Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting

A study of the painter Frank Auerbach built from the artist's own words, assembled by the curator Catherine Lampert from nearly four decades of conversations.

Lampert has known Auerbach since 1978, when she became one of his sitters, and she combines her talks with him with published and archival interviews. The book covers his working methods and philosophy, his arrival in Britain in 1939 as a child refugee from Nazi Germany, and his friendships with Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. It has about 100 illustrations, 78 of them in colour. Thames & Hudson published it in 2015.

Auerbach was born in Berlin and fled Nazi Germany as a child. Lampert directed the Whitechapel Art Gallery from 1988 to 2001 and has curated Auerbach exhibitions, including the retrospective at Tate Britain.