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Lot Essay
Frank Auerbach’s portraits were born of an uncompromising and total attention towards his subjects. Several of them, including Stella West and Julia Yardley Mills, sat regularly for decades in his Camden studio. ‘To paint the same head over and over’, Auerbach said, ‘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’ (quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p. 19). As he made his way as an artist during the post-war years, however, he also looked to a wider circle of sitters with whom he was less intimately involved, learning to respond differently to the unique atmosphere generated by the person and their relationship to him. He explored new methods whose impact would be felt in his work for years to come. Head of Helen Gillespie (1961) and Head of Miss Steinberg (1967) are both from this period, and see Auerbach make bold advances in what he called ‘an area of experience—the haptic, the tangible, what you feel when you touch somebody next to you in the dark—that hadn’t perhaps been recorded in painting before’ (quoted in J. Bumpus, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Art & Artists, June 1986, p. 24).
Head of Helen Gillespie belongs to a pivotal group of charcoal portraits Auerbach made during the 1950s and early 1960s, many of which were brought together in an acclaimed exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, in 2024. Gillespie was introduced to Auerbach by his longtime sitter Stella West, and sat for three charcoal heads in 1961 and 1962. These works exude a remarkable energy and sense of adventure, with strikes of electric colour—here there are red jolts at the lower right corner, and a purple ‘1961’ scrawled at the upper left—that offset and illuminate the figure. Gillespie’s eyes are closed, as if she is asleep or deep in thought, and the bright marks convey a vivid sense of internal life. Auerbach recalled making a conscious choice to engage with a less familiar sitter: ‘with Helen Gillespie I began to try to paint people in the world a bit more than I had before’ (quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London, 2015, p. 100).
Auerbach had been introduced to charcoal by his teacher David Bomberg as a way of swiftly noting down structure and weight, and went on to deepen and amplify these ideas. Around 1955 he began to interpose his paintings of Stella West with imposing, richly-realised charcoals, seven of which he would show in a dedicated exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1957. He also made pictures of his wife Julia, his cousin Gerda Boehm and his friend Leon Kossoff, as well as two self-portraits. The drawings of Gillespie were the last he completed during this post-war phase. These works share an enormous formal power and human presence, with their shadowy surfaces built up, erased and abraded as Auerbach drew and redrew his sitter countless times. Working on the 30 x 22-inch ‘Imperial’ format he had used under Bomberg—sometimes starting with two sheets pasted together—he would wear through and mend the paper, creating a patina of rupture and repair.
‘The heavily worked surfaces, ghosts of earlier iterations, patches and breakages speak of Auerbach pushing his drawing to extremes’, observes curator Barnaby Wright of the charcoals. ‘This gives them their own context, creation as a prolonged, destructive and precarious business’ (‘Frank Auerbach’s Post-War Charcoal Heads’, in Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads, exh. cat., Courtauld Gallery, London, 2024, p. 30). Sitting for his own portrait in 1986, Robert Hughes vividly described the furious intensity of Auerbach’s process. ‘As he scribbles and saws at the paper, the sticks of willow charcoal snap ... When he scrubs the paper with a rag clouds of black dust fly ... The studio is like a colliery; the drawing easel is black and exquisitely glossy from years of carbon dust mixed with hand-grease … In the end, the likeness is retrieved, but as a ghost, the colour of very tarnished silver’ (op. cit., pp. 15-16).
Auerbach’s complex and vital achievements in charcoal informed a change in his paintings’ character during the later 1960s. He increasingly ‘drew’ in the paint using dark, angular lines that gripped and responded to his subject, creating an armature that pinned down their presence in space. These marks would become a defining element of his idiom. ‘I think of it all as drawing—whether with charcoal or paint’, he later said. ‘It’s question of trying to throw a lasso to capture the organic fact in a way that doesn’t throttle the life out of it’ (in conversation with R. Cork, 1983, in R. Cork, Face to Face: Interviews with Artists, London, 2015, p. 70). Made in 1967, the painting Head of Miss Steinberg sees the emergence of these graphic strokes, which cut through the surface to shape a striking yellow head against a deep green backdrop. Her eyes, nose and jawline are caught in dashes of black, while light gleams on her cheekbone and brow: a liquid zigzag animates her hair.
This work is the first of two paintings Auerbach made of Barbara Steinberg, a young American-born artist who was working in London with the sculptor Michael Ayrton. Both portraits feature the same vibrant, earthy combination of terre verte and yellow ochre pigments. Auerbach’s deliberately limited palette during these years—as with the chiaroscuro of the charcoal heads—related to his profound esteem for the Old Masters whose works he studied obsessively in the National Gallery. ‘I used to use nothing but earth colours and black and white,’ he recalled, ‘which Rembrandt and Hals more or less did. Very occasionally a bit of blue, a bit of red, but otherwise terre verte, yellow ochre, Indian red, black and white. And we don’t feel the slightest lack of colour in them; you can do the whole thing in that’ (in conversation with W. Feaver, 2007, in W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, London, 2022, p. 273). In both of the present works, the ‘whole thing’—which for Auerbach meant an image with coherence, freshness, individuality and truth—comes to radiant and hard-won life.
