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Lot Essay
Painted in 1962, during the heyday of the ‘School of London’, Reclining Model in the Studio II is a vivid early nude by Frank Auerbach. Sculpted from thick swathes of impasto, his supine figure emerges like a beacon of light from dense, geological layers. Against the warm, earthen tones of the artist’s studio backdrop, spiked with flashes of red, her outstretched form is thrown into subtle relief. With a sister painting currently held in Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, the present work dates from Auerbach’s early rise to acclaim under the guidance of visionary London gallerist Helen Lessore, who unveiled the painting at her Beaux Arts Gallery in 1962. It was bought from the exhibition by one of the artist’s students, who had been taught by him at Sidcup School of Art, and remained in her family collection for the next 44 years. More recently, the work featured in the exhibition Degas: A Passion for Perfection at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2017-2018), highlighting the artist’s connection with the French master’s nudes, which he studied intensely at the National Gallery in London.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the female form began to occupy a central place in Auerbach’s oeuvre. Two of his most important muses—Stella West (E.O.W.) and Juliet Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.)—played crucial roles in this body of work, prefiguring the later sequence of nude figures reclining upon beds that Auerbach created between 1966 and 1970. Within the bare, minimal confines of his Camden studio, where he had taken up residence eight years prior, Auerbach sought to reveal the raw, physical essence of his subjects. Inspired by the teachings of his mentor David Bomberg during the early 1950s, he strove to capture the ‘spirit in the mass’, adopting a near-archaeological approach that involved a complex, lengthy cycle of painting, scraping off and repainting. The thick, visceral surfaces of Auerbach’s early works, richly demonstrated here, were a product of this method, their human subjects emerging like pieces of treasure from the rubble. ‘…[T]he sense of corporeal reality, that’s what matters’, the artist explained; ‘… I wanted to make a painting that, when you saw it, would be like touching something in the dark’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 86).
The present work takes its place within the context of post-war London, where—as the city rebuilt itself from the ground up—a young cohort of artists breathed new life into figurative painting. A photograph taken by John Deakin at Wheeler’s Restaurant in 1963 captures Auerbach’s close relationship with artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon during this period: both, significantly, would place the reclining nude at the heart of their interrogations into the human condition. Through Lessore, Auerbach would also come to look back to an earlier generation of British artists: notably Walter Sickert, who he admired in part for the inspiration he himself drew from Degas. In the catalogue for Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition, Jane Munro draws a close comparison between the three artists, suggesting that Degas’ brothel scenes are echoed in Sickert’s 1906 work Reclining Nude (Thin Adeline) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which in turn is evoked in the present work’s composition and palette (J. Munro, Degas: A Passion for Perfection, exh. cat. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 2017, p. 219). Here, the lessons of art history merge with a powerful sense of physical immediacy, the figure’s radiant life-force gleaming through the darkness.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the female form began to occupy a central place in Auerbach’s oeuvre. Two of his most important muses—Stella West (E.O.W.) and Juliet Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.)—played crucial roles in this body of work, prefiguring the later sequence of nude figures reclining upon beds that Auerbach created between 1966 and 1970. Within the bare, minimal confines of his Camden studio, where he had taken up residence eight years prior, Auerbach sought to reveal the raw, physical essence of his subjects. Inspired by the teachings of his mentor David Bomberg during the early 1950s, he strove to capture the ‘spirit in the mass’, adopting a near-archaeological approach that involved a complex, lengthy cycle of painting, scraping off and repainting. The thick, visceral surfaces of Auerbach’s early works, richly demonstrated here, were a product of this method, their human subjects emerging like pieces of treasure from the rubble. ‘…[T]he sense of corporeal reality, that’s what matters’, the artist explained; ‘… I wanted to make a painting that, when you saw it, would be like touching something in the dark’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 86).
The present work takes its place within the context of post-war London, where—as the city rebuilt itself from the ground up—a young cohort of artists breathed new life into figurative painting. A photograph taken by John Deakin at Wheeler’s Restaurant in 1963 captures Auerbach’s close relationship with artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon during this period: both, significantly, would place the reclining nude at the heart of their interrogations into the human condition. Through Lessore, Auerbach would also come to look back to an earlier generation of British artists: notably Walter Sickert, who he admired in part for the inspiration he himself drew from Degas. In the catalogue for Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition, Jane Munro draws a close comparison between the three artists, suggesting that Degas’ brothel scenes are echoed in Sickert’s 1906 work Reclining Nude (Thin Adeline) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which in turn is evoked in the present work’s composition and palette (J. Munro, Degas: A Passion for Perfection, exh. cat. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 2017, p. 219). Here, the lessons of art history merge with a powerful sense of physical immediacy, the figure’s radiant life-force gleaming through the darkness.