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Lot Essay
Painted in 2001, Frank Auerbach’s Head of David Landau II is a rich, painterly portrait that masterfully captures businessman, art historian, and former trustee of the National Gallery David Landau. A warm palette of vivid reds, yellows, and browns has been liberally applied in thick, luxuriant impasto offering the viewer a rich visual experience as one becomes caught in Landau’s unfaltering gaze. There is a sense that the work was completed only moments ago; the paint appears wet as if it has yet to ossify and so remains vibrant, fluid, and energetic. All manner of artistic gestures are revealed from the smooth flourishes of paint that make up the shoulders to rapid gestures around his neck. Auerbach combines these in the face, in which the simplest of strokes skillfully delineate the features of his long-standing friend.
This sense of spontaneity and ease is in fact wholly at odds with the works fabrication. After each sitting, Auerbach would mercilessly scrape everything down so that there was just the shadow of an image left. Painting the entire canvas anew each session is vital to his work in which everything is interdependent and lives within the same flow. ‘It is a bit disturbing’ says Landau who has sat for Auerbach since 1984, ‘you think this was a really beautiful picture and yet it wasn’t good enough for him. Next time you arrive it will be a scraped down ghost’ (D. Landau, quoted in J. O’Mahony, ‘Surfaces and Depths’, The Guardian, 15 September 2001). And yet Landau has returned to sit for Auerbach every Friday for nearly thirty years, confessing ‘Frank takes so much trouble to convey our lives and our existence it makes us feel we matter’ (D. Landau quoted in H. Rothschild, ‘Frank Auerbach: An interview with one of our greatest living painters’, The Telegraph, 30 September 2013). The intensity of these weekly meetings stretching over many years has instilled in Auerbach an almost obsessive desire to produce the right image as well as an emotional bond that has allowed him to so brilliantly capture Landau, revealing his confidence and self-assured manner. For Auerbach, building an intimate rapport with his subjects over a long period of time is paramount and is why his works feature only a handful of the same sitters. ‘I find myself simply more engaged when I know people. They get older and change; there is something touching about that, about recording something that’s getting on’, (D. Landau, quoted in H. Rothschild, ‘Frank Auerbach’, The Telegraph, 30 September 2013).
This sense of spontaneity and ease is in fact wholly at odds with the works fabrication. After each sitting, Auerbach would mercilessly scrape everything down so that there was just the shadow of an image left. Painting the entire canvas anew each session is vital to his work in which everything is interdependent and lives within the same flow. ‘It is a bit disturbing’ says Landau who has sat for Auerbach since 1984, ‘you think this was a really beautiful picture and yet it wasn’t good enough for him. Next time you arrive it will be a scraped down ghost’ (D. Landau, quoted in J. O’Mahony, ‘Surfaces and Depths’, The Guardian, 15 September 2001). And yet Landau has returned to sit for Auerbach every Friday for nearly thirty years, confessing ‘Frank takes so much trouble to convey our lives and our existence it makes us feel we matter’ (D. Landau quoted in H. Rothschild, ‘Frank Auerbach: An interview with one of our greatest living painters’, The Telegraph, 30 September 2013). The intensity of these weekly meetings stretching over many years has instilled in Auerbach an almost obsessive desire to produce the right image as well as an emotional bond that has allowed him to so brilliantly capture Landau, revealing his confidence and self-assured manner. For Auerbach, building an intimate rapport with his subjects over a long period of time is paramount and is why his works feature only a handful of the same sitters. ‘I find myself simply more engaged when I know people. They get older and change; there is something touching about that, about recording something that’s getting on’, (D. Landau, quoted in H. Rothschild, ‘Frank Auerbach’, The Telegraph, 30 September 2013).