.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘I am interested in recording things, not models posing, but people who come to the studio as it exists’ (Frank Auerbach)
Unseen in public for half a century, Frank Auerbach’s Reclining Figure (1971-1972) is an elegant, celestial work in oil on paper. The artist’s piercing gaze isolates the subject—likely his longstanding muse Juliet Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.)—who looms in bright white against a midnight ground of deep blue-black, as though bathed in shafts of moonlight falling through a window. She lies on one side, legs gently laid on top of one another and folded slightly in towards the body. Twisting from her waist, the model’s chest and head press down into the mattress, and her arms are folded up above her shoulders. The work’s dynamic surface is built up in layers of thick impasto. Shadows and outlines are figured in bold, graphic linear strokes. Swirling bluish tones glisten like waves, as if lulling the sitter to rest atop a vast ocean of paint. Auerbach’s looping signature is incised into the upper layer of pigment in the lower left corner. The work was included in Auerbach’s first exhibition in Italy, at the Galleria Bergamini, Milan, in 1973.
As the critic Robert Hughes observed, Auerbach’s body of work demonstrates an ‘attachment to the single, isolated figure, seen over and over again, re-imagined each time as unique and extraordinary’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 29). From the early 1950s, the artist returned to the nude portrait consistently for some three decades, after which they disappeared from his oeuvre. Each is a uniquely compelling artefact of Auerbach’s incisive gaze and exhaustive working process. A single picture might take several months to complete, and at the start of each sitting Auerbach would scrape back much of the previous session’s work, its compacted layers forming a rich, textural surface over time. The present work’s quiet light and Rembrandtian chiaroscuro conjure a dazzling portrait of the female form which gleams with an inherent luminosity.
The early 1970s were a period of mounting critical acclaim for Auerbach. Helen Lessore, who championed the artist throughout his early career, closed her gallery in 1965 and from that point on Auerbach would be represented by Marlborough Gallery. The gallery’s presence in the United States helped to foster his growing reputation across the Atlantic. He rarely left England, but exhibitions of his work abroad now provided the impetus for occasional travel. For his exhibition at the Galleria Bergamini in 1973, in which the present work was shown, he made his first journey to Italy, visiting masterpieces such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. The end of the decade would see his first major survey exhibition, which travelled from the Hayward Gallery, London to the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, in 1978.
The subject of the reclining female nude extends a line of rich art-historical precedents from Giorgione, Titian, and Velázquez to Degas and Manet. ‘My main influence is—of course—great art,’ Auerbach claimed. ‘The artists I have never met who are always communicating through the work and memory of their work’ (F. Auerbach quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach. Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 142). Across the 1970s Auerbach continued to visit the National Gallery in London once a week, along with his friend and contemporary Leon Kossoff. They went there to study as a writer might consult a library, drawing directly from paintings by Rembrandt, Turner, Tintoretto, and others. The pose adopted in the present work recalls an alternate angle of Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’), a painting which Auerbach would have seen there frequently.
A few years after the present work was painted, the painter R.B. Kitaj coined the term ‘School of London’ to describe a group of contemporary London-based artists relentlessly pursuing figurative painting, among whom—alongside Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon—Auerbach was a leading figure. By that time in the 1970s, Auerbach had been working in his studio on Mornington Crescent for almost two decades and his oeuvre was deeply embedded in that corner of London. Reclining Figure finds a precedent close to home in the paintings of Walter Sickert, who likewise kept a studio in the area. Sickert had taught the painter David Bomberg, who in turn taught Auerbach during the 1950s. Weary of academic painting’s classical nude tradition, he championed an uncompromising realism in which fleshy figures occupied cast iron beds in unidealised dwellings. Something of this compelling reinvention of the nude courses through Auerbach’s Reclining Figure, whose form is gestural yet delicate, ethereal yet intimate.
Unseen in public for half a century, Frank Auerbach’s Reclining Figure (1971-1972) is an elegant, celestial work in oil on paper. The artist’s piercing gaze isolates the subject—likely his longstanding muse Juliet Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.)—who looms in bright white against a midnight ground of deep blue-black, as though bathed in shafts of moonlight falling through a window. She lies on one side, legs gently laid on top of one another and folded slightly in towards the body. Twisting from her waist, the model’s chest and head press down into the mattress, and her arms are folded up above her shoulders. The work’s dynamic surface is built up in layers of thick impasto. Shadows and outlines are figured in bold, graphic linear strokes. Swirling bluish tones glisten like waves, as if lulling the sitter to rest atop a vast ocean of paint. Auerbach’s looping signature is incised into the upper layer of pigment in the lower left corner. The work was included in Auerbach’s first exhibition in Italy, at the Galleria Bergamini, Milan, in 1973.
As the critic Robert Hughes observed, Auerbach’s body of work demonstrates an ‘attachment to the single, isolated figure, seen over and over again, re-imagined each time as unique and extraordinary’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 29). From the early 1950s, the artist returned to the nude portrait consistently for some three decades, after which they disappeared from his oeuvre. Each is a uniquely compelling artefact of Auerbach’s incisive gaze and exhaustive working process. A single picture might take several months to complete, and at the start of each sitting Auerbach would scrape back much of the previous session’s work, its compacted layers forming a rich, textural surface over time. The present work’s quiet light and Rembrandtian chiaroscuro conjure a dazzling portrait of the female form which gleams with an inherent luminosity.
The early 1970s were a period of mounting critical acclaim for Auerbach. Helen Lessore, who championed the artist throughout his early career, closed her gallery in 1965 and from that point on Auerbach would be represented by Marlborough Gallery. The gallery’s presence in the United States helped to foster his growing reputation across the Atlantic. He rarely left England, but exhibitions of his work abroad now provided the impetus for occasional travel. For his exhibition at the Galleria Bergamini in 1973, in which the present work was shown, he made his first journey to Italy, visiting masterpieces such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. The end of the decade would see his first major survey exhibition, which travelled from the Hayward Gallery, London to the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, in 1978.
The subject of the reclining female nude extends a line of rich art-historical precedents from Giorgione, Titian, and Velázquez to Degas and Manet. ‘My main influence is—of course—great art,’ Auerbach claimed. ‘The artists I have never met who are always communicating through the work and memory of their work’ (F. Auerbach quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach. Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 142). Across the 1970s Auerbach continued to visit the National Gallery in London once a week, along with his friend and contemporary Leon Kossoff. They went there to study as a writer might consult a library, drawing directly from paintings by Rembrandt, Turner, Tintoretto, and others. The pose adopted in the present work recalls an alternate angle of Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’), a painting which Auerbach would have seen there frequently.
A few years after the present work was painted, the painter R.B. Kitaj coined the term ‘School of London’ to describe a group of contemporary London-based artists relentlessly pursuing figurative painting, among whom—alongside Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon—Auerbach was a leading figure. By that time in the 1970s, Auerbach had been working in his studio on Mornington Crescent for almost two decades and his oeuvre was deeply embedded in that corner of London. Reclining Figure finds a precedent close to home in the paintings of Walter Sickert, who likewise kept a studio in the area. Sickert had taught the painter David Bomberg, who in turn taught Auerbach during the 1950s. Weary of academic painting’s classical nude tradition, he championed an uncompromising realism in which fleshy figures occupied cast iron beds in unidealised dwellings. Something of this compelling reinvention of the nude courses through Auerbach’s Reclining Figure, whose form is gestural yet delicate, ethereal yet intimate.