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Lot Essay
‘Viewed obliquely Boehm’s diamond shaped cranium and handsome features invite trust, but if we look again, from another vantage point, we see a beseeching, pinched carapace, and then a subdued gamine, gently dozing’ (Catherine Lampert)
Included in Frank Auerbach’s first major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1978, the present work stands among his largest paintings of Gerda Boehm: his older cousin and longstanding muse. With its vivid, jewel-toned palette swathed in luminous, dazzling blue, it bears witness to his dialogue with Abstract Expressionism during a period of mounting critical acclaim. Boehm was the only relative Auerbach saw after escaping Nazi Germany as a young boy, and became a constant presence in his art, featuring in paintings held in the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. ‘Boehm’s diamond shaped cranium and handsome features invite trust,’ writes Catherine Lampert, ‘but if we look again, from another vantage point, we see a beseeching, pinched carapace, and then a subdued gamine, gently dozing.’ Like Willem de Kooning’s Women, writes Norman Rosenthal, Auerbach’s subjects ‘are almost unrecognisable to us as individuals and suggest that the intimate emotional involvement he has with his sitters somehow makes them less, rather than more, recognisable; private, even abstracted’ (C. Lampert and N. Rosenthal, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2001, pp. 27, 15). Here, through rich, layered twists of impasto, Auerbach weaves a poignant ode to his own flesh and blood, sealing her presence in paint.
In 1959 Auerbach had attended the groundbreaking exhibition The New American Painting at the Tate Gallery: a major touring show organised the Museum of Modern Art, New York. There, de Kooning’s extraordinary paintings of the female form had deeply impressed him. In his rich, contoured brushwork, he found a powerful embodiment of what his former teacher David Bomberg had famously described as ‘the spirit in the mass’. ‘The Dutchman’s hooking, rhythmic line evoked bodies in the jostle of elbow-forms … and drew them openly in the totemic Women’, writes Robert Hughes. ‘His paint surface was a membrane, now thick and now a wash, but always under some degree of torsion and tension from the boundaries of the forms … At the same time there was enough contrast between the figure and field in his work to give Auerbach’s figural obsession a handle on it’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 149). The present work demonstrates the full force of this influence. By the 1970s, Auerbach had moved away from the dark, heavy layers of his earlier oeuvre, embracing brighter palettes and a looser, more linear sense of brushwork. Alive with vibrant tones of cerulean, yellow and green, Gerda’s form emerges through marbled swipes of colour, fuelled and sustained by the dynamism of paint itself.
Gerda Boehm is the largest of three portraits that Auerbach completed in 1973 depicting his cousin in the same distinctive pose. Born in 1907, Gerda was twenty-four years his senior. In 1929 her family moved to Berlin, where Auerbach was born two years later: the cousins grew up on the same street. In April 1939, at barely eight years old, Auerbach was sent to England with five other children under the patronage of an Italian, Iris Origo. In the same year, Gerda and her husband Gerhard also managed to escape Germany, travelling to London and settling in Hampstead Hill Gardens. Both cousins’ parents died in concentration camps, and commemorative ‘Stolpersteine’ remain outside their respective homes in Berlin. Auerbach was enrolled as a boarder at the privately-owned Bunce Court School in Kent, and remained there for the duration of the war. Gerda, as his closest living relative and legal guardian, would have him to stay during the school holidays. He greatly looked forward to these trips, during which he immersed himself in books borrowed from the library in Keats Grove in Hampstead.
According to Lampert, Auerbach explained that these times were ‘very beneficial to me because I led this extraordinarily cloistered life at a Quaker boarding school in the country … there were certain conventions and we seemed to be different from the rest of the world and never quite caught up with the twentieth century ... certainly Gerda Boehm and her husband were very much the opposite of that.’ Lampert notes that ‘the experience of living in cosmopolitan Berlin in the 1930s had somehow imparted to Gerda a desire to dress well and cut a figure in the world, and an appetite for going out’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 79). In the summer of 1948, Gerda took Auerbach to Paris, where he absorbed the city’s thrilling artistic scene. She and her husband supported him financially during his studies at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London between 1948 and 1952. After Gerhard’s passing, Auerbach and Gerda saw each other for dinner every Sunday evening: a tradition that continued until she moved into a nursing home in 2004.
