-taught.

What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.
Francis Bacon, May 1966, in Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 1975)

In 1945 the showing of a number of his paintings at London’s Lefevre Gallery established his critical reputation, and he became central to an artistic milieu in Soho that included Lucian Freud and Michael Andrews. In the mid-1940s he began using as starting points for his work reproductions of paintings, sculpture, photographs, and film stills, mostly imagery of angst that had historical significance but also resonated with him personally. From 1962 he expanded the range of his photographic sources by commissioning particular shots of models, mostly friends and lovers. He described his painting as an attempt to create an image of the cluster of sensations that an appearance arouses in him.

A grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 and moved with his family to London in 1933 to escape Nazism. He trained at the Central School of Art in London and at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. Freud had his first solo exhibition in 1944 at London’s Lefevre Gallery. Throughout his career he focused on the human figure, rendered in a realist manner and imbued with a stark and evocative psychological intensity. He described his work as autobiographical, many of his sitters being friends, lovers, and family members.

I would wish my work to appear factual, not literal.
Lucian Freud, in Lucian Freud (Hayward Gallery, 1974)

In the 1960s Freud progressively moved from the linear approach of the 1940s and 1950s to a looser, broader paintwork. While the human figure remained Freud’s enduring preoccupation, always painted from life in the presence of the model, he occasionally tackled other themes, such as his garden and the view from his studio.