Recent Work: January–February 1983

London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1983. First printing. 39 pp., 8.25 x 11.5 inches. Perfect-bound in printed wrappers. Illustrated with thirty full-page black-&-white reproductions of paintings, plus color frontispiece. Inscribed and signed by the artist. Light rubbing to wrappers; otherwise fine.

Painter Frank Auerbach — along with Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, R. B. Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Howard Hodgkin, and David Hockney, among others — is typically associated with what is sometimes known as the School of London, a loose grouping of artists, mostly working in London in the 1970s, who were concerned with figuration rather than the dominant trends of abstraction, and conceptual and minimalist art. The term was coined by Kitaj in the catalogue for the 1976 Hayward Gallery exhibition The Human Clay, which he had curated.

Auerbach and Kitaj remained close friends until the latter’s suicide in 2007. Auerbach was always less in the limelight than others such as Bacon (who first promoted Auerbach to Marlborough), Hockney, and Freud (who amassed one of the largest collections of Auerbach's paintings), but he was greatly admired by them all.

An exceptional association copy, with a warm inscription from the artist to Kitaj and his wife, painter Sandra Fischer.