© Frank Auerbach, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

The son of German-Jewish refugees, Michael Podro was Head of Art History at Camberwell School of Art (1961–67), when he and Auerbach became friends. Podro read English at Cambridge, then studied at the Slade School of Art for a year, before embarking on a PhD under noted art historian Ernst Gombrich and philosopher Richard Wollheim. Podro first wrote about Auerbach’s work in 1969. Later, reviewing the artist’s 2001 Royal Academy retrospective, Podro observed: ‘Auerbach’s work has a constantly self-revising dynamic which never allows the subject to disengage from the distinctive properties of the painter’s medium’.