Frank Auerbach and his pursuit of the profound: ‘All my paintings went through hundreds of transmutations’

For much of his career, Frank Auerbach worked 364 days a year, only giving himself a break at Christmas. Eventually, he decided that even this routine was too frivolous, and he started painting on 25 December too.

‘It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint,’ he once said, reflecting a dedication to his métier that was pretty much unsurpassed. For seven decades, from 1954 until his death last year, Auerbach sequestered himself in his modest studio in London’s Camden Town and worked.

Often he was joined by a friend or loved one, who tolerated the spartan surroundings to serve as the subject of a portrait. (Until 1990, when the ceiling collapsed, necessitating a refurbishment, the studio had neither central heating nor an inside lavatory.)

Among Auerbach’s best-known sitters were fellow artists, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff. Over the course of the 1950s, the female form began to play an increasingly important role in his art, too, and a remarkable nude from the start of the following decade — Nude on Bed III — is being offered in the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale at Christie’s in London on 19 March 2025.

Auerbach painted the work in 1961 — though one might almost say he sculpted it, from thick swathes of impasto. A female figure emerges in relief from dense layers of paint. Set within the minimal confines of the artist’s studio, the scene is mostly monochromatic, apart from the reclining subject, who shines like a beacon of light.

Nude on Bed III had its first public showing the year after it was painted, at art dealer Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in London. Lessore had come across Auerbach’s work initially in 1955, when visiting a show of graduation pictures at the Royal College of Art (RCA), where Auerbach was completing his studies.

She promptly gave him the first of a series of solo exhibitions at her gallery. This was described by the critic David Sylvester as ‘the most exciting and impressive debut one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon’s in 1949’.

The thick application of paint, a trademark of the artist’s early career, was impossible to miss. Sylvester added that he saw in Auerbach ‘the qualities that make for greatness in a painter — fearlessness; a profound originality; a total absorption in what obsesses him; and, above all, a certain gravity and authority in his forms and colours’.

Like Bacon, Freud and Kossoff, Auerbach formed part of the ‘School of London’, a loose confederation of artists working in the British capital after the Second World War. Together, they spearheaded a renaissance in British figurative painting, at a time when the art world was becoming increasingly dominated by abstraction.

In Auerbach’s case, he followed the advice of his one-time tutor, David Bomberg, who encouraged artists to draw out ‘the spirit in the mass’. Bomberg — previously one of the leading figures associated with the Vorticist movement — meant pursuing an immediate, instinctive approach to painting. One should convey the experience of forms rather than simply the look of them.

This certainly, and stunningly, holds true for Nude on Bed III. Though still a figurative work, it flirts with abstraction. The viewer discerns the sheer presence of the figure on the bed, captured through layer after layer of paint — that paint a marker of the time which Auerbach spent engaging with his model.

The art historian Robert Hughes identified her confidently as Estella (Stella) Olive West, the subject of six portraits by the artist in the year that Nude on Bed III was painted, who was often referred to as ‘E.O.W.’ in Auerbach’s titles.

West was an amateur actress whom Auerbach had first met in 1948, when he was still a teenager and she 32. By that point, West was already a widow with three children, her husband having drowned in a freak accident on the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park.

As a young man, Auerbach toyed with the idea of a career in acting, and he was given a walk-on part in a production of Peter Ustinov’s play House of Regrets, in which West was also appearing. The pair became lovers, and for a while Auerbach moved into the boarding house she ran in Earl’s Court.

West also sat for him regularly, becoming his principal model for more than two decades. The many resulting paintings include E.O.W. Nude (1953-54) and Head of E.O.W. (1955), today part of the collections of Tate and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum respectively.

The relationship was intense — ‘We used to have terrible rows,’ West remembered in later life — but it endured. In fact, it even survived Auerbach’s marriage in 1958 to Julia Wolstenholme, a budding artist whom he had met at the RCA, and with whom he would have his only child (a son, Jake). Married life proved difficult, and Auerbach soon picked up again with West, their relationship lasting until the mid-1970s.

Might one see the semi-abstract figure emanating from the canvas in Nude on Bed III as a painterly metaphor for the tentative return of West to Auerbach’s life? Possibly. But then again, possibly not. The artist himself always pushed back against biographical exegesis. ‘Those sorts of interpretations never occur to me while I’m working,’ he told an interviewer for The Times in 2012. Painting for Auerbach was more an ‘activity concerned with formal problems’.

Formally, one might even compare Nude on Bed III with the artist’s contemporaneous paintings of the building sites of post-war London. For roughly a decade from 1952 onwards, he visited bomb-scarred spots across the British capital and — in works such as Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (1962) — captured the constructions that were gradually emerging or re-emerging out of the rubble.

Nude on Bed III was acquired from Auerbach’s Beaux Arts Gallery show in 1962 by the Hon. Moyra Campbell. The work remained in her collection until her death last year, and was only exhibited publicly once in that time, as part of the artist’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1978 (which later travelled to the Fruitmarket gallery in Edinburgh).

As a young woman during the Second World War, Campbell had been an elite member of the ‘Wrens’, the women’s branch of the Royal Navy. Specifically, she formed part of the top-secret Y-Service intelligence operation, which intercepted and logged enemy messages at wireless intercept stations. In the case of coded messages, these were all forwarded to Bletchley Park for decryption, and proved important in the eventual cracking of the Enigma code.

After the war, Campbell lived a vibrant life, mostly between London and Edinburgh. For many years, she also ran Château de Saran in north-eastern France, an exclusive hospitality venue owned by the champagne house Moët et Chandon.

As for Auerbach, his works from the mid-1960s onwards would incorporate newly bright strains of colour — thanks in large part to a contract he signed with Lessore in the year that Nude on Bed III was exhibited. This gave him the financial means to buy a wider range of pigments than had been possible in his younger days, when his palette was dedicatedly monochrome.

His personal and professional relationship with West ended for good in 1973, after which he reunited with Julia Wolstenholme. The couple would remain together for the next half a century — until Julia’s death in January 2024 (some 10 months before Auerbach’s own).

The work coming to auction forms part of a long tradition of female nudes in Western art. Yet, what sets it apart from most other examples is Auerbach’s concern with communicating the experience of his subject rather than the likeness.

Working only when his model was before him, he was committed to capturing that experience as profoundly as possible. ‘All my paintings [went through] hundreds of transmutations,’ he said — until, finally, after months at the easel, he felt he had reached the point of sufficient profundity.

The Modern British and Irish Art sales will be on view at Christie’s in London from 13 to 19 March 2025, followed by the Evening Sale on 19 March and the Day Sale on 20 March