© The Estate of Frank Auerbach. Courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects From breaking news and insider insights to exhibitions and events around the world, the team at The Art Newspaper picks apart the art world’s big stories with the help of special guests. An award-winning podcast hosted by Ben Luke. During his lifetime, the late artist Frank Auerbach never had an exhibition in Berlin, the city of his birth, which he left for the UK in 1939 to escape the Nazis. This weekend, the first show of his work in the German capital opens at the Galerie Michael Werner. Our digital editor, Alexander Morrison, went to Berlin to talk to the artist’s son, the filmmaker Jake Auerbach, about the exhibition. Frank Auerbach, Hampstead Road, High Summer, 2010. Private Collection A new book by Dan Hicks, a curator at the Pitts River Museum in Oxford, UK, titled Every Monument Must Fall explores the origins of the fierce contemporary debates around colonialism, art, and heritage. It investigates in particular the acquisition of human remains and their ongoing place in museums and other historical institutions. Ben Luke spoke to him about the publication. And this week’s Work of the Week is Republic (1995) by Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose centenary is being celebrated this year with a new publication and a series of exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, Palma de Mallorca, Brescia, New York, Hamburg, Basel and Vienna. Luke spoke to Stephen Ban, a long-term specialist in Finley’s work, about this sculptural installation. © The Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Courtesy the Artist’s Estate and Victoria Miro remembering Fernando Botero and a pioneering Barkley L podcast7 March 2025Censorship and Australia’s Venice Biennale pavilion, a controversial AI auction, and Elizabeth Catlett in Washington—podcastWhat might the fallout be after Creative Australia’s unpopular decision to cancel Khaled Sabsabi’s project AI art beyond this week’s open letter and a chat about Catlett’s terracotta sculpture ‘Tired’ Please select what you would like included for printing: Copy the text below and then paste that into your favorite email application passed peacefully into the loving arms of his Savior and unwavering love for his family and friends where he met and married his high school sweetheart and his dedication to his beliefs was evident in his actions He proudly served in the Ohio Army National Guard He faithfully volunteered at Akron Pregnancy Services where his compassionate heart and dedication to helping others made a lasting impact Don’s evangelistic spirit and his genuine warmth and kindness drew many to him He had a gift for sharing the Gospel and spreading the love of Christ He cherished spending time with his family creating memories that will be treasured for generations Don was blessed to be a part of the Tamarack Ridge community where he flourished as a result of his friendships with staff and residents His infectious humor and genuine interest in others made him a beloved presence in the lives of those who knew him Kevin (Luann) and Kristen (Chuck) Haver; six grandchildren and Becca; as well as all of his extended family and service will live on in the hearts of all who were blessed to know him but his family takes comfort in knowing he is now rejoicing in the presence of his Lord and Savior Please join us to celebrate the life of Don F Receiving friends and family beginning at noon please consider donations in memory of Don to Akron Pregnancy Services OH 44305; Tamarack Ridge Health & Rehabilitation Center To leave an online condolence or shar a memory Enter your phone number above to have directions sent via text This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply Service map data © OpenStreetMap contributors Thanks for visiting ! 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distribution requirements So he tried introductory economics without having a clear idea of what economics was — and discovered he enjoyed it "It was nice to see applications of mathematical tools to real-world situations," he recalls "It was far less abstract than the math or even the physics that I'd been studying Several of his professors encouraged him to pursue an economics Ph.D he had another shift in store: He expected to focus on either macroeconomics or mathematical economics — economic theory — but once he was there "What got me interested in focusing on taxation and fiscal policy and other things like that was that I ended up working with Marty Feldstein" — Martin Feldstein a future chair of the Council of Economic Advisers — "first as his research assistant So I was exposed to the frontier of thinking in the area Auerbach has been on the economics faculties of Harvard he is the director of Berkeley's Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance Among his research interests are the economic effects of taxation the differing effects of fiscal policy measures on different generations the effectiveness and long-term implications of the economic policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the sustainability of rising public debts Price interviewed Auerbach by videoconference in January more than 120 percent of gross domestic product it has grown enormously during the pandemic and post-pandemic eras I do have the problem of having said we should be worried a long time ago when the situation wasn't as bad as it is now I would say I think even more strongly now that we should be concerned about it One factor that clouds the issue is that some of the warnings that we've had — not from me — about huge spikes in interest rates and things like that haven't really happened We haven't seen the sudden bad outcomes that some people might have expected Some people have argued that the debt is just not an issue I think one of the problems is that it's not an issue you have to worry about until you do it's much more difficult to do things because by that time you've gotten to a point where you really have to start cutting in very painful ways instead of making adjustments over a longer period of time that can be more subtle EF: Is that the bad outcome — that interest debt servicing displaces other priorities There are different ways that debt can lead to bad outcomes in countries that are less central to the world economy than the United States and don't have a reserve currency and are historically less trustworthy It can cause a crisis in terms of lack of access to capital markets and things like that What I anticipate more is just a gradual tightening of the vise where more and more of the revenue we raise goes to debt service And we're in less of a position to raise taxes because they're already creeping up And our spending commitments are growing faster than our ability to tax One of the reasons why we haven't done more politically about the debt in recent years is that until the last couple of years we've had low interest rates relative to our growth rate They came down for several years below what was expected And so it made people more and more sanguine But if you look over the longer reach of time such favorable interest rate outcomes are not something that one can anticipate It's better to start dealing with it now when we have a little bit of wiggle room than to wait until we're really up against it EF: An optimist's argument might be that productivity growth is going to be great and we're going to be able to grow ourselves out of this situation Auerbach: I think part of the problem is that historically interest rates and growth rates tend to move together but there are good reasons why stronger economies with faster growth would have higher interest rates There are more opportunities for investment the government's not likely to come out that far ahead If the growth rate picks up maybe in the short run So there's been a lot of emphasis and thinking about the difference between interest rates and growth rates EF: Can we take comfort from the fiscal situation in Japan where public debt exceeds 250 percent of GDP some of the difference is that a lot more of the Japanese government bonds are held within government accounts which exclude debt held by the national government Japan is still substantially higher than the U.S. the institutional differences between Japan and the U.S make it easier for Japan to have a big debt-to-GDP ratio Almost all Japanese government debt is held domestically So in terms of thinking about having willing holders of the debt that's more true in Japan than it is in the U.S I think much more of the debt is held by financial institutions in Japan The government's not simply going into debt markets the way it does in the U.S A lot of it's held in financial institutions It's not necessarily that they're required to but it is part of the Japanese culture or custom that the debt is held that way I think it means that the ability of the government of Japan to issue debt is higher for a given debt-to-GDP ratio Japan could also encounter serious problems at some point and it's hard to know when if you look at some of the things that are going to press on the national debt on health care as a share of GDP than Japan does We're at 19 percent of GDP or something like that on health That's substantially higher than Japan and at least the government component of it is growing and occupying a larger and larger share of our federal budget That's adding a lot of pressure in addition to the debt service coming from the debt that's already been issued EF: Do you anticipate fiscal pressures will lead policymakers here toward so-called financial repression — measures to push Americans and American institutions to hold public debt such as capital controls and regulatory requirements for financial institutions went through a lot of financial deregulation We've had financial repression in the past and it's hard to imagine imposition of capital controls or other requirements that essentially force lower interest rates on households to help finance the federal budget There hasn't been any movement in that direction in the political sphere from either side and so I'm kind of doubtful that that's going to be one of the channels we use to deal with the federal debt EF: We've been talking about the federal debt broadly When you think more specifically about Medicare and Social Security do you see a crisis on the horizon for either of those programs Auerbach: The problems in those programs are a little bit like the problems with the federal debt itself which is that Medicare — at least Medicare Part A the hospital insurance — and Social Security have trust funds can't pay benefits once the trust fund hits zero; they can only pay benefits that can be financed by current revenues which would be substantially lower than the benefits that are currently promised The Social Security trust fund is projected by the Social Security trustees to run out of money in less than a decade and it hasn't really changed much in the last few years then we're going to get to a point where either there has to be a change in the Social Security system or benefits have to be cut I doubt that benefits will be cut across the board That's what would happen if nothing were done you might say there's a manufactured crisis in store which has a trust fund that also will eventually run out of money I'm not as confident as some other people that this will lead to a reform of these programs which was the last time the Social Security trust fund was nearing exhaustion we had the Greenspan Commission that recommended changes in Social Security which raised the retirement age very slowly and increased payroll taxes That put the Social Security system on a better financial footing for many decades But it could also be the case that Congress and the government don't have the appetite for providing this kind of bad news to people in the Social Security system we'll use general revenue funding to cover the shortfalls of Social Security They are not self-sustaining; we have premiums paying for a small part of the benefits and the rest comes from general revenues Some of the traditional supporters of Social Security say it's good to have it be a self-financing system because it makes people feel that they have a stake in it when they're paying their payroll taxes and so forth But if the choice of the government is to cut benefits I'm fearful that they'll choose general revenue funding and just kick the can down the road Social Security is walled off from the rest of the government in the sense that it has dedicated funding that including taxes on benefits as well as payroll taxes although we include Social Security in the unified federal budget we will find out in the not-too-distant future EF: Also related to retirement, you found in your research that the federal tax system and federal programs discourage the elderly from working Auerbach: Both the additional taxes that they pay when working and the benefits that they lose We always think of taxes discouraging work with increases in taxes as people work more That's certainly one of the things that discourages work It's true for the elderly just as it's true for everybody else there are some pretty large benefit programs that are means tested We think of Medicaid as a program for the poor but a large share of Medicaid benefits go to the elderly — for example And so if you have more income and more assets Supplemental Security Income is another transfer program that the elderly benefit from that is means tested There are potentially pretty big disincentives to work if you are at risk of losing some of these benefits They can swamp the effects of just the explicit taxes that you pay there's a question of whether people really understand the way Social Security works for people who are below the normal retirement age you can receive benefits as early as age 62 — unless you're disabled which says you lose benefits once your earnings go up above a certain amount What's essentially a secret as far as most people are concerned is that you do get credits for the additional earnings your benefits go up in the future because you're earning money now It's just deferring the benefits I'm going to get There's an adjustment that essentially gives me the benefits back at a later date when I do fully retire But whether people understand that is quite doubtful The evidence suggests they don't because there's a lot of bunching of earnings just below where the earnings test starts to kick in — which wouldn't be there if they understood That is a potentially very large disincentive It's a particularly unfortunate one because there already is in place an adjustment designed so it won't discourage people from working But given that people don't seem to understand it I think there's probably room for reform to make it more explicit perhaps by getting rid of the earnings test entirely EF: Do you see taxation of Social Security benefits the same way Auerbach: Taxation of Social Security benefits affects people above a certain income So more and more people now have to pay taxes on their Social Security benefits Not only does that discourage retirees from working it discourages them before they receive Social Security because if they have higher assets that they've saved they're going to have higher income from those assets — interest And that's going to contribute to the income that might cause them to be subject to taxes on their Social Security benefits EF: We've had elevated inflation for about five years. You've argued that this has had significant hidden effects on households because federal fiscal policies don't fully take inflation into account there are different ways in which inflation interacts with the fiscal system to affect the taxes that people pay and the benefits that they receive It could help them or hurt them; it mostly hurts them Some things are not indexed for inflation at all which was the threshold over which you're taxed on your Social Security