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Image/Artwork: © The artist, courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London.
J.Y.M. Seated II represents one of Frank Auerbach’s most outstanding portraits of Juliet Yardley Mills, whom he has transformed into a memorable theme in her own right through decades of intense study. Scraped and sculpted, the richly impastoed surface of the present work narrates the story of its creation, powerfully conveying the depth of Auerbach’s emotional response to his subject and resulting in one of his most resolved portrayals of her. Executed in 1987, the present work is an exceptional exposition of Auerbach’s mature style and sits at the very height of his canon of portraiture. Amid swathes of dramatic brushwork and sculptural surface reworked t.mes and t.mes again, the tangible intensity of Auerbach’s subject materialises.
FRANK AUERBACH’S PORTRAITS OF J.Y.M. IN MUSEUM collects IONS.
Throughout his career Auerbach has pursed the same subjects, close friends and admirers of his work and none more so than Juliet Yardley Mills who first posed for him in 1956 when she was a professional model at Sidcup College of Art, and continued to do so for over forty years until 1997. Catherine Lampert, who has sat for Auerbach since 1978, has accounted that J.Y.M. became the first regular sitter at the artist’s Camden studio, where he had moved in 1954. According to William Feaver, she could sustain awkward poses for four hours or more and hugely valued sitting for the artist: “It was the most marvellous thing in my life” (in the film: Frank Auerbach: To the Studio quoted in: William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 19). She arrived every Wednesday and Sunday until 1997 having taken two buses from her home in southeast London. She has said “we had a wonderful relationship because I thought the world of him and he was very fond of me. There was no sort of romance but we were close. Real friends. Sundays now I’m always miserable” (Juliet Yardley Mills quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, Frank Auerbach, 2001, p. 26).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image: © Bridgeman
Artwork: © 2023 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Beautifully composed through a deep and expressive role of colour and a faultless display of decisive and heavily impastoed brushwork, the present work charts a terrific psychological and emotional expression in a manner akin to de Kooning’s explosive Women series, which dynamically illustrates the artist’s familiarity with the sitter. Layers of paint, subtle mutations of blues, greens and browns, characteristically layered and carved set as a muted backdrop for decisive brushstrokes of yellow ochre and orange that highlights and elevates the hour glass silhouette of the sitter. In the present work, J.Y.M sits upright, her back firmly pressed against the back of the supporting tall Windsor chair, exuding an imposing presence within the composition. Her head slightly tilted, expressionless and virtually supressed, her right eye as a black hollow whilst the left side of her face disappears in the shadows of the dense architectural niche of the chair, her arms and legs summarised by long fluid strokes of green and yellow. Her arms rest of the chair, magnified by thick and heavy vibrant blue brushwork.
Image: © National Portrait Gallery, London
“If E.O.W. was a magnetic force, J.Y.M. by contrast was a force of nature, adaptable, optimistic and uncomplaining."
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Image: © Bridgeman Images
Artwork: © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2023
With the J.Y.M portraits of the 1980’s, Auerbach felt able to risk a more direct engagement than in his earlier work as Robert Hughes suggests: “Rearing up, not recoiling, but with her back, one is made to feel, pressed against the back of the chair; the hair resolved into a dense supporting architecture by the broad ochre-to-umber swipes of the brush ... J.Y.M is an imposing presence here, very old, almost hieratic. Yet although one feels a strong sense of confrontation with the sitter, she has no recognisable facial expression ... Because of the lack of expression, the vehement marks with which Auerbach tries to summon up the density of her presence also push the image towards abstraction ... The sense of movement is what counts. Auerbach was quite specific about that: painting must ‘awaken a sense of physicality’, transcend its inherent flatness, or fail.” (in Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 205)
In J.Y.M Seated II, we bear witness to Auerbach’s masterful handling of paint application and structural composition. The immediate force and vigour of execution of the present work demonstrates Auerbach's intimate psychological response to his subjects and further serves as an outstanding exemplification of the ”theatrical dialogue between artist and painting [and] engenders the drama of the finished work” (Isabel Carlisle in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, 2001, p. 62).