Frank Auerbach

Beaux Arts Gallery, London
Private Collection, USA
Desmond Page, London, where acquired by the present owner, 5th February 2004

London, Hayward Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 4th May - 2nd July 1978, cat. no.25, illustrated in the catalogue, with tour to Edinburgh, Fruit Market Gallery;
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Eight Figurative Painters, 14th October 1981 - 3rd January 1982, cat. no.9, illustrated p.42, with tour to Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Museum of Art;
London, Royal Academy, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954 -2001, 14th September - 12th December 2001, cat. no.4, illustrated p.39.

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, cat. no.70, illustrated p.244.

Original canvas. The work appears in excellent original condition with exquisite passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Mounted on a dark painted backboard within a gilt composite box frame under glass; unexamined out of frame. Please contact the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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'Helen Lessore wrote somewhere that [Sickert's locales] are grubby miserable bedrooms: well, those bedrooms with girls in them, where the sheets smell of human congress, they don't look in the least depressing to me – they seem to be really very jolly places. I recognize my life in those streets and in those bedrooms! I felt at home in Sickert's world.' (The Artist cited in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, Thames and Hudson, London, 1989, p.89)

In the 1900s Sickert shook the English art world and wider society with explicitly direct, and at times sinister, depictions of naked women in bedsits. Learning from Degas, he defied conventions of the 'ideal' nude, most evident in his Camden Town paintings. In these bleak narratives Sickert does not shy from the reality of the body and its sexuality, placing women in real rooms and contrasted with clothed people. Gritty, textured and truthful, Sickert invigorated descriptive painting in England and it is a tradition inherited by the likes of Auerbach and Freud, lucidly apparent in the present painting. However, in his student days Auerbach had initially dismissed Sickert as too 'domestic' and 'whimsical'. It was not until his encounter with Helen Lessore that Auerbach was compelled to reconsider. 

Helen Lessore, on the death of her husband Frederick Lessore, took over the running of Beaux-Arts Gallery in 1951. Independent and assured in what she believed, Lessore gave Auerbach his first one man show in January 1956. Her husband had been Sickert's dealer, and in Helen's bedroom hung a talisman Sickert, his self-portrait, The Servant of Abraham. Through these encounters Auerbach was drawn into Sickert's world, and decades later Auerbach asserted him as 'the one real painter of real world stature who worked in England in the early part of this century...' 

In E.O.W., Nude, Lying on her back, Auerbach recalls Sickert's 'grubby and miserable bedrooms' – the truth and excitement of them – through the cropped composition, earthy tones and vigorous brushwork. E.O.W.'s figure lies low in the picture space, her bed part cut off by the frame, which gives her an immediate sense of proximity and pulls the viewer into the drama playing out between artist and model. With rich mediated browns and ochre, and with gestural brush marks, he hints at their setting. Shadowy and sparse, the room occupies the majority of the picture space and borders on the oppressive, intensifying the image. This is a private world, and it is this feeling that heightens the sense of intimacy and inwardness that characterises so much of Auerbach's work.

Estella Olive West, or Stella, was Auerbach's first constant model, an indomitable personality and source of stimulation and stability for the artist in her continuous presence. The pair met in 1948 working on an amateur production of Peter Ustinov's House of Regrets. She was fifteen years his senior and a mother of three children but to her surprise, they struck up a relationship and the affair soon became inseparable from their roles as artist and model. This benefited Auerbach's work, he commented: 'I feel a little uncomfortable painting nudes of people when there is no physical relation'. The emotional complexities inherent in a physical relationship created a distinct tension upon which Auerbach drew for his nude paintings.

Auerbach would visit Stella at her house in Earl's Court three times a week. For lack of an easel, he would prop the canvas upon a kitchen chair, falling to his knees to work. Stella recalled: 'Everything was all dripping with paint. Mostly we worked in my bedroom, because I could lie on the bed and so on, and the chair became more and more encrusted with paint, like a stalactite.' Stella went on to feature in most of Auerbach's nudes and female heads until 1973. A smaller version of the present composition, of the same year and title (fig. 1), incorporates a white pillow and is also much illustrated in the literature on the artist. The emphasis on continuity is one of the defining characteristics of Auerbach's work. For him, far from intimacy being lost in repetition, it is heightened. A person's face or body is a continuous being of exploration; Auerbach's steadfast belief in this explains his devoted studies to individuals and the absence of such distracting details as a social narrative or the incorporation of other persons.

E.O.W., Nude, Lying on her back is full of vitality – completed when Auerbach was still a youthful twenty-eight year old yet more than acquainted with Stella. In her, he continued to find the unfamiliar despite their familiarity and this 'newness', the unexpected surprises which were so important to him, invigorated his work. E.O.W., Nude is full of observation, which finds expression through brushwork that not so much describes as finds animated equivalents. The monochromatic colours, physicality of the paint and compositional structure work together in conveying Auerbach's psychological response to E.O.W., and what Hughes describes as, 'the endless drama of the I and the Other' (Robert Hughes¸ op. cit., p.10). What final form this drama may take on the canvas Auerbach himself is unsure; his mediation of feeling is an instinctive and natural event: 'When I did them, they simply felt to me to be true and that's been the way all the way through'. This is the gift of the artist, the full force of which is exemplified in the present work.