Frank Auerbach

Auerbach’s life and art is defined by its relationships and emotional bonds; none more consuming than that with his wife, Julia Wolstenholme, who he married in 1958 and who since then has recurred as the subject for some of his most emotionally charged and intimate portraits. More than with any other of his sitters, the paintings of Julia verify the reasons behind his unwavering, continued commitment to paint only the people closest to him. They represent the inner core of Auerbach’s close relationships with models and convey a feeling of substance and sensuality that only comes from absolute familiarity.

Reclining Head of Julia shirks figurative interpretation and conveys something more compelling and more private. In a manner akin to de Kooning’s paintings of women, it reveals the psychological expression of the artist as much as his sitter. The marks defining her reclining head resemble an abstract landscape conveying everything but a precise visual reality. There is a sense of revelatory directness in the way he paints his wife here, channelling the visual impetus of the situation and enlivening it through the palpable emotions of their interaction. “There was always the feeling that she might get fed up, that there might be a quarrel or something. I also had a much greater sense of what specifically she was like, so that the question of getting a likeness was like walking a tightrope. I had a far more poignant sense of it slipping away, of if being hard to get.” (Frank Auerbach cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, 2001, p. 23)

Reclining Head of Julia is not an abstract vision of the leading figure in his life but one densely layered with emotion and history. It is a heady, sensual exorcism of infinite experience through the medium of paint - a process Auerbach has likened to the feeling you get when touching somebody familiar next to you in the dark. This sensation is heightened by the reclining head resting on a pillow as here Auerbach succeeds in not just giving the feeling of touching someone in the dark, but in being there next to her.