Dramatically articulated from a glutinous mass of impastoed oils, Frank Auerbach’s Head of E.O.W. II is a striking exposition of the painter's wholly inimitable, physically immediate, and psychologically urgent figure painting. Created in 1964, the present work is a stunning depiction of the painter’s formative and most celebrated model, Estella Olive West, more commonly known as Stella. E.O.W., as she is known in Auerbach’s work, dominated his early artistic output and featured in more than seventy paintings over their twenty-five-year relationship. Here, E.O.W.’s visage emerges from within a cacophony of luscious oils, the staccato-like peaks of impastoed pigment tantalisingly flow, curl and bend, breathing life and rhythm into her singular face. Light illuminates and vivifies this extraordinary painting: thick layers of white paint lavishly denote her skin whilst bold strokes of black expertly draw out the sitter’s raw emotions; cobalt blue dots and a wisp of scarlet red mark out her eyes and mouth, while pure golden ochre, squeezed straight from the tube, snakes across the surface to mark her outline. The emphatic blows of pure gestural energy that comprise the stunning Head of E.O.W. II are left palpable on the surface in the cascading folds and burrowed troughs of Auerbach’s extraordinary mark-making.
Frank Auerbach, Head of E.O.W. III installed in the home of artist Lucian Freud. Image: © Bridgeman Images/ Artwork: © The artist, courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London
Bearing impeccable provenance, the present work was formerly held in the famed Hiscox collects ion as well as the renowned collects ion of Allan Stone; it has also featured in numerous significant exhibitions of the artist’s work, including his first show with Marlborough in the year after it was executed, as well as Auerbach’s first major retrospective, organised by Catherine Lampert at the Hayward Gallery in 1978. Further attesting to this work’s importance, its sister painting Head of E.O.W. III (1963-64), now belonging to Manchester City Art Gallery, was formerly held in the illustrious collects ion of Auerbach’s close friend and eminent British artist Lucian Freud, whilst other works featuring E.O.W. are held in prominent international collects ions such as the Tate, London, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. One of the leading British artists of our t.mes , Auerbach’s work is currently the subject of a critically acclaimed exhibition at The Courtauld, London.
Frank Auerbach’s Portraits of E.O.W. in Prominent Institutional collects ions
Akin to Francis Bacon, Auerbach famously depicts only subjects with whom he is extremely familiar: social intimacy affording an expressive freedom emancipated from the hesitancy of unfamiliarity. Depicted here, E.O.W. represents the cornerstone of the artist's canon. Auerbach first.mes t Stella in 1948 when they were both playing small roles in a production of Peter Ustinov’s The House of Regrets at the Unity Theatre in London, which was directed by their mutual friend Frank Marcus. Recently widowed and left to care for three young children, Stella was forced to open her house in Earl’s Court to lodgers—the first of whom was Auerbach. Despite an age difference—he was 17, she 32— within a week of moving in they embarked upon a long and tempestuous relationship that would span more than 25 years. It was during this period that she became the young painter’s principal subject, sitting for him three t.mes s a week for two hours at a t.mes . Crucially, it is the seemingly endless repetition of Stella and her unwavering commitment that marked a determining factor for Auerbach in these early years. As Robert Hughes observed:
“If anyone, early on, helped him manage his sense of the world, it was Stella West. This would have a deep effect on his art. His need for stability within the threatening flux of experience would be absorbed, through E.O.W.’s constant presence as a subject, into the very marrow of his painting and projected on his habits of work.”
