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At 55, Auerbach shares with his younger German contemporary, Anseln Kiefer, the distinction of being the finest painter now working in an "expressionist" mode. But he is not really an expressionist, if by expressionism one means an art that depends on a rhetoric of anguish and crisis. He is more akin to Giacometti in his stubbornness, his relentless formal probing of a small range of deceitfully familiar subjects and his desire to win back a classical order from the turmoil of visual impression by sheer tenacity of drawing. Thickly painted, scraped off, recomposed, his cryptic paintings of heads and cityscapes are extremely dense and yet open to light, air and buoyant gesture. The density is a form of realism--for the colored paste conveys the utmost physical reality without depending on the normal devices of illusion, like shading. His art looks fast but is slow: Auerbach works obsessively but finishes no more than a dozen canvases a year. Every square inch is laden with pictorial feeling. This is the real thing--and a sign that amid the secondhand babble of so much postmodernism, we are perhaps only beginning to know who the important painters of the late 20th century are.