Frank Auerbach

Beaux Arts Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1957

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, no. 47, p. 240, illustrated

The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate. This work is in very good condition. The sheet is hinged to the backing board along the top edge. There is some horizontal undulation to the sheet throughout, which is inherent to the artist's choice of media, and artist's pinholes in several places towards the edges of the sheet.
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"A beautiful, mature young man; he had a kitchen chair and he'd be kneeling, painting on his knees. I used to think, why am I doing this [sitting for him] with three children and a demanding job? I just loved him.
Estella O. West cited in the film: Frank Auerbach: To the Studio

Executed in the artist's twenty-sixth year, the sublime charcoal drawing Head of E.O.W. executed between February and April 1957 is one of the earliest extant exemplars of Frank Auerbach's breathtaking process of artistic creation. Affording a full survey of the artist's emphatic technique, with charcoal and chalk powerfully inscribed, smudged and rubbed across the surface, this immensely moving portrayal reveals Auerbach's determination to chart the emotional and psychological landscape of his subject through a visceral assault of mark-making. It depicts one of the most important sitters within his remarkable canon, Estella Olive West: the pre-eminent influence on the early development both of the artist's personal and artistic identities. They had first met in 1948 when he was seventeen and she was thirty-two and they were both cast in a production of a play by Peter Ustinov, House of Regrets. Her husband having drowned in a freak accident and left with three young children, Stella ran a lodging house at 81 Earl's Court Road. Robert Hughes has deftly suggested that through West Auerbach "could piece together the broken security which is the orphan's burden; if anyone, early on, helped him to manage his sense of the world, it was Stella West. His need for stability within the threatening flux of experience would be absorbed, through E.O.W.'s constant presence as a subject, into the very marrow of his painting and project onto his habits of work" (Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 90). Indeed, West herself, her influence and role in the artist's life, can be seen as directly responsible for his lifelong obsession with the figure and his endless attempts to record the inimitability of the human encounter.