benefits That threshold has been fixed in nominal terms since it was implemented That means that the more inflation we have the more people are going to be subject to tax on some or all of their Social Security benefits Where we do have indexing for a lot of elements of the tax system and benefits there are delays before the system catches up your benefits go up every year because of inflation the federal tax brackets are indexed for inflation so that if your income goes up by 10 percent because inflation is 10 percent it's not going to change your bracket because the bracket's indexed for inflation What that means is that if there's a sudden surge in inflation the first year or so is going to happen before the brackets and the benefits start reacting to it if we went from an inflation rate of zero to an inflation rate of 10 percent on a permanent basis that would cause a 10 percent decline in people's Social Security benefits because it would happen once and then we'd be forever one year behind The final thing is that capital income — interest things like that — are mismeasured because of inflation if I buy an asset for $100 and the price level doubles over the period that I hold it because we don't index capital gains for inflation If the inflation rate is 4 percent and I'm getting 4 percent nominal interest as well as similar effects on the benefits side in terms of delayed indexing people in general — not every person — have a reduction in resources as a result of inflation that makes inflation a more effective tool for dealing with the deficit It's traditional to think about sudden inflation as a tool governments use particularly in less developed countries with very high debt-to-GDP ratios They often may be tempted to try to inflate some of the debt away debt-to-GDP ratio improved somewhat over the last few years even though we were running very large deficits This is an additional reason or channel through which inflation could help the government finance its deficits I don't think it's a particularly attractive way to do it because it's quite arbitrary If you look at the distribution of effects it varies a lot across households depending on the type of income they have EF: You've been paying close attention to fiscal policy for quite a while now When you see the situation with the debt and debt-to-GDP play out Do you have some sort of gut reaction to all this I am sad that the problems that I think are very very important and should be at the top of the list of things government is dealing with don't interest the government at all You might say one of the frustrations of being an economist is that we often see regardless of the thing we work on — we could be working on environmental policy where I think there must be an enormous amount of frustration too — is that we have policies we think would work well which the government doesn't seem very interested in I think the best we can do is continue putting forward ideas of what we think government should be doing the problems that we think it should be dealing with And hope that somebody gets interested in them One of my most recent papers was on the national debt looking at projections based on the last century or so and asking what kinds of government reactions to debt will put us on a stable path doesn't pay any attention to the national debt during the Reagan administration as well as the first Bush and Clinton administrations it was the case that when debt or projected deficits went up government undertook actions to reduce them either by increasing taxes or by cutting spending If we went back to the way we were behaving then the kinds of shocks that are going to keep hitting the budget either because of interest rates or pandemics or financial crises or other things could be dealt with by those kinds of government reactions It's good news in the sense that we've been there before It's not as though we have to undertake an approach that's never been contemplated or practiced we lost religion sometime in the last 20 to 25 years And it's not exactly clear how we're going to get that back because we lost it in a bipartisan way There used to be bigger constituencies in Congress and in the White House for dealing with national debt at least when problems became more apparent Another paper I've been working on estimates fiscal multipliers in a broad sense — looking at the effects of but also looking at broader measures of social outcomes like mortality This is because my co-authors and I felt that we're taking a too-narrow view of the potential benefits of a fiscal expansion another dollar of government spending might increase social benefits by maybe 25 or 30 cents in ways that are not accounted for by the way we usually measure fiscal multipliers looking at effects on income or effects on employment EF: What do you think are the biggest unanswered research questions today in public finance Auerbach: I would say it's this point we were talking about before: We have a lot of information about the effects of policies and the design of policies but we seem to lack a way of connecting those to actual policy adoptions One example has to do with redistribution; economists for a long time have thought about the optimal ways of redistributing resources in order to overcome inequality And that's clearly not the way a lot of non-economists think about it They tend to think about the income that they get before government people would seem to be much more interested in having a job that pays them a higher income than having a job with lower income and a government transfer payment People tend to think more about what they get in the market as somehow an indication of their well-being and not necessarily equating that with what we give them We say that free trade can be beneficial for all if those who are losers are compensated The standard problem with that is we may not compensate people enough But perhaps the bigger problem is that people may not view that compensation in the same way that they would view having a job governments seem to be more interested in trying to help people in ways that don't actually work through taxes and transfers Every economist thinks some sort of carbon tax would be the best way of dealing with it We believe in pricing to get people to adopt the right behavior given the problem of global warming and other externalities But as much as there's been a bipartisan consensus among economists and attempts to interest policymakers in this We've instead adopted policies that are much less effective and much more costly from a social perspective So economists need to understand what's missing there — how people perceive problems like this why they think the approaches that are being adopted are preferable You might say these are questions of political economy rather than public finance they are questions of public finance because they involve trying to design policies that are most socially beneficial in ways that can actually be adopted Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance National Bureau of Economic Research; Member American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Fellow Econ Focus interview archive Receive an email notification when Econ Focus is posted online By submitting this form you agree to the Bank's Terms & Conditions and Privacy Notice. you will need to confirm your request to receive email notifications from the Richmond Fed Please click the confirm subscription link in the email to activate your request If you do not receive a confirmation email check your junk or spam folder as the email may have been diverted You can unsubscribe at any time using the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email Subscribe to our other digital publications Tim Sablik who was with the franchise from 1950 until 2006 Celtics governor Wyc Grousbeck met Holiday at midcourt before the game to hand him the trophy “Jrue has been key to the success of our team,” Grousbeck said in a press release He alwaysdoes the right thing in the right way He is a perfect embodiment of what it means to be a BostonCeltic—dedicated and relentless in his pursuit of success.” Holiday has appeared in 61 games this season for the Celtics The former All-Star is averaging 11.2 points per game along with 4.3 rebounds Holiday was named to the 2023-24 NBA All-Defense team and also won a gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics Holiday played a pivot role in helping Boston secure Banner 18 and win the 2024 NBA Finals Holiday and company will look to defend their title this spring Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3zBKQY6 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3GfUPFi Texas – Saturday’s contest with the Sacramento River Cats and El Paso Chihuahuas went into the bottom of the eighth without a score but four runs late in the ninth and 10th innings that featured a homer from Brett Auerbach lifted Sacramento to a 4-2 win over El Texas – Saturday’s contest with the Sacramento River Cats and El Paso Chihuahuas went into the bottom of the eighth without a score but four runs late in the ninth and 10th innings that featured a homer from Brett Auerbach lifted Sacramento to a 4-2 win over El Paso in game five The Chihuahuas (12-14) took the lead on a Luis Campusano sacrifice fly and a Yonathan Perlaza RBI single in the home half of the eight though it was not their first scoring opportunity El Paso nearly scored in the third on a Clay Dungan single to right but Tim Locastro was thrown out trying to score by Victor Bericoto to end the inning Bericoto had the only River Cats (13-13) hit when the ninth started and it was nearly the only hit for the game until a crucial error made by Eguy Rosario combined with a wild pitch put a pair of runners in scoring positition Jake Lamb delivered one of the timeliest hits so far this season when he singled into center field scoring both Marco Luciano and Brett Wisely Sacramento’s bullpen kept the Chihauhuas off the board in the ninth working around a leadoff walk in the frame as he hammered a 2-1 pitch with one out over the wall in center field that also scored the extra-innings runner from second base who worked the ninth and the 10th without allowing a run for his first winning decision of the season Trevor McDonald started for Sacramento but did not factor into the decision despite not allowing a run though he did walk four and allow three hits to five strikeouts Of the three home runs that Auerbach has hit this season two have been go-ahead homers and he trails only the three of fellow Brett In total Sacramento scored four runs on three hits The River Cats will have the chance to split the series tomorrow when the two teams line up for game six of the set from Southwest University Park at 11:05 a.m Beloved husband of Laurie Auerbach (nee Brager); loving father of Raquel Eve Auerbach; devoted son of Roslyn Auerbach and the late Marvin Auerbach; cherished son-in-law of Wendy Brager Funeral services will be held at Temple Beth Ami on Friday 2024 at 11 am with Interment to follow at United Hebrew Cemetery Family will be holding a meal of condolence following services from 4 pm – 7 pm at the Auerbach Residence Family will be receiving visitors on Saturday 12 pm – 5 pm with Minyan at 8:30 pm Shiva will be held Sunday from 2 pm – 5 pm with Minyan at 6:30 pm Live streaming will be available for the funeral service at Temple Beth Ami: https://bethami.org/services-and-holidays/livestream/ In lieu of flowers, contributions in his memory may be made to the American Cancer Society or JSSA 29 April 1930 – 11 November 2024The German-born painter’s love of films crosswords and a good pub quiz are recalled by his only child keen to dispel popular ‘myths’ about the artist He worked 364 days a year until a few years ago Christmas Day too was sacrificed to “The best game I’ve ever played” His death is too raw for me now to offer a coherent summation; my picture of him is more a montage of memories he initiated contact: “I will be in the studio every Thursday evening from 7.30 until 8.30 and we went to a Greek restaurant near Camden Road station I think a favourite of his friend Lucian Freud and the door was covered with signs deterring passing trade: “Reservations Only” which we were still doing together in his last weeks Ryan O’Neal’s acting talents and John Denver’s abilities as a songwriter were two useful standbys if a bit of verbal “rough and tumble” was required and they were still being brought up almost 50 years later Frank Auerbach and his son Jake photographed at the French House Photograph: Nicola BensleyI began sitting for my father and soon my parents re-established their relationship (they had got married two weeks before my birth) and through sittings and Wednesday evening meals together we managed to create an unorthodox but reasonably functional family Frank was the first person I would ask when dealing with a tricky decision I had a “good job” many years ago and was considering throwing it in to seek work in the film industry a decision laced with a fair amount of financial risk “I would prefer you to spend the rest of your days getting drunk in a pub on the west coast of Ireland than to spend another minute being bored!” was his immediate response He could be tough. He didn’t think it a kindness to be less than honest. The artist Tom Phillips, who was taught by Frank at Camberwell School of Art told me that my father’s first words to him were: “That’s the most insensitive drawing I’ve ever seen.” And he could be generous too; a few weeks later his judgment was: “If you keep on improving at this rate you’ll end up as good as Leonardo da Vinci.” A few persistent myths seem to hang around him and they are worth rebutting Myth No 1: “Auerbach produces pictures that are weighed down with thick paint.” The paintings haven’t been “thick” for more than 50 years It was never premeditated but more the inevitable result of repeated aggregated efforts to get the picture right When in the early 1970s he found a way to scrape off after each session and he felt liberated: “I thought I had made the thinnest picture ever.” Since then the paint you see in the finished works is almost certainly fresh from the final painting session Myth No 2 (the one that had him grumbling the most): “Frank Auerbach came to England on the Kindertransport” His sponsorship was thanks to a private act of generosity by the writer Iris Origo and was entirely unconnected to Kindertransport In June 2016 I investigated the possibility of getting German citizenship When it seemed likely that I might be successful but I think it is a very good idea… it is good to have options.” Having effectively reclaimed my father’s citizenship I thought it good manners to learn some German From that time our daily phone calls would begin with a few minutes of German conversation After a while I began to realise that his German was that of a seven-year-old child He knew fairytale words like “giant” but not those from a grownup world ‘The best game I’ve ever played’: Auerbach at work Photograph: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/AlamyMyth No 3: “Frank does nothing but paint and finds it difficult to talk.” Frank described himself as a “beast in a burrow” but his reputation as a hermit was overstated; he ate out He loved pub quizzes and there were a few times when he would join me and friends as a team member My father did some acting when he was younger and loved the company of actors with my mother increasingly unwell and his other sitters confined to their homes I worried that he was losing his social confidence so I organised a regular table outside the French House each Sunday at midday Lizzy and I and a guest or two would meet and Frank could let his extraordinary memory for plays Max Miller and British films off the leash I am not convinced that these thoughts are worth sharing My first instinct is to ask Frank to look it over and tell me what he thinks This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025 