Frank Auerbach
1961
Charcoal and chalk on paper
76.2 x 55.9 cm
Gerda Boehm (1907–2006) was Frank Auerbach’s much older cousin. She and her husband fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and settled in London. Auerbach, aged seven, had himself left Berlin earlier that year having been sent to safety in Britain by his Jewish parents, both of whom later died in the Holocaust. For a time, the Boehms were Auerbach’s only relatives in this country. He stayed with them during the school holidays towards the end of the Second World War. This is one of three portrait heads in charcoal Auerbach made of the widowed Gerda when she began sitting for him in 1961. She continued to do so weekly for the next twenty years.