Frank Auerbach

Gifted by the Artist to Keith and Gail Critchlow

Acquired from the above, 2024

Frank Auerbach’s Seated Figure (1955) is a powerful example of his early charcoal drawings, made during a formative decade in which he explored the human figure. Rendered in thick, layered, and expressive charcoal strokes, the full-length seated nude captures Auerbach’s process of observation and reworking. Widely regarded as one of Britain’s most important post-war artists, Auerbach developed a singular style grounded in prolonged study and emotional intensity.

Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach arrived in Britain alone in 1939 as a Jewish refugee, escaping Nazi Germany. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. However, it was the evening classes he took with David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic that deeply shaped his approach. Bomberg’s insistence on the expressive potential of form had a lasting impact. Auerbach developed his own methods: making repeated drawings from life, then returning to the studio to begin again, often over many sittings.

Charcoal offered Auerbach the flexibility to draw, erase, and reapply in pursuit of form. Auerbach worked across the entire surface of a drawing or painting in each session, often over weeks or months, not to document the process but to arrive at a deeper truth about the subject. He once described this pursuit as an attempt to capture ‘what you feel when you touch someone next to you in the dark.’ The resulting work is grounded in close observation, attentive to posture, gesture, expression, and light, and captures the raw aspects of human presence, a quality that particularly interested Auerbach.

Unlike preparatory sketches, this drawing stands as a finished work. His drawings possess a sculptural physicality, built up through layers of marks, erasures, and reworkings that give the image a tangible sense of weight and presence. This physical, sculptural approach embodies Auerbach’s rejection of the ‘optical’ clarity and polished surfaces favoured by many artists in the 1960s. Instead, he embraced a dense style that conveyed emotion and immediacy, rejecting irony or detachment in favour of sincerity. Seated Figure belongs to the same period as the artist’s now-celebrated ‘Charcoal Heads’ of the 1950s and 60s, shown in the 2024 Courtauld exhibition, and reflects the seriousness with which Auerbach approached drawing, as a process as important and demanding as painting. He saw the posed human figure as the ultimate challenge, a constant and unexhausted source of artistic renewal.

Seated Figure is part of the broader story of post-war British figurative art, a context Auerbach shared with Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, bound not only by professional admiration, but by a deep, mutual belief in the continued importance of the human figure at a time when abstraction was dominant. Now, following Auerbach’s death in 2024, works like Seated Figure carry added resonance. They remind us of the commitment with which he approached the act of drawing. This early work already bears the qualities that would define his practice: rigour and a relentless search for form that feels alive.