Head of Helen Gillespie belongs to a pivotal group of charcoal portraits Auerbach made during the 1950s and early 1960s, many of which were brought together in an acclaimed exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, in 2024. Gillespie was introduced to Auerbach by his longtime sitter Stella West, and sat for three charcoal heads in 1961 and 1962. These works exude a remarkable energy and sense of adventure, with strikes of electric colour—here there are red jolts at the lower right corner, and a purple ‘1961’ scrawled at the upper left—that offset and illuminate the figure. Gillespie’s eyes are closed, as if she is asleep or deep in thought, and the bright marks convey a vivid sense of internal life. Auerbach recalled making a conscious choice to engage with a less familiar sitter: ‘with Helen Gillespie I began to try to paint people in the world a bit more than I had before’ (quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London, 2015, p. 100).
Auerbach had been introduced to charcoal by his teacher David Bomberg as a way of swiftly noting down structure and weight, and went on to deepen and amplify these ideas. Around 1955 he began to interpose his paintings of Stella West with imposing, richly-realised charcoals, seven of which he would show in a dedicated exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1957. He also made pictures of his wife Julia, his cousin Gerda Boehm and his friend Leon Kossoff, as well as two self-portraits. The drawings of Gillespie were the last he completed during this post-war phase. These works share an enormous formal power and human presence, with their shadowy surfaces built up, erased and abraded as Auerbach drew and redrew his sitter countless times. Working on the 30 x 22-inch ‘Imperial’ format he had used under Bomberg—sometimes starting with two sheets pasted together—he would wear through and mend the paper, creating a patina of rupture and repair.
‘The heavily worked surfaces, ghosts of earlier iterations, patches and breakages speak of Auerbach pushing his drawing to extremes’, observes curator Barnaby Wright of the charcoals. ‘This gives them their own context, creation as a prolonged, destructive and precarious business’ (‘Frank Auerbach’s Post-War Charcoal Heads’, in Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads, exh. cat., Courtauld Gallery, London, 2024, p. 30). Sitting for his own portrait in 1986, Robert Hughes vividly described the furious intensity of Auerbach’s process. ‘As he scribbles and saws at the paper, the sticks of willow charcoal snap ... When he scrubs the paper with a rag clouds of black dust fly ... The studio is like a colliery; the drawing easel is black and exquisitely glossy from years of carbon dust mixed with hand-grease … In the end, the likeness is retrieved, but as a ghost, the colour of very tarnished silver’ (op. cit., pp. 15-16).
Auerbach’s complex and vital achievements in charcoal informed a change in his paintings’ character during the later 1960s. He increasingly ‘drew’ in the paint using dark, angular lines that gripped and responded to his subject, creating an armature that pinned down their presence in space. These marks would become a defining element of his idiom. ‘I think of it all as drawing—whether with charcoal or paint’, he later said. ‘It’s question of trying to throw a lasso to capture the organic fact in a way that doesn’t throttle the life out of it’ (in conversation with R. Cork, 1983, in R. Cork, Face to Face: Interviews with Artists, London, 2015, p. 70). Made in 1967, the painting Head of Miss Steinberg sees the emergence of these graphic strokes, which cut through the surface to shape a striking yellow head against a deep green backdrop. Her eyes, nose and jawline are caught in dashes of black, while light gleams on her cheekbone and brow: a liquid zigzag animates her hair.
This work is the first of two paintings Auerbach made of Barbara Steinberg, a young American-born artist who was working in London with the sculptor Michael Ayrton. Both portraits feature the same vibrant, earthy combination of terre verte and yellow ochre pigments. Auerbach’s deliberately limited palette during these years—as with the chiaroscuro of the charcoal heads—related to his profound esteem for the Old Masters whose works he studied obsessively in the National Gallery. ‘I used to use nothing but earth colours and black and white,’ he recalled, ‘which Rembrandt and Hals more or less did. Very occasionally a bit of blue, a bit of red, but otherwise terre verte, yellow ochre, Indian red, black and white. And we don’t feel the slightest lack of colour in them; you can do the whole thing in that’ (in conversation with W. Feaver, 2007, in W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, London, 2022, p. 273). In both of the present works, the ‘whole thing’—which for Auerbach meant an image with coherence, freshness, individuality and truth—comes to radiant and hard-won life.