Head of E.O.W. I

Head of E.O.W. I, 1967, is a vivid, potent late portrait of Estella Olive West, capturing an electric point in perhaps the most important relationship in Frank Auerbach’s life. He takes the thickness of his paint to a new extreme, and his bold pigments, including blazing greens and squeezed-out ropes of red, are turned up to searing heat. The work is astonishingly compact and energetic. Auerbach’s fierce creative and personal dialogue with Stella – who sat for him three times a week over two decades – was often fractious, and Head of E.O.W. I is depth-charged with psychological drama. ‘I think life drawing from the body of a stranger is a fine thing in an art school,’ Auerbach once reflected, ‘but there’s a real reason for recording someone whom one’s close to. For one thing one knows exactly whether it’s “like” or not. For another, if the person has wakened one’s mind, one knows what’s not worthy of her, so one isn’t going to pull any funny little tricks. Besides, if you're working with someone with whom you are involved, she may get fed up; you might quarrel; she may find it an intolerable burden and punish you by not sitting for you. The whole thing’s got a totally different sort of tension from the simple transaction with a hired model’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 133). Aglow with complex feeling and audacious formal invention, Head of E.O.W. I stands among Auerbach’s most concentrated and fluent paintings. As David Sylvester has observed, ‘paint laid on with quite outrageous prodigality can be not only seductive but most subtly and mysteriously alive’ (D. Sylvester, ‘Young English Painting’, Listener, 12 January 1956, p. 64).