The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media has always needed rescuing from his admirers whether they be psychobiographers in search of holocaust trauma critics looking for links to German expressionism or anglophile modernists trying to iron him out into Kettles Yard-esque tastefulness His paintings are often the site of misconceptions Recently he was the subject of a troubling little memorial at Tate Britain 1 (1960) hung in a corridor just before the Early 20th Century galleries beside a square glass vase holding eight white roses – drooping when I visited near closing time in December and sometime landlady – looked down and to the left from beneath its brilliantly lit overhang of forehead The shelf with roses stood in this sight-line brooded on the tribute to her absent maker Not because of the intention it expresses – a bland gesture of remembrance from an institution to which the painter had deep ties – but because of the impact the framing has on the painting Auerbach’s portraits might be ostentatious light filtered through cut glass – these speak to a version of English modernism utterly foreign to his vision The great mass of highlights seems to weigh on Stella’s forehead to roll her whole head into its expression of slightly crushed introspection Auerbach has sacrificed a lot to this weight The shadows cast by the electric glare are their own kind of drama The lighting on Stella’s shoulder is bounded in vivid red the edge of her left cheek a bubbling of reds and greens these shadows contain the painting’s brightest colours They form an intersecting diagonal lattice as solid and structural as the orthogonals in Auerbach’s contemporary paintings of building sites The relation between coloured shadows and massed Auerbach made the paintings of Stella on his knees I can never get away from this perspective when viewing the paintings – their smallness and closeness adding up to a kind of hard-won intimacy ‘Hard-won’ because reached through a mad exhaustive testing of the painting’s representational means scraped and repainted at greater and greater densities the visual ‘fact’ (to use Auerbach’s terms) ‘stalks into the world like a new monster’ This new thing retains its link to representation If you compare the paintings to photographs of Auerbach and Stella from the 1960s But it is a kind of representation subjected to profound stress by the sheer weight of the impasto Critics have often reached for tactile metaphors to comprehend this kind of depiction at once so close to its objects and so estranged from them like ‘running our fingertips over the contours of a head in the dark’ All this is a long way from the Tate’s vase of white roses There were English modernists for whom the clarity of light through water and the elegant grouping of figures and objects in well-lit interiors were the fulcrum of art Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell in Charleston His was a world of spartan interiors and urban grime of Mornington Crescent Station for the hundredth time the figure on the bed squashed and comical The Tate’s pairing of painting and flowers suggests a domesticity that the art went to great lengths to refuse It would never have occurred to Auerbach to make a beachfront studio or a Sussex country house the base for his modernism he was saved from the gas chambers by a family connection who sponsored his emigration to England along with four other children in April 1939 a progressive boarding school in Kent for refugee children run by another German Jew Meanwhile his parents were deported to Auschwitz in March 1943 and murdered later that year he moved to London to study fine art – first at the Borough Polytechnic under David Bomberg It is easy (perhaps too easy) to see the marks of trauma and forced migration in Auerbach’s life The obsessive work schedule (364 days a year) and the extreme reluctance ever to leave north London have all been interpreted – rightly I’m sure – as eccentricities conditioned by the ructions of his childhood and the effort at containing them It can seem a small step from recognising the effects of trauma and repression on the life to seeing them in the art the boy who had arrived clutching one little suitcase Why shouldn’t those gunked up paint layers stand for the sedimentations of a psyche engaged in obscuring its own feelings and memories Why shouldn’t the muck-caked gloom that wreaths the early building site paintings represent the mood of an orphaned young man Why not see Stella’s withdrawnness – her squashed But we should beware of the tendency of biographical reasoning to make the art an illustration of the life – in particular of events suffered during childhood One thing this approach neglects is the concreteness of Auerbach’s paintings – their nature as specific marked by context and related to the productions of other artists in a mutually enforcing network of culture and influence as in his copies of paintings in the National Gallery the borders of this network could be thrown very wide This was the case with the Heads of Leon Kossoff he did in the mid 1950s and introduced him to Bomberg’s painting classes They sat for each other on numerous occasions in the years 1954-7 The resulting paintings are so similar that were it not for the physiognomic differences between the two men – Kossoff’s sharp features Auerbach’s strong jaw – it would be almost impossible to tell them apart The paintings have the same heaped impasto The effect of these techniques is to grasp and fix each head as something that is at once massive and mobile both physically there and liable to slip away Head of Leon Kossoff (1954) is cemented in place by the mottled low relief black paint that forms a shroud of hair and shade around the highlit areas of the face formed from thicker applications of grey and mixed Rivulets cross the socket of Kossoff’s right eye like sweat The verticality of this runoff gives a sense of gravity pulled downwards by the weight of its own emphases even as it is held by them The affinities between Auerbach and Kossoff in the 1950s give the lie to any understanding of Auerbach’s art as a unique emanation of his childhood He and Kossoff were both proteges of Bomberg Europeanised vein of British modernism inherited from the music halls and back alleys of Walter Sickert They arrived at their technique ‘like two mountaineers roped together’ repeating Pablo Picasso’s famous simile for himself and Georges Braque in the early years of cubism And although they took it in different directions – Kossoff towards anecdote; Auerbach towards totality – their proximity in the mid-1950s speaks to a shared need in the rendering of modern British life As was the lurking sense of pastiche and obsolescence There was no need to fetch them up from Birkenau Take one of the early landscapes – the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Primrose Hill Auerbach was a great reader (and reciter) of Eliot The painting’s complicated silhouetting of the hill’s black-brown diagonal against the greyer browns of the sky always puts me in mind of The Waste Land’s ‘brown fog of a winter dawn’ Auerbach lacked the poet’s patrician sneer with Eliot’s pairing of opulence and squalor with ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’ The poem’s atmosphere is that of the ‘rat dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I was fishing in the dull canal’; but it is also that of ‘the violet hour This range of tone was one of the fruits of modernism’s breaking up of artistic orthodoxies in spite of all the density of thick brown murk cannot quite make up its mind whether the intended effect is not that of the grande décoration under different weather conditions and from different angles – the same technique he used for all his large landscapes You can see where the grey-browns of the sky have been physically pressed into the blacks and darker browns of the hill’s hump of the painting gathering in weight and density around this central axis Auerbach’s trees do not simply stand on the hill their blacks extending in vertical strokes like reflections in a tarnished pool It is here that the painting’s muteness and intractability resolve themselves as aspects of a time of day – of a peculiar visual fact – as the first blush of sunrise throws the hill into dim relief the construction and condensation of landscape into new kinds of visual intensity And if these tip the work towards over-emphasis of a kind familiar from Eliot’s ‘violet hour’ or Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) ‘Painting has to give itself over entirely to unity and difference in the thing seen’ ‘The visible has to seem to touch the painted surface The unity of a picture is only compelling – only non-trivial as philosophers say – in so far as it persuades us that it is an instance of an order in the material of experience This insistence on the totality and independence of the picture itself – a totality wrested from the visual fact but also standing in for it – is the key to Auerbach’s development as a painter in the years that followed in spite of contrary assertions by philistine art critics (Brian Sewell complained in 1988 of ‘so limited a range of interest so much repeated Auerbach’s later works departed so far from the gloomy impasto of his beginnings Looking at the incandescent oranges of Camden Theatre or the day-glo pastoral of Park Village East (2002-3) it is as if the hints of gaudy sunrise in the early work were the hidden essence of the whole practice Painting’s capacity to generate new intensities out of what merely exists is pushed further and further towards extremes of dramatisation or ridiculousness from which others would have drawn back Part of the drama has to do with the reciprocal interactions of the human body and its surroundings One striking feature of Auerbach’s mature landscapes is how strange their human inhabitants are – how bodies seem warped by their place on the canvas The gloaming in Behind Camden Town Station Autumn Evening (1965) divulges a silly little stick man at left striding self-importantly towards the painting’s edge Catherine Lampert’s uncertainty about whether the figure in Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law III Summer Morning (1966) is a piece of Victorian public art or a passer-by gets at the humorous stiffness of these figures tactile intimacies of the portraits and the nudes to these slender little reeds ironed into gridlike flatness by the painting’s structural imperatives and wafted through the shadows of an evening or the first light of day I suppose Auerbach’s answer would have to do with the differences in scope that come in when making landscapes as opposed to portraits Not that the essential motivations need differ Whether painting E.O.W.’s Reclining Head II (1966) or Mornington Crescent tube the point of the painting – to grasp what he called the ‘recalcitrant inescapable thereness’ of the scene – is the same Whether a figure melts into background or holds the middleground; or whether as with some of the heads done in the 1960s they are all that the painting has of ground (fore Sometimes a person will slip out of our vision; at other times Auerbach is the great master of the latter insight Melting into background is what his figures refuse to do Even when swallowed by a painting’s mechanism nor even Van Gogh (whose peasants and landscape emerge out of one another) although squeezed and pressed to absurd degrees to stick out further from their surroundings Think of the tiny anthropomorphic orange blob that hunches its shoulders and droops from the surface of To the Studios (1993-4) or the clownish child in Next Door III (2011-12) built out of the same zigzag armature of reds and blacks as the surrounding townscape and yet rendered more incongruous – because now she seems made out of the same shingles and girders as the buildings Think of the runner in the Hampstead Road paintings (2010) with his elongated head and swivelling legs the human body is deformed by the demands of atmosphere and structure the instantaneous rightness of the scene depicted But the effect is never total; the body under such demands becomes more obtrusive Auerbach cannot bring himself to see the human figure as incidental As in the landscapes of Poussin and Canaletto Auerbach went on probing the affinities between oil paint and human flesh the essential corporeality of an art form composed by heaping up quantities of greasy coloured matter into patterns of resemblance and recognition This was the quality he took from his heroes and whose work his own often paid homage to In 1961 he made the first of many paintings based directly on the masterpieces in the National Gallery grey work based on Rembrandt’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1635) Often he would return to the same work repeatedly He first drew Samson and Delilah (c.1609-10) and was attracted to the dramatic interaction of the bodies as well as the richly coloured draperies that knit the scene together: ‘If one looks at the hands there is something terribly poignant about the peasant hands of Samson and of Delilah and the sophisticated sly Iago hands of the old woman and the barber that great knot of purple like a tear which underscores the fleshly drama which is an orchestrated accompaniment of poignancy and waste’ full of high-flown contradictions – are classic Auerbach No wonder he was drawn to a painting that conjoined ‘fleshly drama’ I can imagine Eliot finding nothing to disapprove of there In the largest of the oil paintings Auerbach made on the theme he has gone to yet greater lengths to spin the physical essence of the narrative – the slump of the biblical hero the murderers at the door – out of the intensity of the colour The reds and purples that mark Delilah’s dress in Rubens are now splashed across the doorway Auerbach’s paintings from the National Gallery were not the main notes in his art They are less numerous than the seated and reclining figures or the paintings made of the entrance to his studio But they do capture an essential fact about his art: its deep fanatical engagement with a particular modernist history of Western painting in his essay for Auerbach’s Tate retrospective Clark wondered whether there was another living artist for whom a painter like Delacroix mattered as fiercely as they did to Auerbach What I take him to have meant by this was not that contemporary artists had suddenly stopped reading English literature or looking at French painting but rather that the manner of that engagement had shifted Auerbach looked at his idols in the National Gallery and found new patterns of opacity and reserve where values like narrative legibility and moral (often liberal) clarity hold sway Auerbach’s death leaves the field that much thinner. Read on: Julian Stallabrass ‘The Hockney Industry’ Installation shot of Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London © Frank Auerbach these paintings follow the development of the city as it rebuilds in the post war period emerging in the 21st century as a vibrant global metropolis.” Having visited London many many times since the 60s I myself have see the city grow and change from a quiet urban town to a 24 hour city like New York - just cleaner and more polite Most notable is the painter’s dramatic charges of color akin to a great de Kooning - bold and determined in their appearance ultimately Auerbach is an expressionist sensing the power of the brush and the power of thick paint Auerbach’s work encompasses a much broader range of locations Although the heartbeat of his output has centred around his Camden Town studio he has also portrayed well-known sites across London as well as St Pancras and Euston – vital arteries that connect the city Auerbach has created hundreds of paintings that explore the city’s evolving landscape with unparalleled depth and intensity This extensive body of work has redefined the artistic representation of London offering a fresh and enduring contribution to art history The