Gerda began sitting for Auerbach in 1961, marking the start of a weekly ritual that would last until 1982. Over the course of these two decades, Auerbach made thirty-five oil paintings and six drawings of her. Lampert notes that these works stand among his most mercurial portraits, often registering ‘conflicting emotions’ within a single painting (C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, ibid.). The present work, certainly, simmers with painterly tension, shifting between multiple states. Though captured in peaceful repose, Gerda’s form seems to wrestle with itself: layers of fluid, marbled colour are pinned in place by striking bars and angular contours that prop up the image like scaffolding. Myriad tones of blue, violet, ochre and burgundy capture the undulation of her flesh, which seems to modulate before our eyes. Her own, by contrast, are rendered with the most economical of means, her gaze alert and piercing amid the work’s dense, layered surface. With its flickering chiaroscuro, the work bears witness to Auerbach’s continued admiration for Rembrandt: a passion he shared with de Kooning. ‘[His] handling is so rapid and responsive, but the mind is that of a conceptualising architect’, he enthused (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, ibid., p. 87).
The 1970s was a critical time for Auerbach. In 1969 he had made his solo debut in America, and would continue to exhibit internationally over the course of the following decade. Between 1975 and 1976, the present work formed part of the major touring group show European Painting in the Seventies: New Work by Sixteen Artists organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition brought Auerbach to the attention of a wider American public, and featured masterworks by his School of London contemporaries including Francis Bacon’s Triptych May-June 1974 (later retitled Triptych 1974-1977), Lucian Freud’s Naked Portrait (1972-1973, Tate, London) as well as David Hockney’s Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969) and Still Life on a Glass Table (1971-1972). His retrospective at the Hayward Gallery three years later elevated his reputation to new heights, with one reviewer describing him as ‘one of that handful of artists most admired by his peers, which places him at once among the very best in the world’ (W. Packer, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Financial Times, 1978).
Paintings such as the present were the products of an almost archaeological process, in which Auerbach would paint, scrape and repaint his surfaces over periods of months or years before arriving at the final image. Working in the same North London studio, and with a select group of sitters well known to him, the artist sought to go beyond superficial likeness and instead to capture the very essence of the person’s physical being. ‘The thing is after all done from the mind, and the accrued information enriches the content to an extraordinary degree,’ he explained. ‘I mean, if one has the chance of seeing people apart from the time when ones painting them, one notices all sorts of things about them. If one sees them in movement, one sees all sorts of truths about them and one’s infinitely less likely to be satisfied with a superficial statement. Those things that are particular to them to some extent may lead to a particularity of image, because one thereby gets the confidence to make statements which one knows to be true which conform to no statement that already exists in painting’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach’, in Frank Auerbach, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 1978, p. 12). Here, Gerda—the only link to the life he had left behind him as a child—is reborn in paint: the picture itself becomes a living, breathing presence, infused with the trace of her spirit and form.
Included in Frank Auerbach’s first major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1978, the present work stands among his largest paintings of Gerda Boehm: his older cousin and longstanding muse. With its vivid, jewel-toned palette swathed in luminous, dazzling blue, it bears witness to his dialogue with Abstract Expressionism during a period of mounting critical acclaim. Boehm was the only relative Auerbach saw after escaping Nazi Germany as a young boy, and became a constant presence in his art, featuring in paintings held in the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. ‘Boehm’s diamond shaped cranium and handsome features invite trust,’ writes Catherine Lampert, ‘but if we look again, from another vantage point, we see a beseeching, pinched carapace, and then a subdued gamine, gently dozing.’ Like Willem de Kooning’s Women, writes Norman Rosenthal, Auerbach’s subjects ‘are almost unrecognisable to us as individuals and suggest that the intimate emotional involvement he has with his sitters somehow makes them less, rather than more, recognisable; private, even abstracted’ (C. Lampert and N. Rosenthal, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2001, pp. 27, 15). Here, through rich, layered twists of impasto, Auerbach weaves a poignant ode to his own flesh and blood, sealing her presence in paint.
In 1959 Auerbach had attended the groundbreaking exhibition The New American Painting at the Tate Gallery: a major touring show organised the Museum of Modern Art, New York. There, de Kooning’s extraordinary paintings of the female form had deeply impressed him. In his rich, contoured brushwork, he found a powerful embodiment of what his former teacher David Bomberg had famously described as ‘the spirit in the mass’. ‘The Dutchman’s hooking, rhythmic line evoked bodies in the jostle of elbow-forms … and drew them openly in the totemic Women’, writes Robert Hughes. ‘His paint surface was a membrane, now thick and now a wash, but always under some degree of torsion and tension from the boundaries of the forms … At the same time there was enough contrast between the figure and field in his work to give Auerbach’s figural obsession a handle on it’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 149). The present work demonstrates the full force of this influence. By the 1970s, Auerbach had moved away from the dark, heavy layers of his earlier oeuvre, embracing brighter palettes and a looser, more linear sense of brushwork. Alive with vibrant tones of cerulean, yellow and green, Gerda’s form emerges through marbled swipes of colour, fuelled and sustained by the dynamism of paint itself.
