Executed in 1965, Head of Gerda Boehm is a seminal work from the most sought-after period of Frank Auerbach’s celebrated career and depicts the sitter of the artist’s most successful and arresting paintings of the human form: Gerda Boehm. One of Auerbach’s principal muses, Boehm first sat for the artist in 1961 and continued sitting at regular intervals until 1982. Auerbach’s analysis of his subject’s physiognomy is expressed here through a sensational use of medium that thoroughly narrates his unique working process. Dense with surface matter and bearing the marks of the Auerbach’s furious energy and the physicality with which he scrutinises his subjects, the present work consists of a cacophony of forceful blows and furrowed brushstrokes that magnificently conjure the topography of Boehm’s head. Held within the swathes of thickly worked impasto and flurried mark-making, the character of Auerbach's eminent subject emerges. Attesting to its significance and cultural import, the present work remained in the collection of British icon David Bowie for over twenty years and has been included in two of Auerbach’s most important exhibitions, at the Hayward Gallery in 1978 and the Royal Academy in 2001.

An older cousin of Auerbach, Gerda Boehm was the only member of the artist’s family that he saw after leaving Germany before the Second World War. In comparison to the earthy blacks, greys and browns that characterised many of his portraits from the previous decade, such as Head of Leon Kossoff (1954, Private Collection) and Head of E.O.W (1955, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff), the luminous hues of Boehm’s face are immediately striking and contrast dramatically with energetic outlines of black impasto which vigorously sculpt the eyes, nose, mouth and jaw. Flashes of bright white punctuate the features of the face against a rich background of olive green and ochre hues. Auerbach’s highly sculptural method of painting is illuminated magnificently on the surface of the present work as thick, creamy brushwork becomes meringue-like, the strokes melting and swirling in fluid flicks and drips. Here, Auerbach utilises the thick media to craft a formal equivalent for the body, creating a highly dynamic human form. With swaths of paint layered, scraped off and then reapplied, Auerbach constructs a powerful psychological portrait, bringing forth not the personality but the presence of the person seated before him.

Auerbach was a pioneer among the generation of radical artists whose work emerged out of the debris of war-torn London in the 1950s. The artist had moved from Berlin in 1939 and attended St Martin’s School of Art, soon discovering David Bomberg’s evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic, which had a profound impact on Auerbach’s creative development. Inspired by his teacher’s spontaneous, organic idiom, which Bomberg himself termed the ‘sprit in the mass’, Auerbach became committed to the search for the essence of the beings he painted, continuously attempting, erasing, re-doing and re-stating the terms of depiction until the complexity that he perceived unfolding before him was captured. Bomberg’s key lesson and Auerbach’s own groundbreaking interpretation thereof are splendidly manifested in Head of Gerda Boehm.

The fierce accruing of paint on the surface of the present work captures not only the tantalising energy between artist and sitter but also Auerbach’s passionate relationship with the medium of paint itself. Through a faultless exhibition of charismatic painterly gesture, this portrait carries a terrific psychological and emotional charge. Indeed, Head of Gerda Boehm powerfully illustrates Auerbach's statement that: "The person you're involved with most, say, is the most complicated to capture because you can't do a superficial likeness, you can't do a portrait painter's impression. You want something that measures up to the amount of feeling you have there" (Frank Auerbach cited in: William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 230).