Frank Auerbach: Royal academy of arts, London.

A startling feature of the otherwise straightforward catalogue that accompanies Frank Auerbach's recent show is its frontispiece. A double-page, black-and-white photo spread shows the painter in his studio last year: his head in close-up, a defiant anxiety in his eyes made more striking by the presence behind him of what appears to be a hangman's noose. Does this grim object allude to the artist's state of mind on the eve of his first full retrospective since 1978? Is it a ghoulish joke, perhaps, by the photographer, the late Bruce Bernard? Or simply some necessary if unusual element of Auerbach's studio tackle? Whatever its purpose, the photograph serves as an unnerving danse macabre overture to a show of unrelenting, almost ostentatious high seriousness. Such gravity is comparatively rare in British art these days and therefore refreshing.

At seventy, Auerbach is one of Britain's most respected artists, but he himself is relatively unfamiliar. He is a shadowy figure, averse to publicity--not a household face, though his very lack of a public persona is becoming celebrated. His work, however, is frequently seen, part of every survey show and book, and he has borne the burden of a monograph on him by Robert Hughes. But the kind of off-the-peg fame accorded to current British stars is not for Auerbach. He has worked in North London for most of his life, in the same studio, in fact, since 1954, in a city patch explored in the early twentieth century by Walter Sickert and artists of the Camden Town Group such as Spencer Gore. Auerbach's subject matter falls into two categories: family, friends, writers, and constant models, employed in punishing relays; and his immediate neighborhood of Mornington Crescent, where nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments unhappily collide, as well as the nearby open space of Primrose ill. It is a restricted rep ertoire, but the artist is triumphantly entrenched. Heads, figures, buildings, and skies are excavated with a grueling intensity and enough variety to silence those objectors who feel Auerbach should get out more. True, there is none of the politics, fucking, laughter, companionship, or domestic activity found in the work of other artists of the School of London, where Auerbach has been placed alongside Bacon and Freud, Kitaj and Kossoff. You're more likely to find a page torn from a book of art history, to adapt a phrase of Sickert's, than one "torn from the book of life." The voices of Rembrandt, Hogarth, van Gogh, Soutine, Sickert, de Kooning, Giacometti, and David Bomberg (Auerbach's teacher) carry above the general buzz of paint. Auerbach, a cultured man, continues these conversations with unselfconscious intimacy.

In the marvelous early paintings here, dating from 1954-70, Auerbach's natural German expressiveness and adopted British figurative gloom converge in a voice of unmistakably morose individuality. Female nudes (unsexy), heads (melancholy), cityscapes (half-built) emerge from a thick yet precise accumulation of paint to convey a beefy weight of feeling. Already he is becoming the postwar painter of London. His spatial organization, even when hard to access through the impetuous gateau of paint, can be astonishing. Auerbach is the master of vertiginous canyons, of skies pressing onto buildings; later, he speaks for us all when faced with the need for splitsecond selection as we launch ourselves off curbs, up steps, around street signs, picking one route from several, as in the recent Camden Palace paintings. It is in some of these works that his palette is at its most resonant. The uniform gray-white-brown of this part of Camden Town is transformed with a Fauvist acidity yet remains accursedly North London.

The figure and head-and-shoulders paintings, though named after their sitters, are not portraits. Physical likeness in the orthodox sense is denied by the swirled, dashed, zigzagged, blotted paint. No one in the future will go to such works for evidence of a particular pocket of British intelligentsia. But they are nevertheless often extremely accurate plottings of a human presence, a vivid engendering of mass in the circumambient air of the studio. They are best when early or late: There is a difficult period in the '8os when caricature threatens and the artist's ferocious conjuring tricks fall flat. Some of the drawings of people are truly unresolved. Such failures and successes are perhaps an effect of the whole series as one extended self-portrait.

Any selection of Auerbach's work--and this one is excellent, guided by his model and apologist Catherine Lampert--clearly shows his debts to the circumstances from which he emerged in the '50s. There are connections with Fautrier and Wols and Nicolas de Stael as well as to the more local province of the British realist painters known as the Kitchen Sink School, with their threadbare subject matter and ration-book palette. There is, too, the long development of a certain high-mindedness, a humorlessness, a pulverization of delight that stamps a particular kind of European, male, heterosexual artist making figurative paintings against the prevailing grain. The overall appeal is perhaps limited. That said no one could deny Auerbach's increasing opulence and subtlety of color, nor the sense his paint gives of that chasm of mortality waiting to open up and engulf us as we make our way along the sidewalk of daily life.

"Frank Aucrbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001" is on view through December 12.

Richard Shone, an associate editor of the Burlington Magazine, is a frequent contributor to Artforum.