BG 97
FRANK AUERBACH
b. Berlin 1931
Portrait of J.Y.M. seated
Board: 16 x 13 in / 40.6 x 33 cm
Framed size: 23 x 20 in / 58.4 x 50.8 cm
With original backboard
Painted in 1976
Provenance:
Marlborough Fine Art, London
LA Louver, Venice, California
Collection of Monica Bain, Los Angeles, California
Exhibited:
London, Arts Council of Great Britain, Hayward Gallery, 4th May - 2nd July 1978;
Edinburgh, Fruit Market Gallery, 15th July - 12th August 1978, Frank Auerbach, cat. no.130
Venice, California, LA Louver, This Knot of Life: Part II, 27th November - 22nd December 1979
Literature:
Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, Thames and Hudson, London 1990, p.205, no.209, illustrated
William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York 2009, p.278, no.369
‘JYM has been sitting for me twice a week for almost thirty years, first as a “life model” then, with the passing of time, as a friend; latterly mainly for portraits. JYM is an acronym of her name, she is known as JYM to her friends’ (Letter to Whitworth Art Gallery, 28th February 1986). Juliet Yardley Mills was a professional model whom Auerbach met in 1956 while she was working at the Sidcup School of Art. She went on to sit for Auerbach every Wednesday and Sunday until 1997. ‘We had a wonderful relationship because I thought the world of him and he was very fond of me. There was no sort of romance but we were close. Real friends’ (exhibition catalogue, Frank Auerbach: paintings and drawings 1954-2001, Royal Academy, London, 2001, pp. 26-7).
In this striking frontal, three-quarter length portrait, J.Y.M. confronts the viewer head-on. The energy of her seated form, seen in a posture of repose against the yellow high-backed chair, is barely contained by the canvas. Her tilted head, bent arms and clasped hands reach to the outer edges of the image, her left elbow cropped. Thick black lines articulate the external boundaries of the figure in particular the chest, shoulders and face as well as its features in seemingly single strokes, as if to contain its energy. Auerbach fills and binds this rapidly defined human frame, with even broader green and yellow strokes of thick impasto forming peaks of paint.
Robert Hughes suggests the artists sensuous, expressionistic technique was inspired by the Old Masters, ‘Just as, in drawing, Auerbach’s branching line contains overt semi-conscious references to those sudden hooks of the ink-ladden nib which were one of the most often imitated aspects of Rembrandt’s drawing style, so in painting the embedded bars of pigment left by the broad square brush are deeply influenced by Rembrandt’s habit of modelling in explicit facets, each a daub of pigment squarely turned towards the eye. The structure of Rembrandts like Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels, which Auerbach often drew in the National Gallery, finds its way into his own half-length portraits; the long leaning rectangles of her robe, building and driving into a diagonal movement that runs from lower right to upper left of the trapezoidal block of her figure, are metabolized into the long strokes that summarize the arms and torsos of such paintings as Portrait of JYM Seated, 1976’ (Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, Thames & Hudson, London, 1990, p. 204).
The tilted head, slightly to one side, resting against the back of a chair was a recurrent pose, one the artist explored on a larger scale in the late seventies and early eighties in works such as JYM seated I (Tate Gallery). However Hughes opines this had more to do with the sitter than the artist. ‘There was one angle on J.Y.M.s head, tilted back and slightly to one side, resting against the chair-back, that he repeatedly painted in the 70s and 80s – not because it was a ‘formal problem’ that he needed to resolve, but because he had no choice about it; it was one of the ways in which J.Y.M. repeatedly sat’
FRANK AUERBACH
b. Berlin 1931
Frank Helmut Auerbach was born on the 29th April 1931, to Max Auerbach and Charlotte Nora Burchardt. In 1939 Auerbach was sent to school in England with five other children, sponsored by the writer Iris Origo. After boarding the ship in Hamburg, he never saw his parents again. The school, Bunce Court at Lenham, near Faversham, Kent, was evacuated to Shropshire from 1940-45. Having left school with a Higher School Certificate in 1947, Auerbach acted in plays at the Tavistock, Torch, Twentieth Century and Unity Theatres, where he met Estella West. He also attended painting classes at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute. In 1948 Auerbach enrolled at the Borough Polytechnic Institute, where he studied for two terms before starting at St Martin’s School of Art in September, where he met Leon Kossoff and Phil Holmes. He continued to go to drawing classes at the Borough Polytechnic, taught by David Bomberg, two evenings a week throughout 1954.
Declared unfit for the army, Auerbach continued his studies at the Royal College of Art from 1952-55. In 1954 he moved to Kossoff’s studio in Camden until his marriage to Julia Wolstenholme, another student of the Royal College, in 1958. Auerbach left the Royal College in 1955 with a silver medal and first-class honours. He exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery summer exhibition and then held a one-man show there in 1956. He taught in secondary schools and then at various art colleges, including Camberwell and the Slade, one day a week until 1968. Auerbach first exhibited at Marlborough Fine Art, London in 1965 and has continued to show at its associated galleries.
In 1978 the Arts Council of Britain held the first retrospective of Auerbach’s work at the Hayward Gallery. Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1977-85 was held in the British Pavilion at the XLII Venice Biennale, June-September 1986. He was awarded the Golden Lion prize along with Sigmar Polke. In 1990 Robert Hughes published his monograph on the artist. In 1995 an exhibition based on drawings made from works in the National Gallery’s collection was presented, entitled Frank Auerbach at the National Gallery: Working after the Masters. In 2001 an exhibition of Auerbach’s paintings and drawings from 1954-2001 was held at the Royal Academy, London.
Frank Auerbach lives and works in London.