Frank Auerbach, a Celebrated and Tireless Painter, Dies at 93

Frank Auerbach, one of Britain’s pre-eminent postwar painters, who for more than 60 years single-mindedly painted a small circle of intimates and the streets and parks near his London studio, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 93.

His death was announced by his gallery, Frankie Rossi Art Projects, in a news release.

Mr. Auerbach, who was mentioned in the same breath with his near-contemporaries Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, pursued his artistic agenda with a doggedness that made him a byword for artistic dedication. He painted seven days and five evenings a week in a studio in Camden Town, in north London, that he had taken over from his friend and fellow artist Leon Kossoff in 1954. He rested one day each year, taking the train to Brighton on England’s southern coast to catch a whiff of sea air, then returning to London to resume his painting schedule.

From the opening of his first show, in 1956, to his death, Mr. Auerbach never wavered in his preoccupations. Working with subjects who sat for him for decades, he turned out thickly painted portraits — usually heads and reclining figures — whose outlines struggled to emerge from dense, knotted swaths of impasto that could look like primordial ooze animated by lightning strokes of pigment.

At the same time, working from drawings made during walks around his neighborhood — Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill provided his favorite themes — he turned out feverish, intensely observed streetscapes and park scenes, dark and muted in the early years, brilliantly colored and brushy after the late 1960s.

His working methods were nearly fanatic, a slow building of surface on surface until, in the early paintings, the canvas resembled a bas-relief and required several galley assistants to hang them on the wall. His “Head of E.O.W.,” one of many portraits of his longtime lover, Estella Olive West, completed in 1955, required 300 sittings over two years.