delight of a green lush landscape; the drama of a construction site; the density of a city street all transcribed by precise brushstrokes bringing form and color to the highly structured abstract compositions all is contained planned and specific to the view at hand Auerbach’s brilliant invention is his ability to translate the seemingly familiar cityscape into a remarkable array of bravura and fierce colors What I have always admired in Auerbach’s work is both its intensity and its assuredness Nothing is painted without planning or thought yet the manner of painting is such that one thinks he has moved fast but instead he has labored hard to get the color I can't help but compare him to his American painter counterpart Wayne Thiebaud who also focused on themes of countryside and urban life Installation shot of Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London © Frank Auerbach The London show opens with a work from 1959 and continues over the next five decades almost monochromatic and muted in tone like Oxford St Then by the end of that decade color seemingly explodes as in Footballers-Regent Park As if inspired by the canvases of the Fauves Auerbach continues the tradition of English landscape painting from Constable to Turner and then adds the modernist twist of personal interpretation and expression These in many ways are love letters to the city that saved him protected him and served him as both model and audience It is a pity the exhibition did not travel because it is a great tribute to one of Europe’s great artists as well as a pictorial study of the growth change and life of one of Europe’s major capitols Lastly it is a great example of what an artist can be Michael Klein is a private dealer and freelance and independent curator for individuals and professional marker for Quint: a celebration of his 40+ year violin career; the debut recordings of two concertos; and a showcase of contemporary works either written for or premiered by Quint The first of these is Lera Auerbach’s Violin Concerto No the concerto is full of emotional extremes and contradictions “Grandioso” opens with intense chords that Auerbach calls “Deathclusters,” and the morose introduction leads to a fiendish folk dance built on repetition and sequential motion “Moderato” also opens with a Deathcluster and sneaky slides in the strings Quint is joined by a theremin in a scherzo that is charming but unsettling; grotesque yet straining for the solace of familiarity Auerbach sees this movement as playing with listener’s perception smashing together the comforting and the horrific “Andante religioso” is a passacaglia that explores the dizzying restriction of repetition The tension and pull between Quint and the orchestra is gorgeous and frustrating in its stasis In the final “Allegro,” the unholy dance continues paired with a sweetly sinister lyricism whose haunting character is enhanced by the return of distant bells Errollyn Wallen’s Violin Concerto was premiered by Quint, Rune Bergmann, and the Calgary Philharmonic in 2024. Wallen’s fourth concerto and first for violin, the work had roots three years prior when Quint approached her with the idea of a new work evoking Quint’s childhood in the Soviet Union and his life in the United States Wallen’s writing for strings is always electric and dynamic – balancing the resonant with the active – and that is also the case here and the interaction between Quint and the orchestra keeps the energy high and consistent Wallen was particular in her inclusion of bells a reference to the church bells Quint would hear as a child sorrowful setting of “Shlof Mayn Fegele,” a lullaby Quint’s grandfather would sing to him The bombastic “Cheeky and lively” shifts from ominous to hopeful with a cadenza leading to a gorgeous lyrical melody that calls to mind the lushness of Romantic-era concertos Odyssey Rhapsody for Violin and Piano by Lora Kvint is the Russian composer’s first large-scale work for violin (and she’s also the soloist’s mother!) Written for and debuted by Quint last year at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music but not at the expense of expressivity; the relationship between violin and piano is supportive rather than antagonistic and features some nice timbral shifts one section calling for a gossamer sound that makes the violin sound like a theremin Quint closes the album with Adoration by Florence Price this piece has found new life in an arrangement for violin and piano deep tone and keen emotional sense is put to effective use To include her as arranger would have been not only respectful Milestones is an essential album: an example of getting new works recorded so that these compositions may be downloaded or spun in the CD player by many more people and many times over beyond the premiere and Kvint have created works that are beautifully crafted and sound like a blast to play Quint’s performance is of the highest level; his choices and execution show a clarity of purpose that are sometimes assumed to be the domain of canonical works Not enough new violin music gets this treatment. Thank goodness for folks like Quint who go to the mat and remind us of the rich resplendent creations that we miss when we keep the same works on rotation I myself look forward to listening to these pieces many times over and maybe brushing off my own violin to see what new challenges and discoveries these gnarly I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF You can support the work of ICIYL with a tax-deductible gift to ACF. For more on ACF, visit composersforum.org Sign up for our newsletter and get a weekly round-up of I CARE IF YOU LISTEN content delivered straight to your inbox every Friday I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an award-winning media platform for living music creators. It is a program of American Composers Forum, made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. You can support the work of ICIYL with a gift to ACF. 2024Photograph by Suzie Howell / NYT / ReduxSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyThe name of Frank Auerbach the British artist who died on November 11th is not especially well known in the United States MOMA holds five of his works—one oil painting and two prints—but none are currently on display that settled upon his friends and fellow-artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud eluded Auerbach not that he was the kind of guy to seek the spotlight’s glare the intensity of his diligence—he took one day’s holiday a year—seemed to set him apart and alone “I think of painting as something that happens to a man working in a room.” He could be talking about a heart attack Auerbach was joined and tempered in his solitude by a model sounds like a test of both stamina and loyalty whom he’d met in the late nineteen-forties and she later recalled putting a joint of meat in the oven and posing for a couple of hours while it cooked (They then sat down with the children to eat it: a pleasure fully earned.) Another woman sat for Auerbach twice a week for forty years “To paint the same head over and over leads to unfamiliarity,” he said “Eventually you get near the raw truth about it.” and so busily heaped is the pigment that you’re not sure whether to gaze at it tracing the whorls and the smeared grooves might gather as much as—or more than—a viewer with perfect sight who merely looks There are full-length and half-length portraits by Auerbach In “Head of Leon Kossoff” (Kossoff was another painter or in “Head of E.O.W.,” from the following year Light falls largely on cheekbones and brows as if Auerbach were gauging the best access to the brain Is it in tribute to this quest that Freud’s superb portrait of Auerbach (1975-76) should be a skull-length image To call Auerbach a British artist is correct he has been a British citizen since July 16 when he received his naturalization papers He was the only child of middle-class Jewish parents; his father to take up the offer of a place in a well-run school in the countryside His mother stitched little red crosses onto the clothes that did not yet fit him the orphaned boy enjoyed the rest of his childhood “I think I did this thing which psychiatrists frown on: I am in total denial,” the adult Auerbach maintained “It’s worked very well for me.” Denial itself and the frowning shrinks might point to the roiling energies of an Auerbach painting and to his obsessive habit of scraping away the remains of a day’s brushwork and beginning afresh on the morrow “I feel myself to be Jewish in the sense of being a person in all other respects exactly like everybody else who has been made to feel uneasy,” Auerbach said Few modern artists do so much to persuade us that creative endeavor is a struggle—an anxious wrestling with the stubborn materials to hand the impression one forms of him in his youth is that of a lean and hungry figure You are more likely to feel eagerly baffled by it than benumbed.) The city around him still bore the wounds of war and the jamming together of wreckage and reconstruction had its enduring effect There was a curious feeling of liberty about because everybody who was living there had escaped death in some way There was a scavenging feeling of living in a ruined town you catch the murmur of a hard heart in their willful knack of examining a crisis “If one is told that the man next door has been poisoned or that someone has been run over in the street one tries to behave decently but the real instinct is to get back to the studio and the brushes to make sense of these events,” he said but Auerbach turned it to fruitful account aiming to unearth what he called “a secret internal geometry.” You meet the results in unexpected places and striving to breed something new out of the Old Masters Hence “Study after Deposition by Rembrandt II” (1961) in which the space—much bigger than that occupied by the compact original “The Lamentation over the Dead Christ”—is dominated by the cross and the ladders that lean against it Calvary is reconfigured as a building site Auerbach had a studio in Mornington Crescent—north of the British Museum as witnessed in “Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London,” an exhibition that opened at the Offer Waterman and Francis Outred galleries The show supplies a bracing contrast to “Frank Auerbach: the Charcoal Heads,” which assembled a series of his monumental drawings at the Courtauld Gallery townscapes versus headscapes: take your pick I would take a charcoal drawing over an oil painting I came upon one of the charcoal heads for sale and calculated that and the plan was dropped: an act of cowardice that I now regret not because the work would have gained in value as an investment (though it would have done many times over) but because I would have been investing in Auerbach’s act of courage—the record of his unremitting efforts to seize what struck his gaze The fallout of those efforts is discernible in the finished works Much as Auerbach wiped away daily deposits of oil paint in preparation for the next assault so he deployed an eraser (often a hard one like that used by typists) to rub off most of a drawing leaving little more than the relic of an image tends to fray and to tear—a problem partly solved by Auerbach when he stuck two sheets of paper together so that breaking through the upper one would allow him to persist in his task with the lower he patched up the damage by applying rectangles of fresh paper often with jagged edges; what emerges is more than a palimpsest It’s like the portrait of an injured man who has had to improvise his own healing as he goes along Strangest of all are the late-blooming grace notes: the sudden strokes of pink chalk that jut into the frame at the foot of “Head of Julia II” (1960) in a statement that accompanied six of the charcoal heads The angle at which he bears down upon the world one of the last things he ever painted—“Simeon in the Temple,” from around 1669—and said to myself “Auerbach.” Focus on the balding dome of the saint’s forehead and the slits of the half-closed eyes; the paint is not piled up by Rembrandt as it is by Auerbach we know the words that Simeon is about to speak as he holds the Christ child in his arms: “Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” Having stayed alive and waited for this moment has made what one prays was a peaceful departure An earlier version of this article did not fully identify the Mayfair galleries that opened “Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London.” A long-ago crime, suddenly remembered A limousine driver watches her passengers transform The day Muhammad Ali punched me What is it like to be keenly intelligent but deeply alienated from simple emotions? Temple Grandin knows The harsh realm of “gentle parenting.” Retirement the Margaritaville way Fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Thank You for the Light.” Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. Frank Auerbach would stride along Mornington Crescent a typical North London street: tall terraced houses of soot-red brick and stucco Often he carried a plain pad and a stick of graphite to make sketches at sunrise before his neighbours stirred oily yellow light on the buildings and the sleeping cars This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline “Frank Auerbach” Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents The most open-minded pope for many years died on April 21st—Easter Monday—aged 88 The Peruvian novelist and liberal died on April 13th, aged 89 The Bletchley Park “secretary” died on March 31st, aged 101 The two-time heavyweight champion of the world died on March 21st, aged 76 The KGB officer who spied for Britain died on March 4th, aged 86 Registered in England and Wales. No. 236383 | Registered office: The Adelphi, 1-11 John Adam Street, London, WC2N 6HT | VAT Reg No: GB 340 436 876 At seven years old Frank Auerbach’s parents, Max and Charlotte, made a choice. They decided to put him on train to a foreign country, alone. They knew, most likely, that they would never see him again. It was a desperate decision, and ultimately the right one. They remained in Germany and three years later, they were both murdered in Auschwitz. Had they not in that moment made the darkest call a parent can make, Frank would not have survived, and the world would have lost one of the greatest portrait artists of all time. Frank died on 11 November this year. I felt compelled to write about him. Because for me, he is the creative process in its rawest, darkest, most dedicated form. And because his paintings were the first I ever loved. And what of chaos. And nightmares. And storm clouds on fore brows. His was a life that was born into a cacophony of death, and it burns in every hardened mark. He is - he was - the artist that cannot be separated from his art. He showed the beauty in pain. Not because pain is beautiful in and of itself, but because, in his work, it is expressed without artifice or limits. Faces melt like ghosts. Troubled eyes reveal all about themselves, and about the man who held the brush. Today, we are encouraged to be authentically who we are. But when we create, so many of us feel an instinctive need to tone it down and pull back. We worry that we betray too much of ourselves. But we are not parts of a machine or a process. We are individuals with life pouring out of us. Every experience holding power to make its mark on what we create, and the people we create it with. Frank died at the age of 93, at home, in London, where he built his life. His legacy remains - his dedication to a truthful resolve, his revisitation of work and subject, and his raw expression. May his memory be a blessing for creativity. Matt Waksman is the head of strategy, advertising at Ogilvy UK Please let us know if you agree to all of these cookies FAQs Ask a Question Toll Free Numbers Hospitals and Clinics Vet Centers Regional Benefits Offices Regional Loan Centers Cemetery Locations a physician scientist who studied and proved the