News from Norfolk

British painter Frank Auerbach has died, at the age of 93 years.

Whatever else they may have been, Auerbach’s pictures were never easy — easy to make, or easy to love. Effort was demanded on both sides. 

First impressions of his work — on the part of critics and, indeed, the rest of us — often focused on the superficial. Auerbach’s paint could be almost ludicrously thick, his brushstrokes crude, the resulting accretions of pigment apparently messy, hard to read — rebarbative. 

And yet, the longer one engaged with those violently rubbed-out charcoal drawings, those wildly stabbing orthogonals, the grossly clotted or savagely scraped-back surfaces of the paintings, the more they tended to offer in return.