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Lot Essay
‘If something looks like a painting it does not look like an experience; if something looks like a portrait it doesn’t really look like a person’ (Frank Auerbach)
‘As soon as I become consciously aware of what the paint is doing my involvement with the painting is weakened. Paint is at its most eloquent when it is a by-product of some corporeal, spatial, developing imaginative concept, a creative identification with the subject’
(Frank Auerbach)
Auerbach had first met Julia Yardley Mills in 1956, when she was a professional model at Sidcup College of Art. By 1963, she had become Auerbach’s main model and muse, visiting his Camden studio every Wednesday and Sunday until 1997. The fact that she had already been portrayed so often and over such a length of time by 1987, when Head of J.Y.M. -Profile V was painted, has resulted in a great familiarity. On the one hand, this long relationship between artist and model has inevitably resulted in their having a complex friendship, a factor that seeps into the painting, making it all the more electric; on the other hand, it has also meant that Auerbach had contemplated these features again and again hundreds and hundreds of times by the time that Head of J.Y.M. -Profile V was painted. This is a process that he believes can lead to a true revelation: ‘To paint the same head over and over 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’ (F. Auerbach in R.Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p. 19).
From the 1950s Auerbach, along with Leon Kossoff, would regularly visit the National Gallery, scrutinising, through drawing, the great old masters held within the collection. Masterpieces by Rembrandt, Titian and Uccello would be pored over and dissected, not slavishly copied but emotionally responded to. Indeed when painting Auerbach would often place around the floor postcards, photographs or open books of pictures from the history of art ‘to have something good to look at’ while he worked. He said of Rembrandt that his ‘handling is so rapid and responsive, but the mind is that of a conceptualizing architect, making coherent geometries in space’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R.Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p. 87). Indeed the present portrait, painted in the popular Renaissance deportment of the profile may well have had its conception in the National Gallery not only in structure but also in posture.
The areas that form J.Y.M.’s features have a sense of mass accentuated by the contrasts of impasto and varied textures. This creates an illusion of swift spontaneity and conveys a visceral notion of the living, breathing model. The paint in short feels alive. However, contrary to these impressions of excited, flamboyancy, this painting is a result of the long, almost organic process by which Auerbach paints, often scraping away a previous day’s work in order to start again, the picture gaining a history and a character that may not be visible, like an unconscious pentimento, but which has helped inform the gradual evolution of the painting and helps to flavour the finished result. Head of J.Y.M. -Profile V is the final result of repeated experimentation in order for Auerbach to capture his motif in a way that conveys more than mere appearance: ‘I’m hoping to make a new thing that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in ibid., p. 12).
‘As soon as I become consciously aware of what the paint is doing my involvement with the painting is weakened. Paint is at its most eloquent when it is a by-product of some corporeal, spatial, developing imaginative concept, a creative identification with the subject’
(Frank Auerbach)
Auerbach had first met Julia Yardley Mills in 1956, when she was a professional model at Sidcup College of Art. By 1963, she had become Auerbach’s main model and muse, visiting his Camden studio every Wednesday and Sunday until 1997. The fact that she had already been portrayed so often and over such a length of time by 1987, when Head of J.Y.M. -Profile V was painted, has resulted in a great familiarity. On the one hand, this long relationship between artist and model has inevitably resulted in their having a complex friendship, a factor that seeps into the painting, making it all the more electric; on the other hand, it has also meant that Auerbach had contemplated these features again and again hundreds and hundreds of times by the time that Head of J.Y.M. -Profile V was painted. This is a process that he believes can lead to a true revelation: ‘To paint the same head over and over 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’ (F. Auerbach in R.Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p. 19).
From the 1950s Auerbach, along with Leon Kossoff, would regularly visit the National Gallery, scrutinising, through drawing, the great old masters held within the collection. Masterpieces by Rembrandt, Titian and Uccello would be pored over and dissected, not slavishly copied but emotionally responded to. Indeed when painting Auerbach would often place around the floor postcards, photographs or open books of pictures from the history of art ‘to have something good to look at’ while he worked. He said of Rembrandt that his ‘handling is so rapid and responsive, but the mind is that of a conceptualizing architect, making coherent geometries in space’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R.Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p. 87). Indeed the present portrait, painted in the popular Renaissance deportment of the profile may well have had its conception in the National Gallery not only in structure but also in posture.
The areas that form J.Y.M.’s features have a sense of mass accentuated by the contrasts of impasto and varied textures. This creates an illusion of swift spontaneity and conveys a visceral notion of the living, breathing model. The paint in short feels alive. However, contrary to these impressions of excited, flamboyancy, this painting is a result of the long, almost organic process by which Auerbach paints, often scraping away a previous day’s work in order to start again, the picture gaining a history and a character that may not be visible, like an unconscious pentimento, but which has helped inform the gradual evolution of the painting and helps to flavour the finished result. Head of J.Y.M. -Profile V is the final result of repeated experimentation in order for Auerbach to capture his motif in a way that conveys more than mere appearance: ‘I’m hoping to make a new thing that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in ibid., p. 12).