Image/Artwork: © Frank Auerbach, courtesy Marlborough Replica Handbags , London.
Painted in 1996 J.Y.M. Seated depicts the subject of some of Frank Auerbach’s most successful and arresting paintings of the human form: Juliet Yardley Mills. Completed almost 40 years after Auerbach and Mills first.mes t in 1957, this painting is not only the result of countless sittings for this specific picture, it is the product of cumulative experience accrued across decades. In this work, a dense, structural intensity unfolds as the figure’s form develops towards the upper register of the composition; each brushstroke executed with swift purpose, while abbreviated marks sculpted in paint signal every bone, incline, and jutting fork of the sitter’s body. From the artist’s mature production, J.Y.M. Seated utterly embodies Auerbach’s singular painterly execution: a scrutinous labour-intensive technique honed over the years, that spans the densely impastoed surfaces of his 1950s works to the scraped and virtuoso short-hand of his more recent paintings. Of the latter, in which Mills reclines, seated in profile, this painting was chosen as the cover image for William Feaver’s comprehensive catalogue raisonne of Frank Auerbach’s oeuvre, published in 2009.
Frank Auerbach was a trailblazer amongst a new generation of artists who built their reputations amidst the embers of war-torn London during the 1950s. Born in Germany in 1931, Auerbach emigrated to the UK from Berlin in 1939. As a young adult and aspiring artist in London he attended St Martin’s School of Art; however it was the evening classes held by painter David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic that would prove crucial to Auerbach’s development. Bomberg encouraged an organic, spontaneous approach to capturing form; a heavy, sculptural method of painting that was the inverse of the newly burgeoning colour field painting and Pop art of the later 1950s. Taking his cue from Bomberg, Auerbach developed his own unique painterly language in which a sublime melee of tactile strokes and grid like patterns, though pelleted with emotion and energy, purported a clear distain for the merely expressive.
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Artwork: © Frank Auerbach, courtesy Marlborough Replica Handbags , London.
Auerbach has worked closely with an exclusive number of models throughout his career, expecting lengthy and somet.mes s arduous sittings in his Camden studio. Working only in natural light and explicitly from life, the essence and affinity between sitter and their surrounding environment is captured by Auerbach in the mood of each painting. Mills, or J.Y.M., belongs to a rollcall of formative and stalwart female sitters that includes Gerda Boehm, Helen Gillespie, the artist’s wife Julia, who first sat for him in 1959, and Estella West ‘E.O.W’ who modelled for most of the artist’s nudes and female heads prior to 1973. In 1978, the art historian and curator Catherine Lampert first sat for Auerbach, cementing her presence within the later portraits for over 30 years. It is Juliet Yardley Mills however, whose likeness presides over a host of the artist's most iconic paintings, and who is considered Auerbach’s most celebrated and recognised sitter.
FRANK AUERBACH’S PORTRAITS OF J.Y.M. IN MUSEUM collects IONS.
Mills was a professional model and met Auerbach in 1957 whilst she was working at the Sidcup School of Art. Her likeness first appears in Auerbach’s works in 1963 as a slender, long-legged woman sitting in a chair against a backdrop of the artist’s atmospheric Camden studio. Her figure is often portrayed with energetic line breaks that contrast against harsh, exigent gestures. Regardless of the pose, J.Y.M. is instantly recognizable, her fame reflected in paintings housed in global institutions, such as the dramatic J.Y.M Seated No. 1 from 1981 in the Tate collects ion, J.Y.M Seated V from 1983 which sits in Portland Museum and J.Y.M Seated III from 1980 which is part of British Council’s collects ion.
Image: © National Portrait Gallery, London
Across years of translating J.Y.M.’s likeness, Auerbach developed and deepened his technique, both in handling and use of colour; this is particularly evident within the current work’s mellow tones and highlighted peaks. Harking back to his earlier use of a simple palette of yellow ochre and umber tones, J.Y.M. Seated marries the packed density of his early works with a fluidity of line and gesture. Owing to their decades-long working relationship, during which Auerbach painted her twice a week until 1997, Mills became a very close friend. In turn, Auerbach metamorphosed her into one of the most vivid presences in his oeuvre, transformed by repetition and re-seeing into an icon as memorable as Diego Giacometti’s countless sculptures of his wife Annette.
“There's no substitute for likeness. If something looks like a ’portrait’ it doesn't look like a person. When the forms evoked by the marks seem coherent and alive and surprising, and when there are no dead areas, I think the painting might be finished”
J.Y.M. Seated is the culmination of years of diligent sittings and patient, tenacious working and reworking to achieve the brilliance in form and paint evident within the brushstrokes of the present composition. Among the celebrated portraits, this work is a climatic pinnacle of the artist’s relationship with paint and subject. In exemplary style, Auerbach’s painting delivers a bravado command of brushstrokes; via peaks and troughs, clashing and complimenting in harmonious style, Auerbach’s marks form a symphony of order from chaos. At once impulsive and considered, revelatory and enigmatic, J.Y.M. Seated captures the qualities that make Auerbach’s paintings so unique and celebrated.