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Lot Essay
Created in 1960-1961, Reclining Model, Back View is an exquisite large-scale work on paper by Frank Auerbach. Conjuring dramatic chiaroscuro in charcoal, pencil and crayon, Auerbach depicts a nude seen from behind. The black strokes are emphatic and intense, almost scoring through the support; as in the forceful, richly layered impasto of his paintings, Auerbach has repeatedly laid down and scraped back his pigment, using a rag and eraser to rub away the charcoal to reveal the luminous paper beneath. Scars and blurs mottle the heavily-worked surface. The sitter’s body emerges as if lit by shafts of moonlight, her languid form scaffolded by calligraphic, deeply felt strokes of shadow. A swathe of leaf-green crayon blazes across the composition’s lower left, igniting the monochrome picture with a vital emotive flash. Where Auerbach’s sitters are typically viewed frontally, and other subjects of his early charcoals lie face-down or on their sides—as in the related Portrait of EOW on the bed at Earl’s Court (1959, British Museum)—the present work’s ‘back view’ is unique in Auerbach’s oeuvre, and lends the picture a poignant, enigmatic beauty.
The present work’s staging of the figure closely echoes Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece The Rokeby Venus (circa 1648-1651), one of the paramount nudes in the Western canon, and a jewel in the collection of London’s National Gallery. The parallel is likely no coincidence: Auerbach has studied the paintings there obsessively since the 1950s, often accompanied by his friend Leon Kossoff, and continues his practice of drawing from works in the gallery to this day. ‘My most complimentary and most typical reaction to a good painting’, he has said, ‘is to want to rush home and do some more work … Towards the end of a painting I actually go and draw from pictures more, to remind myself of what quality is and what’s actually demanded from paintings. Without these touchstones we’d be floundering. Painting is a cultured activity—it’s not like spitting, one can’t kid oneself’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach’, Frank Auerbach, exh. cat. Arts Council, Hayward Gallery, London 1978, p. 22).
Auerbach’s reverence for the art of the past is palpable in Reclining Model, Back View, whose subtle illumination and timeless mise-en-scène resound with Old Masterly power. At the same time, an uncompromising drive to record his own sense of another person—to capture what his teacher David Bomberg had called ‘the spirit in the mass’—pushes Auerbach beyond figural representation to something rawer, more radical and more profound. His fervent, hard-won mark-making reveals not just a physical presence, but something of the soul of a relationship. Auerbach himself has referred to this human essence as ‘the haptic, the tangible, what you feel when you touch somebody next to you in the dark’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 23). In the present nude, with its ambiguous flare of green and its complex splendours of shadow, light, erasure and revision, we seem to witness feeling forming reality itself in space. As Catherine Lampert has observed, ‘in the very austere, resonant—and large—charcoal drawings made between 1958 and 1962 … the aura of the individual, and their relationship to Frank, extends into marks outside the figure’ (C. Lampert, ibid., p. 86).
The present work’s staging of the figure closely echoes Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece The Rokeby Venus (circa 1648-1651), one of the paramount nudes in the Western canon, and a jewel in the collection of London’s National Gallery. The parallel is likely no coincidence: Auerbach has studied the paintings there obsessively since the 1950s, often accompanied by his friend Leon Kossoff, and continues his practice of drawing from works in the gallery to this day. ‘My most complimentary and most typical reaction to a good painting’, he has said, ‘is to want to rush home and do some more work … Towards the end of a painting I actually go and draw from pictures more, to remind myself of what quality is and what’s actually demanded from paintings. Without these touchstones we’d be floundering. Painting is a cultured activity—it’s not like spitting, one can’t kid oneself’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach’, Frank Auerbach, exh. cat. Arts Council, Hayward Gallery, London 1978, p. 22).
Auerbach’s reverence for the art of the past is palpable in Reclining Model, Back View, whose subtle illumination and timeless mise-en-scène resound with Old Masterly power. At the same time, an uncompromising drive to record his own sense of another person—to capture what his teacher David Bomberg had called ‘the spirit in the mass’—pushes Auerbach beyond figural representation to something rawer, more radical and more profound. His fervent, hard-won mark-making reveals not just a physical presence, but something of the soul of a relationship. Auerbach himself has referred to this human essence as ‘the haptic, the tangible, what you feel when you touch somebody next to you in the dark’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 23). In the present nude, with its ambiguous flare of green and its complex splendours of shadow, light, erasure and revision, we seem to witness feeling forming reality itself in space. As Catherine Lampert has observed, ‘in the very austere, resonant—and large—charcoal drawings made between 1958 and 1962 … the aura of the individual, and their relationship to Frank, extends into marks outside the figure’ (C. Lampert, ibid., p. 86).