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Lot Essay
‘Auerbach is an extraordinary portraitist’ (T. J. Clark)
Included in the artist’s 2024 exhibition Starting Again at the Palazzo Da Mosto, Venice, Reclining Head of Julia (2009) is a spirited portrait by Frank Auerbach. Lavish colour animates the face of Julia Auerbach, née Wolstenholme, the artist’s wife and longest-serving sitter. Gestural black marks define the features of her face as ochres and blues add depth to her cheeks and forehead. The background, a patchwork of orange, green and dusky rose, comes together in a lyrical glow. Auerbach’s famously textural brushwork became increasingly bright and dynamic in these later years. Reclining Head of Julia reveals an artist at the height of his powers, depicting his partner with freshness and vitality: a familiar face across decades of life and art, he nonetheless sees Julia as if for the first time.
Auerbach first met his wife when they were both students at the Royal College of Art in London. They married in 1958 and had a son, Jake—himself a frequent sitter for the artist—before separating. They reconciled in 1976, from which point Julia became a principal subject within Auerbach’s oeuvre. His portraits of her are held in the collections of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, the British Museum, London, the Cleveland Art Museum, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, among others. In these compositions, Julia is often depicted lying down, as in the present work. They were made in acrylic rather than oil, lending them a distinctive fluidity. Describing the experience of being painted, Julia said, ‘You are giving yourself up, it’s very intimate, you are very vulnerable and you are there for them to do what they like’ (J. Auerbach quoted in H. Rothschild, ‘Man of many layers’, Telegraph Magazine, 28 September 2013, p. 33).
As a portraitist, Auerbach elected to paint only a small number of sitters, coming to know their faces and expressions intimately across decades of time together. ‘I’ve got certain attachments to people and places,’ he explained, ‘and it seems to me simply to be less worthwhile to record things to which I’m less attached, since I know about things that nobody else knows about’ (F. Auerbach quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 147). Accordingly, his paintings are slow to reveal themselves, and they allow their subject to unfold gradually before a viewer’s eye. As Reclining Head of Julia shows, the ambiguity of the final image reflects this intensely personal and emotional dynamic. Auerbach creates not a likeness but rather a sense of presence, an apparition of a person’s spirit arrested permanently in pigment.
Included in the artist’s 2024 exhibition Starting Again at the Palazzo Da Mosto, Venice, Reclining Head of Julia (2009) is a spirited portrait by Frank Auerbach. Lavish colour animates the face of Julia Auerbach, née Wolstenholme, the artist’s wife and longest-serving sitter. Gestural black marks define the features of her face as ochres and blues add depth to her cheeks and forehead. The background, a patchwork of orange, green and dusky rose, comes together in a lyrical glow. Auerbach’s famously textural brushwork became increasingly bright and dynamic in these later years. Reclining Head of Julia reveals an artist at the height of his powers, depicting his partner with freshness and vitality: a familiar face across decades of life and art, he nonetheless sees Julia as if for the first time.
Auerbach first met his wife when they were both students at the Royal College of Art in London. They married in 1958 and had a son, Jake—himself a frequent sitter for the artist—before separating. They reconciled in 1976, from which point Julia became a principal subject within Auerbach’s oeuvre. His portraits of her are held in the collections of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, the British Museum, London, the Cleveland Art Museum, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, among others. In these compositions, Julia is often depicted lying down, as in the present work. They were made in acrylic rather than oil, lending them a distinctive fluidity. Describing the experience of being painted, Julia said, ‘You are giving yourself up, it’s very intimate, you are very vulnerable and you are there for them to do what they like’ (J. Auerbach quoted in H. Rothschild, ‘Man of many layers’, Telegraph Magazine, 28 September 2013, p. 33).
As a portraitist, Auerbach elected to paint only a small number of sitters, coming to know their faces and expressions intimately across decades of time together. ‘I’ve got certain attachments to people and places,’ he explained, ‘and it seems to me simply to be less worthwhile to record things to which I’m less attached, since I know about things that nobody else knows about’ (F. Auerbach quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 147). Accordingly, his paintings are slow to reveal themselves, and they allow their subject to unfold gradually before a viewer’s eye. As Reclining Head of Julia shows, the ambiguity of the final image reflects this intensely personal and emotional dynamic. Auerbach creates not a likeness but rather a sense of presence, an apparition of a person’s spirit arrested permanently in pigment.