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Lot Essay
‘One gets an idea of what one looks like as time goes by, and I certainly recognise myself in all of the pictures. But it’s difficult to explain. It doesn’t feel like the same thing being painted over and over again. It looks like different facets, or different parts or ideas around the same thing. Even though the process can be very repetitious, it doesn’t feel it.’
– Jake Auerbach
From the spirited tangle of textured green and burgundy of Frank Auerbach’s Head of Jake II, 2012, a face emerges. The painting depicts the artist’s son, one of Auerbach’s favourite and most frequent subjects; other portraits of Jake are held in the collections of Tate, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others. Auerbach’s long career is an extended mediation on the human form, and he paints a small group of subjects, forging an intimate relationship with each through their repeated sittings: ‘I’ve got certain attachments to people and places, 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’ (Auerbach quoted in C. Lampert, ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach, 1978’, in Frank Auerbach, Tate, London, 2016, p. 147). Returning to the same sitters again and again, even after the elapse of many years, Auerbach captures a person’s evolving likeness, if not an exact representation. Though Jake II appears spontaneous, the impasto surface is a result of a prolonged process of layering and scraping, for which the artist uses both a brush and his fingers. It is a densely animated and wholly empathetic portrayal: ‘If something looks like a “portrait”’, Auerbach says, ‘it doesn’t look like a person. When the forms evoked by the marks seem coherent and alive and surprising, and when there are no dead areas, I think the painting might be finished’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York, 2009, p. 22).
– Jake Auerbach
From the spirited tangle of textured green and burgundy of Frank Auerbach’s Head of Jake II, 2012, a face emerges. The painting depicts the artist’s son, one of Auerbach’s favourite and most frequent subjects; other portraits of Jake are held in the collections of Tate, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others. Auerbach’s long career is an extended mediation on the human form, and he paints a small group of subjects, forging an intimate relationship with each through their repeated sittings: ‘I’ve got certain attachments to people and places, 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’ (Auerbach quoted in C. Lampert, ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach, 1978’, in Frank Auerbach, Tate, London, 2016, p. 147). Returning to the same sitters again and again, even after the elapse of many years, Auerbach captures a person’s evolving likeness, if not an exact representation. Though Jake II appears spontaneous, the impasto surface is a result of a prolonged process of layering and scraping, for which the artist uses both a brush and his fingers. It is a densely animated and wholly empathetic portrayal: ‘If something looks like a “portrait”’, Auerbach says, ‘it doesn’t look like a person. When the forms evoked by the marks seem coherent and alive and surprising, and when there are no dead areas, I think the painting might be finished’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York, 2009, p. 22).