Considered one of Europe's greatest modern artists, he painted mainly unsettling portraits and nudes in drab rooms, with peculiar focus on the texture of their flesh.

He was born in Germany, but the family moved to the UK in 1933 to avoid persecution as Jews. He experimented with Surrealism, and was also loosely associated with Neo-Romanticism, but moved on to establish his own artistic identity in meticulously executed realist works, imbued with a pervasive mood of alienation. By the late 1950s brushmarks became spatial as he began to describe the face and body in terms of shape and structure, and often in female nudes the brushstrokes help to suggest shape.