FRANK AUERBACH | Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm

Marlborough Gallery, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1984

New York, Marlborough Gallery Inc., Frank Auerbach: Recent Paintings and Drawings, April 1982, p. 23, no. 12, illustrated 

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 288, no. 456, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is very good condition. There are some compressed impasto peaks in places. No restoration is apparent under ultra violet light.
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Pliable and passionate, Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm is an exquisite portrait by Frank Auerbach of his close relative and cousin Gerda Boehm, executed exactly twenty years after her first ever sitting for him. The work verges on sculpture, and its visual immediacy sits in dramatic tension to the huge quantities of time invested in its construction. Whipped up into a thick impasto, Auerbach’s blue, olive green, ochre and black hues of dense, oil-based paint are layered on and scraped off in a visceral iterative process, creating layers of ghostly palimpsests that haunt this palpable facial topology. With dark blues and browns attenuated with redemptive yellows, whites and golds, Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm implies the potential for the miraculous within the prosaic; thereby recalling the poignantly sensitive portraiture of Auerbach’s friend and fellow member of the School of London Leon Kossoff. Articulately commemorating at once the play of light, the casting of shadow, the nuance of texture, and the intricacies of joy and nostalgia, the layers of paint in the present work appear to embody both the infinite succession of Gerda’s previous selves, and the infinitely-many moments that contributed to her being as she is here depicted. With heavy, tender and assiduous brushwork, Auerbach reveals his own emotions’ inextricability from the act of communicating Gerda’s distinctive emotional life. Far from Sisyphean, this meticulous work and re-work is executed partly out of respect for his subject; out of a kind of homage to her life and the time she had accorded to her. Part of the reason for the quantity and warmth of Auerbach’s depictions of Gerda Boehm is the profound impact she had on his early life and perspective. Like Gerda, Auerbach moved to London from Germany shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. While Gerda – much older than Auerbach – moved into a house in North London with her husband Gerhard, Auerbach attended boarding school in the country; visiting his fashionable and adventurous cousin during the summer holidays. Their relationship became very close, catalysing Auerbach’s burgeoning creativity and interest in art, and in 1948 they visited the museums and galleries of Paris together. She was for a long time one of the few blood relatives with which Auerbach had contact. It was partly by virtue of Gerda’s encouragement, support and advice that Auerbach ended up attending St Martin’s School of Art. Inspired by David Bomberg’s principled embrace of the serendipitous and the organic in his evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic, Auerbach arrived at the first incarnation of his inimitable style.   

While close knowledge of the physiologies and temperaments of his subjects renders his portraits starkly powerful, there is a poignant sense in which Auerbach’s process embodies the process of searching, erasing and researching for a personal essence that is forever out of reach. Like the observer affecting the observed in a quantum experiment, Auerbach’s presence in the representative act seems to distort the subject; colouring her with the artist’s deepest memories and fragmented dreams. And yet it is partly by virtue of this poignancy that Auerbach’s works are so intimately loved. 

Perhaps it was this very quality that David Sylvester located in the Spring of Auerbach’s career following his first one-man exhibition at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery in 1949. Seeing in Auerbach “the qualities that make for greatness in a painter”, Sylvester identified “fearlessness, a profound originality: a total absorption in what obsesses him; and, above all, a certain gravity and authority in his forms and colours” (David Sylvester, ‘Young English Painting’, The Listener, 12 January 1956).