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Lot Essay
The present work belongs to a group of Auerbach's paintings that date from 1966-68, which depict a reclining figure in an interior. In these works, although there is a thickness in the application of paint, the surfaces are sometimes divided by thick lines and flatter broader areas of colour are apparent.
Robert Hughes comments on an earlier similar work Studio with Figure on Bed II, 1966, 'The title counts - 'studio with figure'; it is one of a group of interior paintings from 1966-68 in which the eye pulls back from the isolated figure or close-up head, seeing the body in ambient space, a thing among others - the planes of bed, floor, wall, mirror ... J.Y.M. stretches out on the purple bedspread ... Her body is a splindly twist overlaid with gouts of red, subordinated to the main structural play of the image - the rectangles of red, purplish-blue and cream, stacked up in the flattened space. This architecture is clarified in the versions that follow - the same motif, the same contents of the room, their achieved differences reflecting Auerbach's belief that 'to have a different shape of canvas and to move a few feet to the right or left presents one with a totally different formal entity and it is just a new problem' ... And as the critic Colin Wiggins remarked of this group of 1967-68 paintings, 'The apparent distortion of the figure invites comparison with Francis Bacon. Bacon's lying figures, however, always occupy an artificial stage which seems to have been coldly painted as an arena within which the act of painting is performed. Auerbach treats the space, the bed and the figure with an equal intensity' ... This effect rose from a change in Auerbach's facture which had been on its way since the middle of the 60s and became pervasive by their end - the complete absoption of drawing into the painterly stroke, so that the form of a head or body, instead of growing by accretion into a solid mass, was improvised, laced together by its graphic energy. The paint is still thick, but no longer crusty, and the part of Auerbach's now clarified colour is to evoke its lost mass' (see R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p.165).
A similar painting, Figure on a Bed, 1967-70 is in the collection of Tate, London. (fig. 1).
Robert Hughes comments on an earlier similar work Studio with Figure on Bed II, 1966, 'The title counts - 'studio with figure'; it is one of a group of interior paintings from 1966-68 in which the eye pulls back from the isolated figure or close-up head, seeing the body in ambient space, a thing among others - the planes of bed, floor, wall, mirror ... J.Y.M. stretches out on the purple bedspread ... Her body is a splindly twist overlaid with gouts of red, subordinated to the main structural play of the image - the rectangles of red, purplish-blue and cream, stacked up in the flattened space. This architecture is clarified in the versions that follow - the same motif, the same contents of the room, their achieved differences reflecting Auerbach's belief that 'to have a different shape of canvas and to move a few feet to the right or left presents one with a totally different formal entity and it is just a new problem' ... And as the critic Colin Wiggins remarked of this group of 1967-68 paintings, 'The apparent distortion of the figure invites comparison with Francis Bacon. Bacon's lying figures, however, always occupy an artificial stage which seems to have been coldly painted as an arena within which the act of painting is performed. Auerbach treats the space, the bed and the figure with an equal intensity' ... This effect rose from a change in Auerbach's facture which had been on its way since the middle of the 60s and became pervasive by their end - the complete absoption of drawing into the painterly stroke, so that the form of a head or body, instead of growing by accretion into a solid mass, was improvised, laced together by its graphic energy. The paint is still thick, but no longer crusty, and the part of Auerbach's now clarified colour is to evoke its lost mass' (see R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p.165).
A similar painting, Figure on a Bed, 1967-70 is in the collection of Tate, London. (fig. 1).