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What drives you, Frank Auerbach? A rare final encounter with art’s great workaholic

There’s a certain romantic allure to the idea of the creative recluse – the artist who insists their work speak for itself. Alongside the Salingers, Kubricks and Garbos, Frank Auerbach always seemed to me to be a promo-dodger. So it was disarming to find myself standing in the cramped galley kitchen of a ground-floor flat in north London with one of the world’s greatest living painters as he made us coffee.

“I only have instant, I’m afraid,” said Auerbach. “And sorry about the mess.”

Despite a reputation for rarely giving interviews, Auerbach was never really reclusive, or even elusive; for seven decades, he had simply been too busy painting to waste time talking about himself to strangers. But on a cold January morning earlier this year, 92-year-old Auerbach pushed back his daily appointment at the easel by an hour or so.

I had met his son, the film-maker Jake Auerbach, at a party just before Christmas, and asked if he would pass on an invitation to his dad to be a guest on my Radio 4 interview series This Cultural Life. I knew about his 364-days-a-year working schedule, so it was a long shot. I was amazed when Jake messaged a week or so later to say Frank would be delighted to talk to us about his life, work and creative influences.

I had hoped we might be invited to the studio in Camden Town he had taken over from his friend and fellow artist Leon Kossoff in 1954, where he was photographed by Lord Snowdon in 1962 looking broodingly Brando-handsome, and in which he painted four days a week.

Instead we arrived at his spartan flat in Finsbury Park, in the front room of which he painted for the other three days a week. Having brought along portable recording equipment, producer Edwina Pitman set about finding the best place to create a radio studio within this painter’s studio. With hard floors and minimal furnishings throughout the flat, we opted for a tiny back bedroom as the least acoustically resonant space.

We sat on the edge of a neatly made bed while Frank perched on a kitchen chair squeezed into a corner.

Prompted to give us some words for a sound level, Frank launched into a word-perfect recital of WB Yeats’ 1938 poem Hound Voice, all three verses of it – far more entertaining than the usual soundcheck staple of listing that morning’s breakfast menu.

We had arrived with some trepidation. Although Frank had agreed to talk, we didn’t know if he would be willing to reveal very much, or, given his age, whether he would struggle to remember details from across nine decades. Within seconds of hitting the record button, it was clear we needn’t have worried.

Lucid stories poured forth with eloquence, charm and wit. He discussed his 1930s Berlin childhood and the growing sense of unease within his Jewish family. He recalled in vivid detail his flight from the Nazis on the eve of the second world war. After crossing the Channel, seven-year-old Frank arrived alone in England.

His answers poured out without hesitation, even when explaining how he dealt with the pain of knowing his parents and other family members had been murdered in Auschwitz. “I simply moved on,” he said. “Life is too short to brood over the past.” Yet his testimony contained a heartbreaking detail that caused me to catch my breath. His mother had packed him off with two suitcases, one with clothes for immediate use. The other contained sheets, napkins and tablecloths marked with red crosses in the corners, items for when he “got married later on”. She knew she was unlikely to ever see her son again.

Soon after Frank had settled in Bunce Court, a progressive school in Kent which housed many Jewish refugee children, the letters from Berlin stopped.

Auerbach moved to London, began to paint, never stopped working and rarely looked back. There was a decade of drunken nights in the 1950s and early 60s that he spent carousing around Soho with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff. But painting had been the daily pursuit for 70 years, as he documented the streets of Mornington Crescent, the views from Primrose Hill, and the faces of friends and family members.

In green fleece zip-up top and baggy cords, Frank looked smaller and physically frailer than the last time we had met a decade ago. Yet an extraordinary energy and charisma poured out of the man. What a privilege to witness such a force of raw creativity.

“If I hadn’t been forced by this interview to make these presumptuous and pretentious statements, I would have been innocently sloshing away next door, carrying on with my work,” he said. “That’s all there is.”

“So what drives you on, Frank?” I asked. For a painter who had dedicated an extraordinary amount of his life expressing the profundities of existence in paint, and whose dedication to the cause was surely driven by a rarely acknowledged sense of personal loss and displacement, the answer was surprisingly simple.

“It’s far more fun than anything else,” he said.

As we left, I peeked into his painting room next to the front door. A half-finished self-portrait stood on the easel. In the corner of the room was a camp bed with rumpled blankets. At 92-years-old, there was still work to be done, no time to waste.