FRANK AUERBACH A MARRIAGE IN PAINT
Frank Auerbach - Reclining Head of Julia, 2018, acrylic on board, 51 x 51 cm
This 2018 work by Frank Auerbach, painted in acrylic on board, is entitled ‘Reclining Head of Julia, 2018’. ‘Julia’ is his wife, not to be confused with Julia Yardley Mills (aka J.Y.M.), another of his regular sitters over the years.
They met in 1955, during Auerbach’s last term at the Royal College of Art, and married in 1958, shortly before the birth of their son, Jacob. She sat for him, resulting in several 1960 drawings in heavy charcoal, but they soon separated, rarely in contact until 1976, when they got back together again.
Since then, she has been on his roster of sitters, not in his regular studio in Mornington Crescent, but in his second workspace, in Finsbury Park. The studio is rented, and because of the regulations of the lease, Auerbach doesn’t use oils – his normal medium for painting - instead employing acrylics. She poses every week: in the evening, and again in the morning.
The medium may be different, but the modus operandi is the same. Until he feels the painting is complete, Auerbach scrapes back the work he has done at the end of every session, and starts again, on the same canvas, at the start of the next one. This might go on for days, or weeks, or months. “I don’t think one produces a great painting,” he has said, “without destroying a good one in the process”.
It's vital to Auerbach’s that his portraits are full of intimacy, and empathy, which is why he employs regular sitters – sometimes over many decades – with whom he develops a strong relationship. As well as being a portrait of Julia, then, this is a portrait describing Frank’s relationship with Julia; a portrait of a marriage, if you like.
“Paint is at its most eloquent,” he has said, “when it is a by-product of some corporeal, spatial, developing imaginative concept, a creative identification with the sitter.”
Reclining Head of Julia, 2018 is on the books of Tanya Baxter, who will be showing works by Frank Auerbach at Stand 19 on the Ground Floor, alongside pieces by Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Sean Scully, Marc Quinn, Pip Todd-Warmoth, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and William Scott.