The work Supremely modern art made with fury for life

When I found out Frank Auerbach was dead, I thought once more of the heartbreaking story of his parents, Max Auerbach and Charlotte Nora Borchardt, who saved his life by putting their child on a train from Berlin to London in 1939.

- Jonathan Jones

Auerbach told his friend William Feaver they packed things he would need in his future life, including linen for when he married. They knew they would never see him grow up, or be there for any of his future. They believed they would soon die. And they did, in the Holocaust of Europe's Jews. What a future they missed. 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.

And that's in his mature art, when he was more reconciled to life and the healing act of painting itself. In his devastating early work the wound is wide open. In the late 1950s and early 60s 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, he paints them as holes in the world. 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, the destroyed, the murdered. Auerbach simply refuses to join in the fun as a new consumer society prepares to forget and move on. He's stuck in the mud.