Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, pp. 185 and 330, no. 812, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although there are more light blue undertones in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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“Like most strong portraitists, what Auerbach appears to be after is not a likeness so much as a presence, or an apparition, or a sudden proximity of someone” (T.J. Clark, ‘On Frank Auerbach’ in: Exh. Cat., Bonn, Kunstmuseum (and travelling), Frank Auerbach, 2015-16, p. 14).

As T.J. Clark has described, Frank Auerbach’s portraits are much more than painterly representations of his sitters. Through a laborious creative process, where paint is applied onto canvas only to be scraped down again in a repetitive and arduous progress that may last months, Auerbach reveals an image of his models that is indeed much closer to a presence than a mere portrait. Head of David Landau perfectly attests to the painter’s unique ability to capture that ‘presence’; in a flurry of expressive brushstrokes, angular sweeps of paint and softer, thinner areas that have been rubbed down, Landau’s image brilliantly emerges.

David Landau met Frank Auerbach in 1983, when he was looking to commission a portrait of historian Asa Briggs for Worcester College in Oxford. Landau wrote a letter to Auerbach, who agreed to paint Briggs, but ultimately the historian’s busy schedule made it impossible for the painter’s regular sitting sessions to take place, so instead Landau started sitting for him. The present work, executed in 1998, is an outstanding example of Auerbach’s mastery of oil paint. Using a reduced palette of blacks, whites and greys – reminiscent of his earlier work – the painter’s signature energetic brushwork fills the composition bringing his model’s appearance to light. A lattice of vigorous lines uncovers details of Landau’s semblance; a pensive brow, the outline of a nose, and a hint of the eyes which seem to be lost in deep contemplation. With its heavily impastoed surface, Head of David Landauresembles Giacometti’s intensely worked canvases. Indeed, the similarities between both artists reach beyond what meets the eye. Not only do they stand out as more uncompromising, often reclusive artists than almost all of their contemporaries, but their relentless, almost extreme focus on and compassion with the “conditio humana” relates and nobles their respective oeuvres. It may have to do with their biographies – both as life-time emigrants who dedicated their entire lives to their work and almost nothing else.

Auerbach requires from his sitters that they come at set times and days of the week. The intimacy that is created by means of regular sessions during prolonged periods of time enables the artist to capture more than what is visible to the naked eye. Thus, quasi-abstract marks become in Auerbach’s work “components in the face or visage of the whole of the painting. But the marks that seem to stand for something nameable and those marks which seem to you to be inventive ones, are not in my mind separate. It’s always a process of suddenly seeing a unity in the disparate things one’s trying to hold together, a unity that one hadn’t predicted and that seems true to one and that seems comprehensive in the sense that nothing’s left out. The ghost that is floating in front of me is something totally new and raw and strange and arbitrary, the like of which has not been seen before but which is true to my experience of the subject” (Frank Auerbach in conversation with Catherine Lampert in: Ibid., p. 152).