‘He painted with a fury for life’ – how Frank Auerbach put lust and sorrow into every brushstroke

Saved from the Holocaust, this supremely modern painter captured the devastation of postwar Britain as if its wounds were his own – but he ultimately found salvation in painting
• Frank Auerbach dies aged 93
• I’ll die with a brush in my hand: Frank Auerbach – a life in pictures

When I found out Frank Auerbach was dead I thought once more of the heartbreaking story of his parents Max Auerbach and Charlotte Nora Borchardt, who saved his life by putting their child on a train from Berlin to London in 1939. Auerbach told his friend William Feaver they packed things he would need in his future life, including linen for when he married. They knew they would never see him grow up, or be there for any of his future. They believed they would soon die. And they did, in the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews.

What a future they missed. The son they saved became one of the greatest British artists of modern times who painted with a fury for life and a gravitas of grief, as if his lust and sorrow were fighting it out in each mighty brushstroke. Slashes of red or black streak across a pair of mid-period canvases, bringing savage bolts of lightning to a lime parkland or a grey heath in violent pastoral scenes that make a spring day seem like pure agony. And that’s in his mature art, when he was more reconciled to life and the healing act of painting itself.