Gerda Boehm is the largest of three portraits that Auerbach completed in 1973 depicting his cousin in the same distinctive pose. Born in 1907, Gerda was twenty-four years his senior. In 1929 her family moved to Berlin, where Auerbach was born two years later: the cousins grew up on the same street. In April 1939, at barely eight years old, Auerbach was sent to England with five other children under the patronage of an Italian, Iris Origo. In the same year, Gerda and her husband Gerhard also managed to escape Germany, travelling to London and settling in Hampstead Hill Gardens. Both cousins’ parents died in concentration camps, and commemorative ‘Stolpersteine’ remain outside their respective homes in Berlin. Auerbach was enrolled as a boarder at the privately-owned Bunce Court School in Kent, and remained there for the duration of the war. Gerda, as his closest living relative and legal guardian, would have him to stay during the school holidays. He greatly looked forward to these trips, during which he immersed himself in books borrowed from the library in Keats Grove in Hampstead.
According to Lampert, Auerbach explained that these times were ‘very beneficial to me because I led this extraordinarily cloistered life at a Quaker boarding school in the country … there were certain conventions and we seemed to be different from the rest of the world and never quite caught up with the twentieth century ... certainly Gerda Boehm and her husband were very much the opposite of that.’ Lampert notes that ‘the experience of living in cosmopolitan Berlin in the 1930s had somehow imparted to Gerda a desire to dress well and cut a figure in the world, and an appetite for going out’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 79). In the summer of 1948, Gerda took Auerbach to Paris, where he absorbed the city’s thrilling artistic scene. She and her husband supported him financially during his studies at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London between 1948 and 1952. After Gerhard’s passing, Auerbach and Gerda saw each other for dinner every Sunday evening: a tradition that continued until she moved into a nursing home in 2004.
Gerda began sitting for Auerbach in 1961, marking the start of a weekly ritual that would last until 1982. Over the course of these two decades, Auerbach made thirty-five oil paintings and six drawings of her. Lampert notes that these works stand among his most mercurial portraits, often registering ‘conflicting emotions’ within a single painting (C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, ibid.). The present work, certainly, simmers with painterly tension, shifting between multiple states. Though captured in peaceful repose, Gerda’s form seems to wrestle with itself: layers of fluid, marbled colour are pinned in place by striking bars and angular contours that prop up the image like scaffolding. Myriad tones of blue, violet, ochre and burgundy capture the undulation of her flesh, which seems to modulate before our eyes. Her own, by contrast, are rendered with the most economical of means, her gaze alert and piercing amid the work’s dense, layered surface. With its flickering chiaroscuro, the work bears witness to Auerbach’s continued admiration for Rembrandt: a passion he shared with de Kooning. ‘[His] handling is so rapid and responsive, but the mind is that of a conceptualising architect’, he enthused (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, ibid., p. 87).
The 1970s was a critical time for Auerbach. In 1969 he had made his solo debut in America, and would continue to exhibit internationally over the course of the following decade. Between 1975 and 1976, the present work formed part of the major touring group show European Painting in the Seventies: New Work by Sixteen Artists organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition brought Auerbach to the attention of a wider American public, and featured masterworks by his School of London contemporaries including Francis Bacon’s Triptych May-June 1974 (later retitled Triptych 1974-1977), Lucian Freud’s Naked Portrait (1972-1973, Tate, London) as well as David Hockney’s Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969) and Still Life on a Glass Table (1971-1972). His retrospective at the Hayward Gallery three years later elevated his reputation to new heights, with one reviewer describing him as ‘one of that handful of artists most admired by his peers, which places him at once among the very best in the world’ (W. Packer, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Financial Times, 1978).
Paintings such as the present were the products of an almost archaeological process, in which Auerbach would paint, scrape and repaint his surfaces over periods of months or years before arriving at the final image. Working in the same North London studio, and with a select group of sitters well known to him, the artist sought to go beyond superficial likeness and instead to capture the very essence of the person’s physical being. ‘The thing is after all done from the mind, and the accrued information enriches the content to an extraordinary degree,’ he explained. ‘I mean, if one has the chance of seeing people apart from the time when ones painting them, one notices all sorts of things about them. If one sees them in movement, one sees all sorts of truths about them and one’s infinitely less likely to be satisfied with a superficial statement. Those things that are particular to them to some extent may lead to a particularity of image, because one thereby gets the confidence to make statements which one knows to be true which conform to no statement that already exists in painting’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach’, in Frank Auerbach, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 1978, p. 12). Here, Gerda—the only link to the life he had left behind him as a child—is reborn in paint: the picture itself becomes a living, breathing presence, infused with the trace of her spirit and form.