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Lot Essay
Reclining Head of J.Y.M., a picture of Julia Yardley Mills painted in 1984, has a glistening appearance, lending it a tangible sensuality. The paint surface appears organic, it seems to breathe and pulse with some strange elemental energy as though hewn not out of paints but instead out of some primordial ooze. Auerbach's paintings portray not only a visual but also a tactile sense of his subject. 'I don't know how they can talk about thickness, really,' Auerbach declared when questioned about the materiality of his paint surface. 'Is blue better than red, thick better than thin?-- no. But the sense of corporeal reality, that's what matters. English twentieth-century painting tends to be thin, linear and illustrative. I wanted something different; I wanted to make a painting that, when you saw it, would be like touching something in the dark' (Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 86).
The painting process through which Auerbach achieves this 'thickness' is lengthy and almost organic in its nature. He scrapes away as much as he leaves on the picture surface, often starting again and again, meaning that each picture is a record of a series of emotions. He is all too aware of the physical presence of the sitter, and it is his awareness of this presence, of the relationship between artist and sitter-- both in terms of the painting and the personal-- that fills his pictures with their intense atmosphere of congealed sensation. Auerbach records not only the appearance of his subject, but also the atmosphere that that presence has created.
A professional model, J.Y.M. first sat for Auerbach in 1956, and soon became one of his greatest Muses. She continued to sit for him on a regular basis for over four decades, visiting his studio twice a week. When Reclining Head of J.Y.M. was painted, she had been sitting for him for almost three decades. Discussing his preference for painting the same heads of the people with whom he is most familiar, Auerbach commented that, 'To paint the same head over and over leads you to its unfamiliarity; eventually you get near the raw truth about it, just as people only blurt out the raw truth in the middle of a family quarrel' (Auerbach, quoted in Ibid., p. 19).
The painting process through which Auerbach achieves this 'thickness' is lengthy and almost organic in its nature. He scrapes away as much as he leaves on the picture surface, often starting again and again, meaning that each picture is a record of a series of emotions. He is all too aware of the physical presence of the sitter, and it is his awareness of this presence, of the relationship between artist and sitter-- both in terms of the painting and the personal-- that fills his pictures with their intense atmosphere of congealed sensation. Auerbach records not only the appearance of his subject, but also the atmosphere that that presence has created.
A professional model, J.Y.M. first sat for Auerbach in 1956, and soon became one of his greatest Muses. She continued to sit for him on a regular basis for over four decades, visiting his studio twice a week. When Reclining Head of J.Y.M. was painted, she had been sitting for him for almost three decades. Discussing his preference for painting the same heads of the people with whom he is most familiar, Auerbach commented that, 'To paint the same head over and over leads you to its unfamiliarity; eventually you get near the raw truth about it, just as people only blurt out the raw truth in the middle of a family quarrel' (Auerbach, quoted in Ibid., p. 19).