relationship between smoking and the development of lung cancer Smith Library of the Health Sciences/Rutgers University The Oscar Auerbach Visiting Scholar Program supports VA investigators who are motivated to understand the incidence and prevalence of cancers (and/or other potential health conditions) among AHOBPR participants This program provides multi-year support to highly accomplished VA investigators who are working to pursue research questions pertaining to long-term health outcomes (i.e. cancer or other noncommunicable diseases) among Veterans with military environmental exposure which officially linked smoking to lung cancer This work was conducted at the East Orange Campus of the VA New Jersey Health Care System—and the current site of the AHBPCE through the Health Outcomes Military Exposure program office manages and oversees the AHOBPR and is chiefly responsible for the integrity and use of these data The AHOBPR was established by Public Law 112-260 (Sec 201) requiring VA to establish and maintain a registry comprised of information to ascertain and monitor health effects of military exposure Hundreds of thousands of Veterans are currently enrolled Project: Novel Radiomics Methods for Phenotypic Assessment of Post-Deployment Lung Disease Kaul is an investigator at the VA Center for Innovation in Quality staff physician in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the Michael E and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine Kaul’s scholarship focuses on improving timely access to care for post-deployment Veterans with interstitial lung disease by leveraging “big data” generated from electronic health records to reduce missed opportunities for diagnosis developing novel care delivery models to improve access to subspecialty care and the thoughtful implementation of artificial intelligence tools for care pathway optimization She completed residency in internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of California She completed additional advanced training in interstitial lung disease and health services research at UCSF and is board certified in internal medicine Project: The Impact of Service-related Burn Pit and Embedded Metal Fragments Exposure on Sarcoidosis Incidence and Mortality Seedahmed is an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and an attending physician at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System with a concurrent role as a core investigator at the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP) He is also a faculty member at the Dorothy P Simmons Center for Interstitial Lung Disease at UPMC and the VA deployment-related Respiratory Disease Clinic He earned his master’s degree in public health with a focus on applied epidemiology from Emory University and completed a Clinical Research Informatics Postdoctoral (CRISP) Fellowship at UCSF He specializes in managing sarcoidosis and other interstitial lung disease His research focuses on leveraging real-world data from electronic health records (EHR) to study the impact of sarcoidosis heterogeneity and the role of environmental exposures on the natural history of the disease he aims to inform innovative clinical care for sarcoidosis patients and support evidence-based practices that improve clinical outcomes In addition to pursuit of their research question(s) the Visiting Scholars will have the following opportunities as part of the AHBPCE: 1) participate in existing AHBPCE-initiated or supported projects 2) lead and/or participate in national webinars 3) respond to ad-hoc inquiries from VA senior leadership as a subject matter expert and 4) assist AHBPCE in recruiting future Visiting Scholars The AHBPCE will commit salary support for a minimum of 50% effort per year for the two-year Visiting Scholar Program with option for renewal on an annual basis Requested support >50% may be approved if justified by project scope The AHBPCE also provides travel support for the Visiting Scholars for in-person consultation with collaborators Other project-related costs and publication fees may also be provided upon request For any questions, please feel free to contact us directly: VHAEASAirHazardsCoE@va.gov Complete Directory Department of Veterans Affairs | 810 Vermont Avenue Saved from the Holocaust by a sponsorship that took him from Berlin to London as a child the artist later fell in with Soho’s artistic crowd including Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud the artist who arrived in Britain as a Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler’s Germany and went on to become one of the most significant figurative painters of the postwar era the British-German artist was known for his portraiture as well as street scenes of Camden Town in north London where he kept the same studio for 50 years He was also known for the unique way in which he created his work – repeatedly scraping the paint from versions he was dissatisfied with and starting again until the finished work could be so laden with paint that it threatened to wobble off the canvas He once estimated that 95% of his paint ended up in the bin “I’m trying to find a new way to express something,” he told the Guardian “So I rehearse all the other ways until I surprise myself with something I haven’t previously considered.” The Studios IV, 1995, by Frank Auerbach. Photograph: Courtesy Frankie Rossi Art ProjectsGeoffrey Parton, the director of Auerbach’s gallery Frankie Rossi Art Projects died peacefully in the early hours of Monday 11 November at his home in London We have lost a dear friend and remarkable artist but take comfort knowing his voice will resonate for generations to come.” in 1931 and arrived in Britain eight years later as one of six children to be sponsored by Antonio and Iris Origo were both murdered in the concentration camps at Auschwitz a progressive boarding school for Jewish refugee children where his talent for art and drama shone through In 1947 Auerbach became a naturalised British subject and a year later he began his formal training in London – St Martin’s School of Art in the day with extra night classes taken at Borough Polytechnic During this time he took a role in the then 19-year-old Peter Ustinov’s debut play but painting would become his true calling and he continued his studies at the Royal College of Art Auerbach fell in with Soho’s artistic crowd which included Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud: when the latter died in 2011 a proportion of his vast Auerbach collection was given to the British government in lieu of £16m death duties In 1956 Auerbach received his first solo exhibition at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery Some visitors were unimpressed with his excessive application of paint but he found a fan in the critic David Sylvester who called it “the most exciting and impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon in 1949” Surviving the war was a key influence on Auerbach; he would journey through the capital’s bomb sites and feel an urge to capture the scenes; to somehow document the nation’s collective trauma Auerbach developed similarly intense relationships with his sitters and preferred to paint only a small circle of friends and family the model Juliet Yardley Mills and Estella Olive West with whom he had a romantic relationship that contributed towards him separating from Wolstenholme His studio was reportedly cramped and cold with Auerbach turning the oven on during winter to keep it habitable To sit for him could be an endurance in itself: the weekly two-hour sessions could go on for a year while Auerbach painted “Rather like going to the dentist,” one sitter reported In 2015 London’s Tate Britain staged a major retrospective of Auerbach’s work alongside the Kunstmuseum Bonn. His painting Head of Gerda Boehm fetched more than $5m in 2022. Auerbach frequently referenced art history in his work and liked to discuss insights on his heroes: Constable, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. There was certainly something old-fashioned about Auerbach’s approach – in an age of international travel and glitzy art openings, he would rarely leave his patch of north London. He was a self-confessed workaholic. While under lockdown restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic, the 91-year-old took to painting self-portraits. Read moreAuerbach had a son, the film-maker Jake Auerbach, with Wolstenholme, and after his relationship with West finally ended he began living with his wife again at weekends. Often, though, he was at his happiest alone with his canvas. “I sometimes think of doing other things,” he said to the Guardian in 2015, “but actually it’s much more interesting to paint.” Tributes were paid to Auerbach on Tuesday. The Turner prize winner Mark Wallinger told the Guardian that Auerbach had been an “enormously important and influential figure” in the art world and a “truly great, significant painter who followed his dedication and vision right up to the end”. The American video artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa said: “WTF. Hands down, the greatest British painter of the past 75 years.” Sean Scully, who has twice been nominated for a Turner prize, said: “Frank, as with many great artists, came from a perilous background that included brutal antisemitism. His loyalty to his subject, which was the difficult human head, and majestic nature, produced obsessive originality.” The conceptual artist and painter Michael Craig-Martin said the news of Auerbach’s passing was “terribly sad”. “He was such an important figure, who made absolutely beautiful paintings, drawings and sculptures,” he said. “Frank was a really great man as well as a great artist. He was a towering figure of integrity in the British art world. He was totally devoted to his work with no interest in fame and money. He was a person without any affectations or pretensions, he was never holier than thou. Being an artist was his calling, and he didn’t let anything distract him from that path. I treasured that respect for the work.” whose own 60-year career is currently being exhibited in a retrospective at the Royal Academy said Auerbach “drew and painted virtually every day He added: “He was always very generous towards me which was a huge compliment because I looked up to him There are a small number of people who posed for him regularly over the decades and they all became totally devoted to his work as well I know several of them and they’d do anything not to miss a session I can’t think of any other example in art of such long term engagement with sitters.” The writer and illustrator Ed Vere said Auerbach was an “incredible painter who dedicated his life to painting Luckily for those of us who love his resonant paintings and deeply powerful charcoal drawings.” Following the British painter’s death last week the BBC broadcaster John Wilson recalls a revelatory interview with him at his London home Despite a reputation for rarely giving interviews 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 I was amazed when Jake messaged a week or so later to say Frank would be delighted to talk to us about his life 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 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 Frank Auerbach and John Wilson at the artist’s flat in Finsbury Park for the recording of the BBC Radio 4 programme This Cultural Life Photograph: BBCPrompted 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 didn’t know if he would be willing to reveal very much whether he would struggle to remember details from across nine decades Within seconds of hitting the record button 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 seven-year-old Frank arrived alone in England even when explaining how he dealt with the pain of knowing his parents and other family members had been murdered in Auschwitz “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 napkins and tablecloths marked with red crosses in the corners 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 Free weekly newsletterYour weekly art world round-up Frank Auerbach’s painting J.Y.M Photograph: courtesy Frankie Rossi Art ProjectsAuerbach moved to London 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 But painting had been the daily pursuit for 70 years as he documented the streets of Mornington Crescent 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 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 “It’s far more fun than anything else,” he said 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 This Cultural Life: Frank Auerbach is available on BBC Sounds – Following an opening weekend in which he homered in both of the first two contests of the season Sacramento River Cats infielder Brett Auerbach has been named the Pacific Coast League Player of the Week for March 28-30 Auerbach logged a hit in every game and was a combined 5-for-11 (.455) with four of his five hits going for extra bases In addition to driving in a run in each of the three games (four RBI total) Auerbach generated a triple slash line of .500/1.182/1.682 while striking out only once In game one Auerbach represented the first River Cats run of the season with a solo blast leading off the bottom of the third inning one that proved to be the game-winning run He left the yard again for a pair of insurance tallies in his final at-bat on Saturday and on Sunday the Alabama product produced a pair of doubles This is the first PCL Weekly honor in Auerbach’s career though he was once named the Eastern League Player of the Wek while a member of the Richmond Flying Squirrels (Double-A) for the week of Aug It is also the first weekly award earned by a River Cat this season something that Sacramento players achieved four times last season There were two PCL Players of the Week in Tyler Fitzgerald (May 27 2024) were tabbed as a PCL Pitcher of the Week The next chance to see Brett Auerbach and the rest of the River Cats at Sutter Health Park will come on Tuesday, April 15 when Sacramento welcomes the Salt Lake Bees to town for a six-game series. To purchase individual tickets, visit rivercats.com. If interested in booking a suite or hospitality space, email [email protected] or reach a River Cats ticket representative at (916) 371-HITS (4487) Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker Auerbach disputes statements made by the network to journalists from news.com.au and the ABC The former Spotlight producer Taylor Auerbach suffered substantial distress, embarrassment and hurt after Seven breached a non-disparagement clause, he has claimed in a lawsuit filed against the media company in the federal court Auerbach worked at the network for nearly five years during which he was instrumental in securing an interview with former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann including purchasing $1,000 in services from a Thai masseuse for Lehrmann on the Seven credit card He said he continued to be Lehrmann’s minder using the company card “to purchase lavish dinners for Mr Lehrmann and purchase luxury accommodation stays for him over the course of the succeeding months” The producer said he was “offered multiple inducements to stay at the network” after securing the interview but he resigned seven months later in April 2023 after settling a dispute with Seven over the “conduct of fellow employees in the workplace” Sign up for the Afternoon Update: Election 2025 email newsletter Auerbach claims the former commercial director at Seven, Bruce McWilliam, spoke to the news.com.au journalist Samantha Maiden in March 2024 and told her a producer had used a Seven credit card to purchase personal services without the knowledge of anyone else at the network, according to his statement of claim. Maiden reported that “the producer was counselled and provided with a written warning”. “It is understood that Seven considers the matter has been dealt with appropriately,” she wrote. Auerbach said in his claim that Seven’s statement to Maiden caused him to lose