Frank Auerbach

The Beaux Arts Gallery, London
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Modern and Contemporary Art 1945-1981, 2 July 1981, Lot 542
Waddington Galleries, Ltd., London
The Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1984

 

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 255, no. 164, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate although the illustration fails to convey fully the highly textural nature of the surface Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection under raking light reveals a minute fissure to an extremely thin paint thread in the white impasto towards the centre, one towards the centre right; and a very small loss to an impasto tip towards the upper left edge and one to the left of the top edge. No restoration is apparent under ultra violet light.
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"If one has a chance of seeing people apart from the time when one's painting them, one notices all sorts of things about them. If one sees them in movement, one realises all sorts of truths about them and one's infinitely less likely to be satisfied with a superficial statement" The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery; Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 1978, p. 12

Forged in Frank Auerbach's Camden studio during the same crescendo of creativity that witnessed the execution of the record-breaking Head of Helen Gillespie and Helen Gillespie III, now in the Art Gallery of South Australia, the present work is in the highest tier of early paintings by the artist ever to be offered at auction. The emphatic blows of pure gestural energy that comprise the stunning Head of Helen Gillespie II are left palpable on the surface in the cascading folds and burrowed troughs of his extraordinary mark-making. Residing towards the right of the composition, the present visage affords the distillation of Auerbach's thoroughly inimitable, emotionally urgent and psychologically compelling portraiture. Held within the swathes of impasto the character of Auerbach's subject emerges: simultaneously portrait and paint landscape. As is so characteristic of early works from this period, the palette is derived from deep red and brown ochres, whites and blacks as pigments that could be bought cheaply and in quantity at the time. The richness that he extracts from this focused range of hues forces the viewer to address both the presence of the sitter and the physical substance of the paint material itself. All this achieves an unmistakable air of authenticity, of the focused observance of a real person, and this sense of reality - of a sitter presented without artifice - is incredibly persuasive.

Like Francis Bacon, Auerbach infamously depicts only subjects with whom he is extremely familiar, proving that pre-existing intimacy affords degrees of artistic interrogation, analysis and exposure emancipated from the hesitancy of "getting to know" the subject. In this context Helen Gillespie is a comparatively rare feature in the artist's career of the early 1960s. By comparison with the endless, virtually obsessive, cataloguing of Estelle Olive West (E.O.W.) and Juliet Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.) that extended over decades and ran to dozens of pictures, despite Auerbach's exhausting working method; the exclusive nine appearances made by Helen Gillespie between 1962 and 1965 are very rare events. Of this small group, Head of Helen Gillespie II particularly demonstrates Auerbach's artistic conviction and courage to explore the boundaries of composition and form by exceptional means. The physiognomy surges into the centre of the picture plane from the right, thanks to the artist's cropping of the head to assert its monumentality and presence. The essay of subtly mediated ochre and crimson recalls the artist's earliest paintings of building sties in these hues, which had been his artistic mainstay following the Second World War. Auerbach's majestic image has been reworked time and again over an extended period to forge an uncanny link between analysis and expression, this finished version emerging in an urgent crescendo of expressive brushwork. The heavy paint topography here subtly adjusts according to the play of light across its surface, to precipitate a constantly shifting schema of shadows, which further emphasise the form of the sitter.

Head of Helen Gillespie II represents the pinnacle of Auerbach's artistic achievements up to the mid 1960s: a threshold in his career after which his canvases became arenas for flurries of more sparse brushstrokes of brighter hues. This work encapsulates the tireless working and reworking of the paint strata, and vividly communicates to this day the focus and energy of its genesis. It is a remarkable portrait, which seems to fluctuate continually in mood and atmosphere owing to its physical presence, and is the crystallisation of Auerbach's very best work.