Lot 41
  • 41

Frank Auerbach

Estimate
500,000 - 700,000 GBP
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Description

  • Frank Auerbach
  • E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown IV
  • oil on board
  • 41.5 by 46.3cm.; 16 3/8 by 18 1/4 in.
  • Executed in 1963.

Provenance

Beaux Arts Gallery, London

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London (acquired from the above in 1966)

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1974

Literature

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 252, no. 148, illustrated in colour

Condition

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the red is more vibrant and the light blues have more green undertones in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a few minute losses to the impasto peaks most notably to the bright red and cream pigment to the upper torso of the figure. Further inspection reveals a small crack to the mid-blue pigment to the centre-left of the composition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Catalogue Note

Teased from a welt of glutinous oil paint, Frank Auerbach’s E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown IV is a remarkable depiction of the painter’s formative and most celebrated model, Estella Olive West or E.O.W. as she was called by Auerbach. Estella, more commonly known as Stella, utterly dominated Auerbach’s early artistic output and featured in more than seventy paintings by the artist over their twenty-five year relationship. Executed in 1963, the present work is from a group of ten paintings created in 1962-65, which illustrate Stella’s spectral, nude body floating on a cool blue stream of glistening, granular paint that represents her eiderdown of the same colour. An enticing cacophony of marks here picks out her undulating form; the grooved planes of her lithe legs, the encircling crown of hair and the staccato-like peaks of impastoed oil that tantalisingly flow, curl and bend, breathing life and rhythm into her inanimate body. Notable not only for their extraordinary density and facture, this small group of works are renowned for their electric use of colour, which had not yet been seen before in his oeuvre. In E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown IV, the canvas is bathed in dramatic cadmium reds, swathes of canary yellow, striking jolts of Veronese green, and this series’ defining mark – a river of cobalt blue. Attesting to the importance of the present work, another piece from this series is held in the illustrious collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, whilst other works featuring E.O.W.’s visage are held in eminent international collections such as that of the Tate, London and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Re-affirming Auerbach’s status as one of the most relevant and dynamic painters today, a major retrospective of the artist’s work opened this summer at Kunstmusuem Bonn and will travel to the Tate Britain, London this October.

Auerbach first met Stella in 1948 when they were both playing small roles in a production of Peter Ustinov’s The House of Regrets at the Unity Theatre, which was directed by their mutual friend Frank Marcus. Recently widowed and left to care for three young children, Stella was forced to open up her house in Earl’s Court to lodgers; the first of whom was Auerbach. In spite of being 17 to her 32, within a week of moving in they embarked upon a long and tempestuous relationship that would span more than 25 years. 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. Crucially, it is the seemingly endless repetition of Stella 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).

Recently describing the impetus for the Blue Eiderdown series, Auerbach recalled “she worked as a social worker all day and got quite tired in the evenings, so lying on the bed and very often falling asleep was a good situation both for her and for me… I worked in Stella’s bedroom then because the children were growing up and I didn’t have quite the freedom to muck up the rest of the house in those days. I would have lots of paint around me, with the painting resting on a very, very painty chair. Stella would lie on the blue eiderdown thrown across her bed. And I have to say the painting brings the whole situation back to me very vividly indeed. These conditions, which I think most artists would complain about, I never found irksome, working in a crowded small room, to be on my knees and not able to get too far away from the painting, because finally, I think, all that thing of unity is in one’s head as much as it is found by looking” (Frank Auerbach quoted in: Catherine Lampert, ‘Frank Auerbach in his own words’, The Telegraph, 4 November 2012, online resource).

Although the works after Stella traverse an incredible development, art historian Catherine Lampert points out that the true essence of Stella, her electric magnetism as a sitter, is felt most strongly in the works that he created of her from 1963-65; the Blue Eiderdown works. In the present work jet black recesses pick out her steely eyes whilst a whisper of crimson denotes her lips, forcefully conveying the raw inner spirit of his lover. With Auerbach’s characteristic flair and ingenuity, E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown IV is a superlative example of how he utterly redefined, regenerated and wholly modernised the genre of portraiture through one of the most poignant and celebrated relationships between artist and model of the Twentieth Century.