Frank Auerbach

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

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 341, no. 887, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly more vibrant in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to convey the rich texture and glossy nature of the oil paint visible in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a small spot of lifting towards the centre of the composition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Frank Auerbach’s portrait of Ruth Bromberg recites a sustained and emphatic account of Britain’s greatest living painter, who was recently the subject of an acclaimed retrospective at Tate Britain. One of his most privileged subjects, Ruth Bromberg sat for the artist most Thursday afternoons over a period of sixteen years, from 1992 to 2008, at his Mornington Crescent studio. As a keen and ardent admirer of Auerbach’s work for some time prior to her years as a sitter, Bromberg was eventually introduced to Auerbach by David Landau, a long-term friend of the Brombergs and also regular model for Auerbach since 1983. Produced over the course of two decades, these extraordinary works, of which the present work is distinct testament, bear witness to the development of a friendship that was to last until the very end of Bromberg’s life. Cultivated by a mutual interest in art and long discussions on Walter Sickert – Ruth was an erudite scholar on the Camden Town painter’s etchings and prints – a mutual and lasting respect developed between artist and subject.

As the meticulously preserved archive of correspondence between the two parties attests, Ruth had a deep reverence for the artist’s practice. Such a level of regard was affirmed by Auerbach: “The greatest present is your constancy as a sitter, and your patience with my slow fumble towards an image” (Frank Auerbach in a letter to Ruth Bromberg, 2 December 1994, online). The visceral and vigorous spontaneity of Auerbach’s portraits belie this “slow fumble” – his arduous working process of intense scrutiny and endless erasure. A brutal self-editor, Auerbach ruthlessly scrapes off the toiled progress of paintings that do not meet his high standards; a process both repetitive and cumulative in which the extended time of a work’s creation, and its implicit position within the wider trajectory of art history, are revealed in the artist’s sculptural modelling and linear brushwork. For the artist, this arduous routine of reiteration affords the very potential for going beyond mere likeness and representation, providing the means to capture something of the sheer essence of being and presence. In the present work, Auerbach’s supreme draughtsmanship and expressionistic gesture combine to create an emotive frontal portrait of Ruth Bromberg: an intensely charged psychological depiction that registers the painterly tension between an almost baroque darkness and the internal luminosity of the sitter. In this way, Auerbach’s position in the canon of western portraiture is assured, not only alongside his contemporaries such as Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, but also the historical masters, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Cézanne.

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” (Frank Auerbach in conversation with Catherine Lampert, in: Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 1978, p. 13). A spectacular translation in paint of the shared experience between artist and sitter, Head of Ruth Bromberg is a work of pure presence and a testament to the enduring brilliance of Auerbach’s singular artistic vision.