his job with Sky News Australia where he was employed as an investigations producer. Seven also gave a statement to the ABC program Media Watch in March 2024 which said “the person involved was disciplined at the time and no longer works for the company” but did not name Auerbach. Read moreAuerbach’s statement of claim said he previously had an outstanding reputation as a journalist and the republication of Seven’s statements “had the effect of making people shun and vilify” him “The statements caused a tide of hatred and negativity towards Auerbach,” the claim said Auerbach also repeated claims that he was not disciplined by Seven for using a network credit card to book Lehrmann the personal services “Seven never ‘insisted’ the monies be repaid in line with its expense policy,” Auerbach’s statement of claim said Seven dissuaded Auerbach from doing so and instead instructed him to attempt to track down the massage service provider and offer the individual a ‘bonus’ in return for reversing the credit card charges and wiping them from the Seven accounting records.” Before Justice Michael Lee could deliver his judgment in the defamation case brought by Lehrmann last year, News Corp reported that Spotlight had put almost $3,000 on a Seven credit card to pay for Thai massages for Lehrmann and an unnamed producer The story prompted Ten to seek leave to reopen its case and Lee allowed it hearing evidence from Auerbach about how he persuaded Lehrmann to sit down with Spotlight’s Liam Bartlett for a TV interview Auerbach told the trial how he built a rapport with Lehrmann over several months in order to secure an exclusive interview claiming that Lehrmann “appreciated the fact that I wasn’t sitting with the rest of the feminazis in the press pack” The proceeding has been listed for a first case management hearing on 2 May A spokesperson for Seven West Media said: “Seven West Media will strenuously defend its position in this matter and is considering its options Seven will not be commenting further at this stage.” One of the great postwar figurative painters who was a leading light of the School of London each one wrested from chaos over weeks and months of struggle place the artist firmly in the English tradition stemming from Constable who had the same feeling for the material world and the materials of art Auerbach’s almost lumpen approach to his subject matter (portraits, nudes and cityscapes), mediated by his teacher, David Bomberg who advised his students to seek “the spirit in the mass” changed almost imperceptibly during his 70-year career yet his reputation never faltered; in fact it increased to create art with a density equivalent to feeling the physical form of the subject in the dark though he admitted in the same breath that Matisse could do just that by painting thinly would take a mundane subject such as a descending set of concrete steps at Euston station and finish with a canvas transformed by its densely observed presence But despite the Englishness of his work, and his belonging to a group of painters dubbed the School of London by RB Kitaj His parents had sent him to Britain for safety choosing to remain themselves in Germany on the assumption that Hitler would moderate his policy on the Jews In 1943 they were both transported to Auschwitz and killed After that traumatic beginning, the source material for his work was to be found within an area of London not much more than five miles across from Bethnal Green to Camden Town and Primrose Hill Auerbach became, along with two of those friends, Leon Kossoff (whom Auerbach painted in the early days) and Lucian Freud (also born in Berlin which was neither a school nor composed particularly of Londoners and had little in common except figuration As well as these three, the group included Francis Bacon, Kitaj himself, and Michael Andrews What they had in common was that they stood out against prevailing trends throughout their careers and innovation-for-the-sake of-innovationism Then they were reworked once more until the haunting image of a head appeared out of the Stygian shade A family friend offered to sponsor his place at a liberal co-educational boarding school and so he was sent to Britain; he never saw his parents again Bunce Court gave Auerbach security and a liking for art but when he left in 1947 he was ill-equipped either for further education or for a career He drifted into the leftwing Unity theatre in London and made himself useful designing sets among other productions for Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters At the beginning of 1948 he gained a place at St Martin’s School of Art unable to wait until September to begin painting he enrolled as a student at the Borough Road Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) a Vorticist before the first world war and embittered and regarded as a burnt-out case was a brilliant master for an aspiring artist In these postwar years English painting was illustrative naturalism crammed into a provincial interpretation of cubist space Bomberg encouraged his students to work fast and big to work from primary vision confronted with the motif rather than through preconceived notions of what art should look like It was tough work and only the better students survived He continued with Bomberg’s classes while at St Martin’s and encouraged his fellow student and friend Kossoff to attend them Auerbach remarked in retrospect: “I had a very limited art education and were not subservient to their teachers.” He himself went on to the Royal College of Art and left in 1955 with first-class honours and a silver medal Kossoff and Auerbach became close friends, painted each other’s portraits, though not for long (neither could afford the time to sit for the other), but for some years regularly visited each other’s studios. Tate Britain has a portrait of Kossoff that Auerbach painted at St Martin’s yellow and a touch of red – the cheaper pigments that he could afford It is a timeless image of concentrated power a quite extraordinary artistic achievement let alone for a 20-year-old student Self Portrait Photograph: Frank Auerbach/courtesy Frankie Rossi Art ProjectsFor all the similarities between Kossoff’s work and Auerbach’s opened up the city’s crowds and activities its trains and its swimming pools; Auerbach and initially painted a series of building sites a single townscape motif over and over and over typically Mornington Crescent close to his studio slowly covering the floor in a thicker impasto even than his canvases keeping alive by spells of teaching in Bromley and Sidcup His personal paradise was Primrose Hill, his first painting of which is practically monochrome and looks like a relief sculpture in need of urgent cleaning. But the palette of some late paintings – images of Park Village East, Hampstead Road Mornington Crescent – is so hot they would drive a fireman backwards they resumed a loving relationship and she too became his model who also became his model; in 1973 for the first time he painted her initials on to a canvas as he had done with EOW “for the same reason that you carve people’s name on trees,” he wrote “… one writes the name of the person or people that one is in love with.” Despite this the relationship between Mills and Auerbach was always platonic The show was in galleries next to one of Rembrandt’s portrayals of women Auerbach had always painted with the masters in mind making studies that might later become Auerbachian versions of Rembrandt Walking between those later two exhibitions confirmed that Auerbach’s canvases constitute some of the noblest painting of our times A Constable exhibition at the V&A in 2014 reinforced Auerbach’s connection to art history – a literal one when, as a student at the RCA, he would walk through “a secret tunnel” that joins the college with the museum to view the permanent collection. In an interview prior to the show opening Auerbach said that he loved Constable for his “doggedness” measured every distance between every tree Everything has been worked for and made personal so you sometimes feel that Constable’s own body is somehow inside the landscapes there.” This article was amended on 14 November 2024 to correct the name of Joan Yardley Mills and to clarify the nature of her relationship with Frank Auerbach Auerbach headline OSU Athletics academic awards banquet winners April 21 Andrew Auerbach, a technology executive in the defense and intelligence sectors, has joined Sierra Nevada Corp. as vice president of technology Auerbach will oversee SNC’s technology strategy tech investments and innovation initiatives and leverage his expertise in artificial intelligence cloud computing and digital transformation to improve the company’s capabilities in addressing emerging global threats In a LinkedIn post published Monday, Auerbach said he is thrilled to be joining SNC which he said is focused on delivering advanced tech platforms across land “From supporting NASA’s Mars missions to developing next-generation solutions for national security I’ll be leading technology innovation across our product lines driving forward mission-critical solutions and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” he said Auerbach most recently served as chief technology officer for mission innovation at Amazon Web Services where he led innovative platforms for the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community He also served as a special technologies architect at Juniper Networks and founded multiple tech companies where he secured venture capital to drive business growth in national security and financial markets The premier source of breaking business news for the government contracting industry to-the-point stories of the most significant contract awards M&A activities and financial results of the sector’s most notable players GovCon Wire is always on top of the most recent contracting sector activity and is updated in real time as the news breaks Important URLs: About us – Government Contracting FAQ – Guest Contributions – 2024 Events This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Auerbach was the truthful cliché of the painter’s painter who continued to paint, with limited interruptions, for eight-tenths of a century. He managed to be that rare thing: the artist who stood outside of the clatter of his own moment and yet produced some of the most enduring and perceptive observations of what it meant to be alive during his time. Frank Auerbach, Self Portrait (2024) in graphite on paper Photo © Andrew Smart, A C Cooper Ltd. Courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects After Bunce Court, Auerbach moved to London, where he was supported by his much older cousin Gerda Boehm, who would become an important muse, and the subject of many of his early Charcoal Heads, which were displayed together at the Courtauld Gallery earlier this year. Auerbach’s breakthrough came in the summer of 1952, when he made two formative paintings. E.O.W. Nude, which depicts Estella Olive West, whom he described as his greatest influence, during a fraught sitting in which he found in himself “enough courage to repaint the whole thing, from top to bottom, irrationally and instinctively”. Ultimately, after entirely reworking the canvas, “I found I’d got a picture of her.” Auerbach's studio Photograph Geoffrey Parton. Courtesy Frankie Rossi Projects Frank Auerbach, In the Studio II (2002), oil on board Courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects Frank Auerbach; born Berlin 29 April 1931; married 1958 Julia Wolstenholme (one son); died London 11 November 2024. developed a technique of repeatedly erasing and redoing his drawings blog2 April 2024An expert's guide to Frank Auerbach: three must-read books (and a film) on the German-British painterAll you ever wanted to know about Auerbach from a biography by one of his sitters to a collection of essays about his drawings—selected by the Courtauld Gallery curator Barnaby Wright news15 November 2024‘Like Picasso, everything he touched was wonderful’: the art world pays tribute to Frank AuerbachCurators institutions and critics remember a “humble giant of figurative painting” who worked from the same London studio for 70 years and made his home city its art collections and inhabitants the subject of his unique output and Sexuality Studies (WGST) Department invites the campus community and the public to the Annual Minx Auerbach Lecture on Thursday in the Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium an Indigenous feminist philosopher whose research bridges Indigenous knowledge systems “Indigenous Feminisms and Relational Accountability: Pathways to Justice and Coalition-Building.” Meissner is an associate professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland and the founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab a pioneering hub for Indigenous feminist research and evaluation A proud first-generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians “I want the entire campus community to leave the Auerbach Lecture brimming with ideas about how we can develop and sustain ourselves in times of uncertainty,” said Shelby Pumphrey Gender and Sexuality Studies and Pan-African Studies Departments if we can put those two together then we can figure out how we can learn and grow together as a campus community.” The Minx Auerbach Lecture annual series highlights thought leaders who challenge and expand conversations on gender Meissner’s talk promises to offer a compelling and necessary perspective on Indigenous feminist interventions in research the rematriation of Indigenous archival materials and land-based coalition building between Indigenous and Black communities Her research highlights how these collaborations foster sustainable practices in scholarship and activism “I genuinely believe these ideas will resonate deeply with students across the university as well as our larger campus community,” Pumphrey said Meissner's highlights the significance of Indigenous-led scholarship and activism within the contemporary historical moment Pulling out the beauty and brilliance of Indigenous knowledge and pointing to how Indigenous people are using these tools to dismantle colonial systems I think is very interesting to a variety of students across campus as well as faculty members and staff." WGST Department Chair Dawn Heinecken said the Auerbach Lecture is a unique chance to hear from incredible scholars and activists whose work speaks directly to the experiences of students and community “Thanks to the generosity of the Auerbach family audiences this year will come away with new insights into Indigenous perspectives on caretaking and trauma and the power of feminist coalition-building the first female chair of the Board of Trustees at UofL and a woman who fought to make this city better for everyone—especially women who had been ignored for too long,” Heinecken said This free event is open to all and will also be live-streamed for those unable to attend in person: 📍 Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium 🔗 Click to join livestream Don’t miss this opportunity to engage with cutting-edge scholarship that reimagines feminist futures through Indigenous perspectives Gardiner HallUniversity of LouisvilleLouisville asdean@louisville.edu Contact Dean's staff the film-maker Jake Auerbach applied for German citizenship a move that was at once straightforward and deeply complicated one of six Jewish children who were sponsored to travel to Britain by the writer Iris Origo it seemed likely that Jake would get a new passport But this had to be set against the fact that after saying goodbye to them at first not telling his father what he was up to “I wanted to see what was possible,” he says the embassy got in touch to say it was confident the application would go through.” He remembers very clearly what happened next and at the end of the sitting I said: ‘There’s something I want to tell you and I want to know what you feel and think about it.’ I explained about the application He was quiet for a while – about 30 seconds – and then he said: ‘I don’t feel anything Jake thought it would only be good manners to learn some German and again “Frank loved the fact that I spoke a bit,” he says I instituted something that had never happened before which was that he would call me every morning so I could check he was OK “He would have had no interest in travelling to Berlin for this show He wouldn’t even go into the centre of London for a show I do think he would have been more pleased about having an exhibition in Berlin than in some other places.” There are, he says, several popular myths about his father (the story Frank found most annoying was that he’d escaped to Britain on the Kindertransport). But his much-vaunted workaholism – it was said that he painted for up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week – was indeed a fact: “He said to me: ‘Why would I do anything else? This is the best game I’ve ever played.’” Last year was hard. Jake’s mother, Julia, also died, in January (she and Frank had been married since 1958). “They’d lived long and full – the fullest – lives,” he says, “and the end was as good as it could have been.” Was Frank afraid of dying? “I think he was scared of not being able to work, but I don’t think he was scared of death. At the end, he felt he couldn’t work, and he was ready to go.” Among the portraits on show in Berlin is Reclining Head of Julia (2019-20), and anyone who still labours under the notion (another myth) that Auerbach was devoted to impasto, his paint so thickly layered that his pictures were hard to hang, will be struck by its lightness and lustre, effects that render it ineffably tender. Jake’s film, the third he has made about Auerbach, tells the story of his father’s life from childhood. It is moving, and sometimes a little shocking, too. In old footage, Frank explains very plainly that his mother sent him to England with clothes and other items not only for the present, but also for when he was grown up; he tells us, too, of how the letters from his parents dried up. After school, Frank went first to St Martin’s and then to the Royal College of Art. It was there he met Jake’s mother, Julia Wolstenholme, though as his film reminds us, the couple were separated throughout most of the 60s and early 70s (Frank was living with another woman for some of this period). Did Frank seek his opinion? “Occasionally, and if I was asked, I’d say what I thought. But I don’t think my opinion held much sway in the end. No one’s did.” Frank’s regular sitters were usually given pictures of themselves at some point – he regarded a portrait as “collaboration” between artist and sitter – and Jake is no exception. “Once, I was very appreciative, and I felt afterwards that was why he elected to give that particular picture to me. It’s a very wild one. I was in my twenties.” But in the last years of his life, Frank was often his own model. Before we say goodbye, I tell Jake that ahead of our meeting, I visited Auerbach’s London gallery, where I saw four of the last works before they travelled to Germany. One was a self-portrait from 2024, and our conversation has made me feel all the more strongly about it. I remember how very clearly I could see the skull beneath the skin. How touching it is that this picture, among all his father’s paintings, now hangs in Berlin. The Frank Auerbach retrospective is at Galerie Michael Werner in Berlin till 28 June. For details of Jake Auerbach’s film go to jakeauerbachfilms.com Photographs: Harry Diamond/National Portrait Gallery, London; The Observer New Review: The Observer Food Monthly: Policies Exclusive: First show of figurative painter’s work to be displayed in city he fled in 1939 to escape Nazi regime Frank Auerbach is to be the subject of what has been billed as a homecoming show in Berlin, at which some of his final paintings will be displayed in the city he fled as a child which he left due to persecution by the Nazis Both of his parents were later killed in Auschwitz Frank Auerbach in Berlin at Galerie Michael Werner, which opens on 2 May, will include between 25 and 30 works and will be the first posthumous exhibition of the artist, who kept working until his death at the age of 93 last November curator and former director of the Whitechapel Gallery said some of Auerbach’s final self-portraits and portraits of his wife The paintings of Julia are in acrylic and they’re in greens and pinks and blues these very unusual colours – not at all like he was when he painted in oil as one of six children who were sponsored by Antonio and Iris Origo before studying at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and the Royal College of Art In the last few years of his life he had a hugely successful solo show at the Courtauld in London, where his signature charcoal portraits made between 1956 and 1962 attracted large crowds and positive reviews Despite never returning to Germany there were connections between Auerbach and the country of his birth While at Bunce Court, he studied under the exiled German actor and theatre director Wilhelm Marckwald who worked in Berlin and once said Auerbach’s appearance in one of the school’s theatre productions was “one the best young performances he had ever witnessed” His cousin was the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto who hid during the war then eventually moved to Germany and became a key cultural figure and commentator during the 20th century. He was described as a “peerless friend of literature, but also of freedom and democracy” by Angela Merkel Auerbach “had memories of Berlin but he never returned and despite there being many fans of his work in the city “When I was at his Kunstmuseum Bonn exhibition in 2015 many people talked about what Germany had lost because Frank had to leave but there aren’t works by Auerbach in German museums It’ll be interesting to see how his work is received.” Lampert was one of what Auerbach called his “persistent sitters” and regularly appeared in the work he created in his Camden and Finsbury Park studios in north London “I always left the studio incredibly happy and his company was incredible early on he would often talk to himself about how the painting was going or recite poetry.” When contacting support provide them the following information: caused by triggering of the Web Application Firewall rule They find themselves down 0-2 to the Indiana Pacers as their first-round playoff series shifts to Milwaukee Game 3 on Friday night is a must-win for them He is trying to find a way for his team to play better Rivers is trying anything that he can to get his team motivated so that they play better basketball They have to be better in transition and they have to stop turning the ball over so much Read more: Damian Lillard Says Crucial Element of Bucks Game Can Shift Series Rivers is trying to use legendary coach Red Auerbach to help him out. While talking to the media he mentioned Auberach would not stand for the turnovers that the Bucks are committing in this series I've said it since I started coaching in Boston and Red Auerbach came around with that terrible-smelling cigar He would come into my office every single day Turnovers have been killing the Bucks because they have allowed the Pacers to score easier buckets Milwaukee should be able to take care of the ball a little bit better now that Damian Lillard is back in the lineup he should be better in the rest of the series More Bucks news: Bucks Are Absolutely Wasting Giannis Antetokounmpo so he should know what buttons to push with this team He has held his end of the bargain in the first two games of the series Lillard and Bobby Portis are the two guys who have to play really well in Game 3 for the Bucks to get a win Playing in front of their home crowd should help them More Milwaukee Bucks news: Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo Has NSFW Rant After Falling 0-2 vs. Pacers How Many Points Did Bucks' Damian Lillard Score in Playoff Return? For more news and notes on the Milwaukee Bucks, visit Milwaukee Bucks on SI. RYAN STANO The content on this site is for entertainment and educational purposes only Betting and gambling content is intended for individuals 21+ and is based on individual commentators' opinions and not that of Sports Illustrated or its affiliates All picks and predictions are suggestions only and not a guarantee of success or profit If you or someone you know has a gambling problem crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling 1-800-GAMBLER Fresh claim understood to relate to alleged comments made by Auerbach’s former employer after evidence he gave in Lehrmann’s defamation claim Taylor Auerbach is suing his former employer Seven over comments the network allegedly made about him last year amid a defamation claim in which the former producer gave explosive evidence about how Spotlight secured an interview with Bruce Lehrmann The federal court has not yet released documents in the case, but sources have told Guardian Australia the fresh legal action, filed on Friday emanates from Seven’s public statements about its former employee in response to claims in his evidence in the Lehrmann case The former Spotlight producer was one of several staff who convinced Lehrmann to do an exclusive interview after the criminal case for the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in the ACT was dropped our of fear for her health Auerbach became a late star witness when Ten re-opened its defence of the defamation action in April 2024 just days before Justice Michael Lee was to deliver his verdict Auerbach swore an affidavit saying text messages and receipts in his possession showed tens of thousands of dollars were billed to Seven while the Spotlight program was courting Lehrmann for an exclusive interview In a statement issued after Auerbach’s evidence, a spokesperson for the Seven Network said it was “appalled” by the allegations “Seven did not reimburse Bruce Lehrmann for expenditure that has allegedly been used to pay for illegal drugs or prostitutes and has never done so,” the spokesperson said In the paid interview, which aired in June 2023, Lehrmann said the alleged assault in Parliament House “simply didn’t happen”. November 2023 marked the beginning of the defamation trial Lehrmann brought against Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson for broadcasting the allegation on The Project. In his affidavit Auerbach alleged his former employer falsely made public statements that he was disciplined as a result of misuse of the company card. He told the court he had previously settled a psychological injury claim against Seven on confidential terms. Free newsletterGet the most important news as it breaks Read moreAfter leaving Spotlight in 2023 and signing a non-disclosure agreement Auerbach was employed by Sky News Australia as an investigations producer but he lost his job at Sky when News Corp published text messages between a Seven employee and a Thai massage parlour and use of a Seven credit card In Auerbach’s affidavit he said his employment as an investigations producer at Sky News Australia was terminated in March last year “as a result of … media reports” He also provided receipts showing eight separate charges for Sensai Thai Massage on 26 November 2022 Auerbach has always rejected the suggestion he was counselled and sacked by Seven for his role in the Lehrmann matter and gave a press conference in an eastern suburbs park at the time “It was reported that I was counselled and given a written warning by Channel Seven over my conduct relating to a night involving Bruce Lehrmann – that reporting is inaccurate As are reports that I lost my job [at Seven] over the incident,” Auerbach said Seven is yet to file a defence and has declined to comment An early photo of Frank Auerbach in his studio Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo top tips for dealing with fair-and party-weary feet blog26 February 2024Barbie star America Ferrera to portray late artist Ana Mendieta in TV seriesBook adaptation will investigate further the Cuban-US artist's controversial death news2 May 2024Frieze New York diary: homages to art hot-shots past, an artist heats up and moments of silence for Yves KleinPlus: artists musicians and activists march for a more radical future blog16 July 2020From John Lennon and Nicole Kidman images to Grayson Perry’s handbag: Christie's auction benefits cancer charity One of Frank Auerbach’s most treasured paintings, completed 50 years ago, is finally to go on public display for the first time. Primrose Hill, Hot Summer Evening (1974-75) is one of 25 oils which the 93-year-old artist is putting into the first-ever exhibition of his landscapes, Auerbach: Portraits of London (4 October-7 December), organised by Offer Waterman and Francis Outred in London. There is a fascinating backstory to this particular portrayal of Primrose Hill, which has long been his favourite London park. He painted Primrose Hill in different seasons and times of the day more than 40 times between 1954 and the late 1980s, initially sketching en plein air before going to his studio to paint. Twelve of his depictions of Primrose Hill are owned by public galleries, including the Tate, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Scottish National Gallery, but most are in private hands. Not one to give up, Auerbach tried once more in February 1978 with a very polite plea, noting that the Hayward exhibition would be his one and only chance to get his best work together in a single retrospective. But to no avail. Though clearly disappointed, Auerbach managed to persuade the Hayward and the Arts Council to include details of the painting with a colour illustration into the catalogue. By 2018, the ownership of Primrose Hill, Hot Summer Evening changed to another private individual. This time, the person has agreed to loan it for the exhibition. “Landscapes play a significant role in Frank’s artistic output, and Primrose Hill, Hot Summer Evening holds a special place for him,” Waterman says. “Landscapes probably make up about one quarter of his oeuvre.” The rest are mainly portraits, notably very regular ones of a handful of women who have been very close to him. Frank Auerbach, Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert's Father-In-Law III, Summer Morning (1966) © Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects. Photographer: Prudence Cuming Associates, London The exhibition will also include depictions of Auerbach’s other favourite London locations, including the more urban Mornington Crescent, Euston Road and Oxford Street. A majority come from private collectors including a couple—Primrose Hill Study, Autumn Evening and Spring Morning, Primrose Hill Study—which have both only been seen publicly once before, back in 1982. Waterman has linked up with the former Christies’ contemporary art expert Francis Outred for Auerbach: Portraits of London. However, none of the paintings in the exhibition is for sale. It is simply considered a one-off opportunity to see the distinguished artist’s very best landscapes. news26 September 2022Together again: Gagosian exhibition celebrates Freud's centenary by reuniting the artist with his closest friends The show will feature works by Freud Michael Andrews and the photographer Bruce Bernard On this day in Boston Celtics history legendary head coach Red Auerbach retired after taking the Celtics to their ninth championship with a 95-93 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 7 of the 1966 NBA Finals the day prior Auerbach coached Boston for all nine of its championships up to that point -- eight of them consecutive between 1959-66 -- before passing the baton to player-coach Bill Russell His 16 seasons as head coach produced a 795-397 regular-season record (a .667 winning percentage) and a 90-58 postseason record (.608) the winningest in league history to that point Auerbach would remain with the team in an executive capacity until his death in 2006 It