Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1974

London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Frank Auerbach: Recent Work, 1974, p. 31, no. 31, illustrated

London, Hayward Gallery; and Edinburgh, Fruit Market Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 1978, pp. 73 and 93, no. 114, illustrated

New Haven, Yale Center for British Art; and Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Eight Figurative Painters, 1981-82, p. 44, no. 11, illustrated

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 275, no. 332, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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"Unless the painting surprises me… I mean being really unpredictable in the colour, the paint and everything… I couldn't possibly begin to think of it as finished... If I leave a picture it is because it actually stands up for itself, and I no longer see the trace of my will and hopes in it."

Frank Auerbach quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Eight Figurative Painters, 1981, p. 14.

The present work is one of two paintings that Frank Auerbach painted of the artist Stephen Finer between the years of 1973 and 1974. Most famous for his portrait of David Bowie which today resides in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, Finer became acquainted with Auerbach after they met at the French Pub in Soho – one of the notorious drinking dens of the London artistic circle frequented by the likes of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Michael Andrews. In his portrait, Finer appears as a rush of visual data. Exigent brush-strokes detail short-hand sign-posts for facial features and likeness: the thrust of laboriously applied glutinous oil paint casts Finer’s head in a solemn bow, while orthogonal accents pick out the detail of an eye-socket or chin with spontaneous acuity. Executed in a deep colour palette, Auerbach conjures a heavy atmosphere of intimacy and closeness out of which the sitter emerges. Exhibited at the artist’s behest as part of his landmark retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1978, this painting is an example of Auerbach at his very best. Indeed, Head of Stephen Finer utterly embodies the slow-burning immediacy for which Frank Auerbach is the undisputed master.

Beautifully composed within the square canvas, Finer is locked in place, his shoulders asymmetrically filling the composition as though captured in the flash of a photo booth. This essay of subtly mediated forest green, greys, ochre and flashes of yellow and crimson recalls the artist's earliest paintings executed in hues which had been his sole artistic companions through expense and availability following the Second World War. Nonetheless, although the colour of Auerbach’s palette mutated over time, his artistic process has not.  

Since the 1950s, Auerbach's rigorous weekly schedule of painting has produced a surprisingly concise output of twelve to fifteen finished works annually, of which roughly two-thirds are portraits. These dynamic and vigorously spontaneous paintings are the result of an arduous process of intense scrutiny and endless erasure. Where Bacon is famous for slashing and destroying innumerable canvases during his career, Auerbach ruthlessly scrapes off the toiled progress of paintings that don't meet his high expectations; the faint ghosts they leave behind act as the starting point from which Auerbach begins again, almost from scratch. Approaching the conditions of a palimpsest, these intensely worked paintings reflect the way in which ancient manuscripts were repeatedly scraped down and reused – a practice that left behind the trace of faint but legible under-layers. A repetitive yet cumulative process, sometimes spanning years, Auerbach’s method eventually reaches a point of distillation, a moment of fraught realisation at which the painter attains a semblance of the immediate reality he is ultimately aiming to enshrine in paint. Urgently conveying the paroxysmal gestures of these pivotally decisive final moments, Auerbach's finished portraits come as an essential revelation of the immediate fluidity of appearance. Forming an uncanny link between analysis and expression, the heavy paint topography here subtly adjusts according to the play of light across its surface, to precipitate a constantly shifting schema of light and shade, which further emphasises the form of the sitter. Testament to this rigorous method, Auerbach's remarkable Head of Stephen Finer emerges in an urgent crescendo of expressive brushwork made possible only by the constant reworking that preceded the final moments of fraught painterly activity.