Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, Marlborough Gallery, Frank Auerbach: Recent Works, 2006

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 341, no. 899, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is lighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Executed between 2003 and 2004, Head of David Landau is a superb example from Frank Auerbach’s extraordinary portrait practice. Painted with vigorous brush strokes in a vibrant chromatic palette, the present work is testament to Auerbach’s mastery of translating human presence in paint, a life-long dedication rigorously pursued via an austere weekly routine. Marking a dramatic progression from the thickly encrusted deep ochre works from the early 1950s, Head of David Landau evinces the evolution of Auerbach’s spectacular handling of paint with an unbridled command of colour.

A businessman, editor of Print Quarterly, and former trustee of the National Gallery, David Landau first began to sit for Auerbach in 1983. A fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, Landau approached Auerbach in 1983 with the aim to commission a portrait of the college’s Provost Asa Briggs. To this end, recalls Auerbach, the visit was unsuccessful: “David Landau came, polished shoes, and agreed that the studio was not a suitable place, ‘My behaviour is disturbing and it might take two years ,’ I said” (the artist quoted in: William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 21). After abandoning this idea, Landau proposed that he instead could sit for the artist, to which Auerbach replied: “if you are reliable, and can come on Fridays” (Ibid.). Though a weekly sitter, Landau’s initiation was protracted and his likeness did not make it into a finished painting until 1987. Where this first painting was finished in 1987, the present work was completed in 2003 and in turn embodies the artist’s tremendous artistic short-hand developed after 15 years of closely scrutinising Landau’s likeness. Indeed, it is the extraordinarily strict constraints of Auerbach's procedure and the dedication of his sitters that lays the foundation for the painter's groundbreaking innovation. Though aligned with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff in drawing from the repository of individuals that comprised their immediate social locale in London, Auerbach's demanding and repetitive scrutiny of the same group of individuals invests his work with a height of emotive charge; so familiar with the personalities and appearances of his sitters, Auerbach imbues his work with unparalleled physiognomic and psychological power.

As early as 1978, Auerbach had defined his practice as tied to an intense familiarity with his subjects: "I've got certain attachments to people and places, and it seems to me simply to be less worthwhile to record things to which I'm less attached, since I know about things that nobody else knows about" (the artist interviewed by Catherine Lampert in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Arts Council, Frank Auerbach, 1978, p.13). Auerbach's weekly routine produces a surprisingly concise annual output of twelve to fifteen finished works, of which roughly two-thirds are portraits. These dynamic and vigorously spontaneous paintings are the surprising result of an arduous process of intense scrutiny and endless erasure. Where Francis Bacon slashed and destroyed innumerable canvases, Auerbach ruthlessly scrapes off the toiled progress of paintings that fail to meet his high expectations; the faint ghosts they leave behind act as the starting point upon which Auerbach begins again almost from scratch. Approaching the conditions of a palimpsest, this repetitive yet cumulative process spans months and even years until the final moments of completion, at which Auerbach attains the immediate reality he is ultimately aiming to enshrine in paint. Here, urgently conveying the paroxysmal gestures of these pivotally decisive final moments, Auerbach's Head of David Landau delivers this as a revelation of the immediate fluidity of appearance.