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拍品专文
Painted in 1978, Head of J.Y.M. stands as one of the most compelling works from a pivotal moment in Frank Auerbach’s career. Its subject, Juliet Yardley Mills, had been sitting for Auerbach since 1956, travelling across London twice a week to his Camden studio, where she would hold poses for hours at a time. Such continuity was not incidental to Auerbach’s work but fundamental: he worked from a small, fixed circle of sitters across his career, returning to the same faces year after year rather than seeking out new ones, treating each sitting as part of a single, ongoing act of looking. By the late 1970s, Auerbach and JYM’s relationship was already a twenty-year partnership, less a conventional artist-model arrangement than a bond of deep mutual devotion. As JYM herself later recalled: 'We had a wonderful relationship because I thought the world of him, and he was very fond of me… Real friends'.
Such intimacy is inseparable from what makes the present work so arresting. Auerbach's intention was to trap the physical essence of the sitter and evoke the presence of a particular individual, and yet identity here is not captured so much as fought for. The surface of the board is a battlefield of accumulated effort: layers of paint applied, scraped back and re-applied across successive sessions, the memory of each session lingering beneath the next. The finished painting – despite its appearance of accumulated labour in its surface – was thus painted essentially within a single sitting: the culmination of many false starts, rather than their sum.
The result is something closer to excavation than depiction. Paint has been carefully built up in layers, creating a textured topography of pigment that adds depth and weight to the bold silhouette emerging from the composition. What crystallises from this process is not a likeness but a presence: swirling ochres and yellows animated by the energy JYM brought into the studio. ‘When I work from a model there is a person in the room. The person creates her own energy by being present’, Auerbach expressed to Catherine Lampert; ‘each sitter in a sense creates, to some extent, a unique atmosphere, so that one finds oneself behaving differently because the sitter's a different person’. In Head of J.Y.M., that atmosphere has been permanently fixed in paint: warm, insistent, and unmistakably alive.
Head of J.Y.M. was included in the Royal Academy's major 2001 retrospective, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954–2001, and illustrated on the cover of the Academy's magazine that autumn. Nearly two decades later, it held a central position in Auerbach's first New York exhibition in over a decade, at Luhring Augustine (2020–21). Writing of the present work, Sanford Schwartz – who counted it among the ‘high points’ of Auerbach's 2020–21 New York exhibition – described the productive disorientation it produced: standing before it, he saw at first only ‘an explosion of broad yellow brush marks’ with ‘little idea of what I was looking at’, and only later, in reproduction, did ‘the features of the sitter's face emerge’. Even once legible, he noted, the likeness did nothing to diminish ‘the tightly wound drama of Auerbach's brushwork’ (S. Schwartz, ‘A Painter's Performances’, The New York Review of Books, 11 March 2021). Abstraction and presence, in other words, sustaining rather than undercutting one another: the very tension that gives Head of J.Y.M. its lasting hold.
Such intimacy is inseparable from what makes the present work so arresting. Auerbach's intention was to trap the physical essence of the sitter and evoke the presence of a particular individual, and yet identity here is not captured so much as fought for. The surface of the board is a battlefield of accumulated effort: layers of paint applied, scraped back and re-applied across successive sessions, the memory of each session lingering beneath the next. The finished painting – despite its appearance of accumulated labour in its surface – was thus painted essentially within a single sitting: the culmination of many false starts, rather than their sum.
The result is something closer to excavation than depiction. Paint has been carefully built up in layers, creating a textured topography of pigment that adds depth and weight to the bold silhouette emerging from the composition. What crystallises from this process is not a likeness but a presence: swirling ochres and yellows animated by the energy JYM brought into the studio. ‘When I work from a model there is a person in the room. The person creates her own energy by being present’, Auerbach expressed to Catherine Lampert; ‘each sitter in a sense creates, to some extent, a unique atmosphere, so that one finds oneself behaving differently because the sitter's a different person’. In Head of J.Y.M., that atmosphere has been permanently fixed in paint: warm, insistent, and unmistakably alive.
Head of J.Y.M. was included in the Royal Academy's major 2001 retrospective, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954–2001, and illustrated on the cover of the Academy's magazine that autumn. Nearly two decades later, it held a central position in Auerbach's first New York exhibition in over a decade, at Luhring Augustine (2020–21). Writing of the present work, Sanford Schwartz – who counted it among the ‘high points’ of Auerbach's 2020–21 New York exhibition – described the productive disorientation it produced: standing before it, he saw at first only ‘an explosion of broad yellow brush marks’ with ‘little idea of what I was looking at’, and only later, in reproduction, did ‘the features of the sitter's face emerge’. Even once legible, he noted, the likeness did nothing to diminish ‘the tightly wound drama of Auerbach's brushwork’ (S. Schwartz, ‘A Painter's Performances’, The New York Review of Books, 11 March 2021). Abstraction and presence, in other words, sustaining rather than undercutting one another: the very tension that gives Head of J.Y.M. its lasting hold.