Indeed, charged with psychological intensity and emotional intimacy, Head of E.O.W. II is a charismatically sculptural and vivid encapsulation of one of his most important figures in his artistic and personal life, and an outstanding example of his celebrated painterly practice. Painted by Auerbach on his knees in the upstairs bedroom of Stella’s house, Head of E.O.W. II exudes a captivating devotional quality. The artist recalled “I would have lots of paint around me, with the painting resting on a very, very painty chair… These conditions, which I think most artists would complain about, I never found irksome, working in a crowded small room, to be on my knees and not able to get too far away from the painting, because finally, I think, all that thing of unity is in one’s head as much as it is found by looking” (the artist quoted in: Catherine Lampert, ‘Frank Auerbach in his own words’, The Telegraph, 4 November 2012, online). Brimming with the kind of raw emotion and expression that can only be achieved through life study, Head of E.O.W. II is a forceful and faultlessly executed depiction of a sitter that shaped and defined Auerbach’s practice.
Ostensibly buried beneath an avalanche of worked and re-worked paint material executed over the course of many hours, the richness that Auerbach extracts from this tremendous surface particularly demonstrates his artistic conviction and courage to explore the boundaries of composition and form by exceptional means. Predominantly articulated through swathes of bone white, drizzles of cadmium red, striking highlights of bright blue and winding rivers of golden yellow, the monumental form of E.O.W.’s head churns with chromatic dynamism. The essay of subtly mediated ochre and crimson recalls the artist's earliest paintings of building sites in these hues, which had been his artistic mainstay following the Second World War, while the newly introduced use of pure white for the figure’s skin effects a heightened complexity of pictorial cognition; together these elements produce an evocative interplay of light and shadow. Indeed, Auerbach’s rendering of light is so exceptional that the present work was notably installed adjacent to Rembrandt’s iconic Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul in a dual exhibition comparing the two artists’ work at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, in 2014. Further, Auerbach’s radical use of bold lines of pure pigment in the present work was developed from his celebrated earlier corpus of charcoal drawings, currently the subject of a major exhibition at The Courtauld, London. As explained by Barnaby Wright with specific reference to this painting, “The complexity and vitality of his drawings informed a change in the character of his paintings… A more prominent use of complex line to cut and shape form and mass certainly comes into his paintings alongside his charcoal heads of the later 1950s and early 1960s… This experimentation with materials is taken to extremes in his three paintings of West from 1963-64, where he draws with paint squeezed directly from the tube over heavily worked, repeatedly painted surfaces” (Exh. Cat., London, The Courtauld Gallery, Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads, 2024, p. 44). Forging myriad expressions, movements, lights and moods—observed through multiple sittings—into a single image, Auerbach captures not E.O.W.’s physical likeness but her emotional and psychological essence. Fresh, instinctual, and passionate, Head of E.O.W. II is an intense observation that maps the process of its own creation, reconstructing Stella’s presence more fully and viscerally than a literal “portrait” could ever achieve.
Frank Auerbach, Head of E.O.W., 1964. Private collects ion. Artwork: © The artist, courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London
"If one has a chance of seeing people apart from the t.mes when one's painting them, one notices all sorts of things about them. If one sees them in movement, one realises all sorts of truths about them and one's infinitely less likely to be satisfied with a superficial stat.mes nt."
Head of E.O.W. II represents the pinnacle of Auerbach's artistic achievements up to the mid-1960s: a threshold in his career after which his canvases became arenas for flurries of more sparse brushstrokes of brighter hues. The work encapsulates the tireless working and reworking of the paint strata, and vividly communicates the focus and energy of its genesis, culminating in an urgent crescendo of expressive brushwork. Though the image teeters just on the edge of collapse, in constant visual tension shifting between figuration and abstraction, Auerbach’s deft handling of its painterly topography ultimately resolves itself into a characteristic architecture of form. Although the works after Stella traverse an incredible development, art historian Catherine Lampert points out that the true essence of Stella, her electric magnetism as a sitter, is felt most strongly in the works that he created of her from 1963-65, including the present example. With Auerbach’s characteristic flair and ingenuity, Head of E.O.W. II is a superlative example of how he utterly redefined, regenerated and wholly modernised the genre of portraiture through one of the most poignant and celebrated relationships between artist and model of the twentieth century.