is also the anniversary of Boston setting an NBA single-game playoff scoring record after beating the New York Knicks 157-128 in Game 2 of the first round of the 1990 Eastern Conference Playoffs The Celtics shot .670 (63-of-94 from the field overall) Kevin McHale led Boston with 31 points and 10 rebounds MediaNicole Auerbach expands role with NBC SportsBy Austin Karp08.15.2024 nicole-auerbach Longtime college sports writer Nicole Auerbach is expanding her role with NBC Sports who last week announced she was leaving The Athletic after seven years will expand her role with NBC Sports to include multiple sports this season she served as lead insider during football season for “Big Ten College Countdown” in NBC’s first year of a media rights pact with the conference The Michigan alum will expand that role now to include college basketball while also launching a podcast and written content for NBC Sports platforms Her new role around college hoops will see Auerbach serve as lead insider on NBC Sports’ coverage of the Big Ten She will also keep her role as a host for SiriusXM Auerbach is repped by Excel Sports Management’s Will Petok Yola’s got a new EP called My Way out today and the title track apparently describes a fraught dynamic with her previous label In a new interview with Rolling Stone the British soul singer (who digs into ’80s pop/R&B on My Way) describes her fight for creative control when making 2021’s Stand For Myself is all it is,” she said of Easy Eye’s business model with in-house songwriters and musicians “It’s what they did in the old days: People have no agency so I can see how people hold that up as a way to operate “I like a diss track,” Yola also said of “My Way,” adding: This song is about when you’re trapped and you can’t just evaporate because you have to be in this space It’s about the levels of which I had to go through This song is really about how I really tried with someone: “I’m interested in you as a person and how you operate But you just can’t seem to not want to invoke the mammy paradigm which is the plus-size Black woman who serves you at the sacrificing of herself.” Yola is currently signed to S-Curve Records. Read her full interview here and stream My Way below The most important stories and least important memes one of the world’s leading modern painters and last survivor of the post-World War II London School of figurative art that also included Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon The German-born British artist believed that “the purpose of art is to make us see things anew to see the world in a way that it’s difficult to describe in words.” His ability to extract and give material expression to the psychological essence of those around him—his friends fellow artists and sitters—comes across most dramatically in his emotionally intense Estella Olive West was his earliest sitter and companion from the 1950s to the 1970s Auerbach said West was perhaps his “greatest influence” and someone he loved for “her nature West also appears in six wonderful charcoal and chalk drawings displayed earlier this year alongside drawings of other sitters and two self-portraits from the 1950s in the Courtauld Gallery’s Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads exhibition the first survey dedicated to the London landscapes from his seven-decade career is currently showing (until December 7) at the Offer Waterman & Francis Outred gallery are a record of the development of a postwar London characterised by destruction and poverty but also by a movement of the working class and intelligentsia for a better The gallery describes Portraits of London as following “the arc of the artist’s career from the enigmatic to the more fluid and exuberant works of the past 30 years.” Although Auerbach was not overtly political socially aware and cultured individual totally immersed in his art working until his death 364 days a year in the same studio he bought in 1954 reapplying and scraping off paint—often over months or years—insisting he could not “leave a painting until it had an independent life of its own.” Though his paintings were eventually to sell for vast sums—a record $7 million was paid in 2023 for a 1969 version of his Mornington Crescent series—Auerbach lived frugally When I was young I thought like everyone else that the aim was.. I’ve had no contact with what’s called the Art World I live an amazingly restrictive life and go on in this very quiet way broadcast earlier this year on the BBC radio programme This Cultural Life Throughout my life one of the many mysteries of life is how the muse Because she picks the most disparate people.. Totally incompatible people and then turns them into great poets People are chosen mysteriously from early on and they don’t know what has drawn them to this still lucid and witty artist launched into a word perfect recitation from memory of William Butler Yeats’s poem Hound Voice—a rousing call to arms to join the struggle for liberation and freedom symbolised by the wild and independent “hound” of the title Because we love bare hills and stunted treesAnd were the last to choose the settled ground,Its boredom of the desk or of the spade becauseSo many years companioned by a hound,Our voices carry… That interview was also remarkable for the way Auerbach eschewed postmodernist ideas of victimhood and identity born in Berlin in 1931 and sent to England at the tender age of seven just before the outbreak of the Second World War by his father Max Lithuanian art student Charlotte Nora Burchard His mother had packed two suitcases for him napkins and tablecloths for when he “got married later on.” Max and Charlotte both perished in Auschwitz in 1942 Auerbach revealed he only escaped their fate because his family were “fairly prosperous.” He was one of six children allowed into the country sponsored by a family friend on the condition they would not be a “burden” on the British state Auerbach remarks that he was not part of the Kindertransport scheme in which the Conservative government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain reluctantly and temporarily relaxed Britain’s rigid immigration rules to allow a token 10,000 unaccompanied This was the result of public revulsion at the November 9-10 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany known as Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) denying visas to the children of less wealthy parents and all Jewish adults in Nazi Germany Kristallnacht was the prelude to the most terrible atrocity of the 20th century—the extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust Auerbach claims he never tried to find out about his parents and “simply moved on.. life is too short to brood over the past.” He plunged into life at Bunce Court and “a little republic pretty much cut off from the world.” He recalls the enormous impression a reproduction of J.M.W Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire made on him as a boy and continued to influence him as “an example of art breaking the rules.” Fellow artist and close friend Leon Kossoff later compared Auerbach’s art to “a gleam of light and warmth and life.. the same light that seems to glow through the late Auerbach started painting when he arrived in London from school at 16 then the Royal College of Art and subsequently under David Bomberg in 1948 whose thickly painted impasto method was to prove so influential Auerbach described him as “the most original radical intelligence that was to be found in art schools.” Auerbach once traced his painting heritage Auerbach’s first exhibition took place at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in 1956 his first retrospective exhibition was at the Hayward Gallery in 1978 and he was Britain’s representative at the 1986 Venice Biennale That Auerbach was able to develop a figurative style of art sticking to his profound and optimistic belief that “I feel there is no grander entity than the individual human being” is extraordinary The succession of terrible defeats and betrayals that artists witnessed—including the rise of Nazism and Stalinism and the horrors of the Holocaust—resulted in many cases in demoralisation despair and doubt (or worse) about the working class and the possibility of the socialist transformation of society Britain saw the demise of the Kitchen Sink school of artists who whilst expressing sympathy for the plight of the working class could only see the mundane and oppressed nature of its existence Pop Art and its arch-exponent Andy Warhol were in the ascendancy with young British artist Richard Hamilton praising it for its popular The abstract expressionists produced bold and enduring paintings but failed to grasp and creatively transform in their work the social reality they inhabited we have one of the few artists whose paintings glow with a light that believes in the possibilities of life and humanity Saved from the Holocaust, this supremely modern painter captured the devastation of postwar Britain as if its wounds were his own – but he ultimately found salvation in painting• Frank Auerbach dies aged 93• I’ll die with a brush in my hand: Frank Auerbach – a life in pictures They knew they would never see him grow up The son they saved became one of the greatest British artists of modern times who painted with a fury for life and a gravitas of grief as if his lust and sorrow were fighting it out in each mighty brushstroke Slashes of red or black streak across a pair of mid-period canvases bringing savage bolts of lightning to a lime parkland or a grey heath in violent pastoral scenes that make a spring day seem like pure agony when he was more reconciled to life and the healing act of painting itself I bet each new show and book will raise his reputation – until we see him as Constable and Picasso rolled into oneIn his devastating early work the wound is wide open as London was rebuilt after the Blitz and bombsites became shiny new shops and cinemas he painted a series of resolutely un-swinging building site scenes Instead of seeing these busy locations as optimistic signs of renewal Girders feebly raised into the sky are dwarfed by the swarming cavernous voids dug out of the bomb-blasted 20th-century soil You can’t resist the power of these paintings or doubt for a second that they speak of the lost Auerbach simply refuses to join in the fun as a new consumer society prepares to forget and move on Voids and renewal … Shell Building Site From The Festival Hall courtesy Marlborough Fine ArtAuerbach’s building sites with their almost unreadable lattices of half finished structures and matted They rival the American abstract expressionist paintings that were then storming Britain – yet they cleave to the real world Abstraction haunts Auerbach like a madness: it’s the easy way out and instead he must bring his masses and dashes of paint back from the cliff edge to portray … the cliff edge itself In all of Auerbach’s paintings, from his earliest raw stabbing at the form of a human head to the self-portraits he did in his 90s an abstract impulse to let rip in unrecognisable bursts of energy is in tension with a duty to depict real people and places For Auerbach the depiction of the human face is not an easy thing imaginative drawing or painting hand wants to do His first images of people look ancient. EOW Nude could have been found in the ruins of a city destroyed by fire actually introduces bright colour – lashings of mustard yellow You might even compare it with the lurid colours of the Hammer films enlivening British screens at the time The paint is piled up so thick it juts out far beyond the wooden board it’s been layered on to Into its colours the features of the woman Auerbach calls EOW – full name Estella West – are engraved like a photographic negative or the shadow of an atom bomb victim cannot forget what lies beneath the successful new postwar western Europe Auerbach rethought the human image for a world in which the human might be doomed Meeting any of his regular portrait subjects you realise there’s no simple visual resemblance at all – to pose for Auerbach was to lend yourself as a near-anonymous icon of the human presence put blood into Britain’s previously pallid art Now it’s pretty clear to almost everyone these were our modern art greats – what could be more modern than a harrowing Auerbach head his urban pastorals are shadowed by chills Read moreAuerbach painted past his 90th birthday and unveiled heroic pitiless self-portraits in his very last years it was announced: “Frank can’t be here: he’s working.” There will be time for the curatorial reassessments I bet you any money that each of these raises his reputation a little higher until we see him as Constable and Picasso rolled into one – a supreme modern painter Right now we should mourn the orphan of the 20th century who lived to the full the great life he was given by a train ride out of Berlin I like to think Auerbach hasn’t gone: he’s painting See the fall 2024 BPEA event page to watch paper presentations and read summaries of all the papers from this edition. Submit a proposal to present at a future BPEA conference here Congress and presidents could avoid an explosion of federal debt by returning to an era when they regularly restrained spending and raised taxes in response to projected budget deficit increases suggests a paper discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on September 27 According to the paper—”Robust Fiscal Stabilization”—from 1984 to 2003 Congress reduced the deficit (the annual gap between federal spending and revenue) when projected deficits rose it has not responded to projected deficits from 2004 to 2023 “Year-to-year feedback has disappeared,” write the authors Auerbach and Danny Yagan of the University of California They note that federal debt has risen from about a third of U.S annual economic output (gross domestic product or GDP) in 2000 to nearly 100% now and is projected to continue increasing Relying on an array of empirical evidence drawn from past budget and economic trends the authors model the fiscal path over the next century They account for the possibility of economic shocks such as the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the possibility that interest rates paid on government debt could return to persistently higher levels They then examine the fiscal path under several responses to projected rising deficits and government debt including regular ongoing adjustments such as occurred from 1984 to 2003 and sudden deficit reductions They find that gradual adjustment over the coming decade would cumulatively reduce the primary deficit (the deficit excluding debt service) between 0.5% and 1.2% of GDP to avoid the debt ballooning past 250% of GDP over the next century a wait-and-see strategy of taking action only when it must be taken would require the government to be able to undertake two larger deficit reductions of 1.5% of GDP in a 12-year period Fiscal rules such as the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit targets of the mid-1980s Congress restrains spending and raises taxes when needed “We need to do something about the deficit … and waiting until things get really bad is a major gamble,” Auerbach said in an interview with The Brookings Institution “We once had government that was responsive to this problem in both Republican and Democratic administrations and we don’t now in both Republican and Democratic administrations.” Download the conference draft “Robust Fiscal Stabilization.” BPEA Conference Draft David Skidmore authored the summary language for this paper Chris Miller assisted with data visualization Frank Auerbach dedicated himself to his work 364 days a year capturing himself and his surroundings in vivid works The great painter once told the Guardian he hoped to keep painting until his final breath Photograph: courtesy: Frankie Rossi Art Projects Photograph: Courtesy: Frankie Rossi Art Projects Photograph: Geoffrey Parton/Courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects