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Lot Essay
Previously held in the Saatchi Collection, J.Y.M. Seated, 1986-1987 is a luminous oil portrait by Frank Auerbach. By the time the present work was completed, Auerbach had been painting J.Y.M.—or Juliet Yardley Mills—twice a week for three decades. Here, as she sits on a chair in the North London studio where the two have shared countless hundreds of hours, Auerbach nonetheless manages to see his muse as if for the first time. She leans backwards at a slight angle, hands gripping the chair’s arms, bodied forth in bold strokes of colour: angular lines of ultramarine bracket her limbs, while zig-zagging flurries of khaki, pale orange and yellow infuse her form with expressive energy. Planes of green, blue and lilac convey the studio setting. The painting’s otherworldly palette and rich, atmospheric chiaroscuro are typical of Auerbach’s uncompromising approach: he pushes beyond figural representation to something more radical and profound, revealing not just a physical presence but something of the soul of a relationship. Capturing the bravura of the artist’s 1980s work, J.Y.M. materialises with vibrant and persuasive totality.
The 1980s saw a period of rising acclaim and creative freedom for Auerbach. At the start of the decade, his works were included in ‘A New Spirit in Painting’, a seminal 1981 exhibition at the Royal Academy which marked the era’s turn away from Conceptual and Minimal art, and a reassertion of the painterly power of colour, figuration and gesture. In 1986, the same year the present work was begun, he shared the prestigious Golden Lion prize with Germany’s Sigmar Polke at the XLII Venice Biennale. These years saw the full flowering of Auerbach’s fluid later idiom, far freer and brighter than the thickly-encrusted paintings of his first two decades of work. Colour, in particular, took on a greater expressive role; while still concerned with making tangible what his teacher David Bomberg had called ‘the spirit in the mass’, his works’ surfaces became less heavily layered, and were animated by the near-Abstract Expressionist action of linear, liquid drawing in paint.
Juliet Yardley Mills, a dynamic, vital woman whom Auerbach had first met when she was a model at Sidcup College of Art in 1956, brought an energy to her sittings that can be vividly felt in the boldness and clarity of these later paintings. ‘You see I had this terrific excitement when I was going’, she remembered. ‘I loved getting up at 5. And I tore down those dark streets’ (J.Y. Mills quoted in C. Lampert, exhibition catalogue, ‘Auerbach and his Sitters’, Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, London, Royal Academy, 2001, p. 26). In J.Y.M. Seated, this immediacy and vigour comes to the fore. Jewel-like, saturated hues conspire with assured structural mark-making to conjure a joyful sense of life: the painting is charged equally with the magic of their relationship and with the momentum of its own creation.
The 1980s saw a period of rising acclaim and creative freedom for Auerbach. At the start of the decade, his works were included in ‘A New Spirit in Painting’, a seminal 1981 exhibition at the Royal Academy which marked the era’s turn away from Conceptual and Minimal art, and a reassertion of the painterly power of colour, figuration and gesture. In 1986, the same year the present work was begun, he shared the prestigious Golden Lion prize with Germany’s Sigmar Polke at the XLII Venice Biennale. These years saw the full flowering of Auerbach’s fluid later idiom, far freer and brighter than the thickly-encrusted paintings of his first two decades of work. Colour, in particular, took on a greater expressive role; while still concerned with making tangible what his teacher David Bomberg had called ‘the spirit in the mass’, his works’ surfaces became less heavily layered, and were animated by the near-Abstract Expressionist action of linear, liquid drawing in paint.
Juliet Yardley Mills, a dynamic, vital woman whom Auerbach had first met when she was a model at Sidcup College of Art in 1956, brought an energy to her sittings that can be vividly felt in the boldness and clarity of these later paintings. ‘You see I had this terrific excitement when I was going’, she remembered. ‘I loved getting up at 5. And I tore down those dark streets’ (J.Y. Mills quoted in C. Lampert, exhibition catalogue, ‘Auerbach and his Sitters’, Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, London, Royal Academy, 2001, p. 26). In J.Y.M. Seated, this immediacy and vigour comes to the fore. Jewel-like, saturated hues conspire with assured structural mark-making to conjure a joyful sense of life: the painting is charged equally with the magic of their relationship and with the momentum of its own creation.