Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Mrs. Rosemary Peto, London
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Part II, 30 November 1995, Lot 218
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

London, Hayward Gallery; Edinburgh, Fruit Market Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 1978, p. 34, no. 92, illustrated in colour and p. 91, no. 92, illustrated
Jevnaker, Kristefos-Museet, Kropp: fra Munch til Melegaard, 2004, p. 42, no. 2, illustrated in colour

Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 76, no. 43, illustrated in colour
William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 266, no. 263, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although they are deeper and richer in the original, and the illustration fails to convey the purple tones towards the top of the composition. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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“E.O.W.’s reclining head, its icy nose thrusting up against its warm earthen background, is almost mummy-like, indifferently staring at nothing in particular… the sense of an architecture or girding criss-cross marks, each bracing its neighbour against toppling into chaos, becomes acute in a slightly later yellow version from 1970.”

Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 166.


Densely rendered in viscous yellow ochre and black, Frank Auerbach’s E.O.W. Reclining embodies an iconic depiction of the painter’s first and formative long-standing model, Estella West. Known as Stella though famous across Auerbach’s oeuvre as E.O.W., West appears in more than 80 paintings spanning a period of over twenty years of the artist’s demanding and arduous production. Executed in 1970, the present portrait represents one of the very last occasions Auerbach would translate E.O.W.’s likeness in paint, vociferously enshrining her status as the most enigmatic and important presence from the artist’s early output. Portrayed lying down, face tilted upwards, E.O.W.’s jutting profile and the angular articulation of her form here engender a simultaneous sense of substantial yet fragile presence. Boldly inscribed across the top and bottom edges, this painting registers a closeness and mutuality of affection between the painter and his muse of over twenty years: ‘ELLA’ standing as shorthand for Estella and ‘HA’ an initial of the painter’s second and last names, Helmut Auerbach. Significantly, across the entire breadth of Auerbach’s iconic canon of portraiture, this is the only instance in which text appears. What’s more, very rarely, if ever, does one even find the slightest suggestion of a signature on his paintings. So forceful a part of the composition, the double affirmation of both artist and sitter in text – a presence so utterly intrinsic within the fabric of the work itself – here communicates on an unmatched level the importance of an artistic dialogue that bestowed form to Auerbach’s status among the very greatest of the twentieth century’s figurative painters.

Auerbach and West first met in 1947. At the time they were both performing small parts in a production of The House of Regrets at the Unity Theatre directed by their mutual friend, Frank Marcus. Shortly following, Auerbach was invited to lodge at her house in Earl’s Court. Fifteen years his senior and with three young children, at the time she assumed Auerbach’s attraction to her unlikely. Nonetheless, perhaps owing to the artist’s own sense of having been ‘born old’, they were lovers throughout the years Auerbach came to maturity. It was during this time that she inevitably became the young painter’s principle subject. She sat for him three times a week for two hours at a time, and has since recalled Auerbach’s painterly approach as “very violent and quite in a world of his own; quite frightening in the beginning” (Estella West cited in: William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 11). Between the fifties and early 1970s Auerbach was to produce over 80 nudes and portrait heads after her likeness. Crucially, it is the seeming endless repetition of West and her unwavering commitment that marked a determining factor for Auerbach in these early years. As Robert Hughes observed: “if anyone, early on, helped him manage his sense of the world, it was Stella West. This would have a deep effect on his art. 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 projected on his habits of work” (Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 90).

The works after West traverse an incredible development. From the astoundingly thick and packed density of sheer painted substance through to the later works articulated with increasing fluidity and ease, the paintings of E.O.W. are forceful expressions of that which has proved most vital to Auerbach’s work: familiarity, constancy, and commitment. The product of vigorous routine and ceaseless reiteration, E.O.W. Reclining at once delivers the ferver of Auerbach’s technique and intense psychological emotionality with a fluency of translation. In response to this work and other late depictions of West, Catherine Lampert notes a marked transition: “Between 1961 and 1973 the paintings of Stella move through a process of what psychologists (and art historians) call displacement. The liquidity of the paint is at the centre of something almost alchemical in its ability to express feeling… the brush strokes, in contrast to mass, manage to convert us, almost like a stigmatism to truth. Rembrandt and Titian’s late tonal paintings guided him, yet he began to act in a modern idiom, open to pungent attacks on our nerves as well as our acceptance of ‘disorder’” (Catherine Lampert, ‘Auerbach and his Sitters’, Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Art, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1952-2001, 2001, p. 25). Robert Hughes similarly identifies a transition that imparts a heightened feeling of brutality and even impatience in his treatment of West. With particular reference to the present painting Hughes outlines: “By now, E.O.W. looks shrivelled and crone-like, and a third version of her reclining head seemed to the English critic Robert Melville to convey ‘a rather frightening atmosphere of prediction’, with enigmatic letters HA scrawled into the paint by her head producing ‘an atmosphere or ritual murder’. That was too Expressionist a reading, though these heads of E.O.W. do suggest pathos, even desolation” (Robert Hughes, Op. cit., pp. 165-6). Indifferently staring up at the ceiling, West’s body and discernable physiognomy not only carries a sense of substantial physical presence but also registers a strong emotional weight.

Readily communicated within the present work, West’s magnetic force casts a defining legacy discernable throughout the artist’s inimitable treatment of the human form. As indelibly inscribed in letters onto the thick ground of coagulated pigment, E.O.W. Reclining forcefully pronounces the significance of the most fundamental exchange between artist and model across Auerbach’s entire career.