Frank Auerbach 1931 - 2024

Auerbach met Juliet Yardley Mills in 1956, when she was working as a model at Sidcup College of Art. He began to paint her the following year, and continued to do so, at his studio in Camden, every Wednesday and Sunday, until 1997. As with all his repeated sitters, Auerbach developed an acute awareness of posture and mood:

‘I notice something when people first come and sit and think, they do things with their faces. It’s when they’ve become tired and stoical the essential head becomes clearer. They become more themselves as they become tired.’ ₁

JYM was an ideal sitter, capable of holding poses for long periods of time. At first Auerbach painted her without identification in his titles, although she is distinguishable from his previous frequent subject, Stella West (EOW). A characteristic pose shows JYM seated, her head against the back of the chair or supported by linked hands. As Robert Hughes notes, she always returns the artist’s gaze, and ‘there is a look – head cocked back, sometimes seen a little from below, a bit quizzical, sometimes challenging – that makes [her portraits] quite recognizable as a series’. ₂

Auerbach’s drawings evolve and assume their final form across weeks of sittings. A day’s work may be scrubbed back, the following morning, to leave an accumulated deposit of charcoal. In some cases the paper wears perilously thin and needs to be patched. The finished drawing represents the last sitting, the most recent thoughts, yet Auerbach feels compelled to retain the accumulated traces as part of a process of securing the image within its own space and atmosphere. ₃

Head of JYM III gazes partially downwards. There is a weight and solidity that derives from the density of charcoal, implying the settled mass of the sitter, at ease, one shoulder higher than the other. The volume of her head is registered through its eye sockets, cheekbones and chin. Through these we gain an intuition of its totality, and how it might feel to follow the head round, past its visible limits.

₁ William Feaver, Frank Auerbach (Rizzoli, 2009), p. 20.

₂ Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), p. 80.

₃ Feaver, Frank Auerbach, p. 19.

The Artist

Marlborough Fine Art, London

Private Collection (purchased from the above)

W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, cat. no. 428

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Frank Auerbach, Recent Work, 13 January – 11 February, 1983, cat. no. 31

Juliet Yardley Mills, the sitter in this arresting 1991 oil on canvas by Frank Auerbach, is known as ‘J.Y.M.’ in the artist’s paintings. Auerbach first met her in the late 1950s whilst she was working as a professional model at Sidcup School of Art, although her name does not appear in his work until 1963. Over the following four decades Juliet would sit for Auerbach every Wednesday and Sunday at his Camden studio, until 1997. This represents one of the most committed and lengthy relationships between artist and model in the history of twentieth century art. In Auerbach’s canon, only ‘E.O.W.’ (Estella West) and his wife, Julia, are represented with any kind of similar regularity.

Each year Auerbach would embark on a small and intimate series of oil paintings which tackled his favoured models. Within the titles they would usually be assigned a number (as a Roman numeral) denoting their sequential order. Such was the obsessive in depth analysis of these individual paintings that each series rarely exceeded five (V). Their compositions would usually remain faithful to the first in the series, with seemingly minor adjustments. In the 1991 group of four paintings depicting J.Y.M. seated, Juliet is depicted not quite full length in her chair, and positioned to varying degrees right of centre.

It is with Auerbach’s choice of colour and handling of paint where we see greater variety and experimentation, making each painting a unique and powerful testament to his connection and understanding of Juliet’s character. In J.Y.M. Seated II (1991) there is less dark and heavy outlining of forms making it an altogether gentler image. It contains less black and utilises more yellow and green than the others, in both the body and background, which serves to flatten the picture plane.

Auerbach once fondly noted that J.Y.M., “was brought into the world to be a model, she came and sat and it was not quite like anything else… She took poses that were natural to her… It became like a central spine of what one was doing” (Frank Auerbach cited in: Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 184).

The Artist
Marlborough Gallery, Madrid
Private Collection, U.K.
Private Collection, U.K. (since 2017)

W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, p. 314, no. 664 (ill. col.)

Madrid, Marlborough Gallery, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings, 1993

The first portraits of David Landau, charcoals on paper, were made in 1984-85, with the initial oil appearing a year later. Artist and businessman had met in 1983 when Landau, also an art scholar and former trustee of the National Gallery in London, visited Auerbach at his studio in Camden with a view to introducing Lord Asa Briggs for a one-off portrait. Briggs was the Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, of which Landau was a fellow. Art historian William Feaver details the meeting between the two men concerning the Briggs portrait,

‘Auerbcah was discouraging: “David Landau came, polished shoes, and agreed that the studio was not a suitable plcae. My behaviour is disturbing and it might take two years, I said.” They decided it was not going to work, Briggs being busy and away a lot, but then Landau had a better idea, “What about doing me?”‘ (W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009 p. 21)

The new relationship between artist and sitter then commenced, and, for a period of two years in stints of two hours per week, Landau visited Auerbach in Camden before the first portrait of him materialised. At the outset, the visits occurred on a Friday evening at 6pm, once Landau’s pressurised working week had concluded. In an interview with The Guardian in 2015 Landau remarked of his visits, ‘It became a kind of catharsis’. In the same interview he went on to say, ‘He is a tremendous friend: the only person, apart from my wife, who I’ve seen so consistently for so long. He has shown me how art is produced: how hard it is to achieve greatness, and how exciting it is to be there when, after 10 or 12 months, a painting is finally finished. It’s a magic moment – like witnessing a birth (David Landau interviewed by Laura Barnett for The Guardian, 30 September, 2015).

In this impressive 2001 portrait of David Landau, Auerbach presents the sitter from his shoulders up, and in profile. The other Landau oil portraits from the same year are all full frontal representations.

The Artist
Marlborough Fine Art
Sotheby’s London, October 2006
Private collection, U.K.

W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, p. 334, cat.no. 846 (ill. col.)