Frank Auerbach b.1931
Head of J.Y.M., 1974
oil on board
28 by 24 inches


Provenance
Marlborough Fine Art, London
Private Collection, UK

Exhibited
London, Mall Galleries, Contemporary Art Society Art Fair, 14 - 23 January 1974

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, European Painting in the Seventies: New Work by Sixteen Artists, , 30 September - 23 November 1975, cat no.22 illus colour, touring to:
St Louis Art Museum, 16 March - 9 May 1976
Elvehjem Art Center, University of Wisconsin, 8 June - 1 August 1976

London, Hayward Gallery, 1977 Hayward Annual, Part One, 25 May - 4 July 1977, cat no.1

London, Hayward Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 4 May - 2 July 1978, cat no.119 illus b/w, touring to:
Edinburgh, Fruit Market Gallery, 15 July - 12 August 1978

Literature
Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, cat no.206, illus b/w, p204
William Feaver, Frank Auerbach Catalogue Raisonné, Rizzoli, New York, cat no.336, illus colour



" There's a phrase by Robert Frost about his own verse, I don't know what it means about verse, and I really barely comprehend what it suggests about painting, but it seems to me to be absolutely true. He said. ' I want the poem to be like ice on a stove - riding on its own melting.' Well, a great painting is like ice on a stove. It is a shape riding on its own melting into matter and space, it never stops moving backwards and forwards."

A conversation with Frank Auerbach, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978, p20

Painted in 1974, Head of J.Y.M. is an iconic Auerbach portrait executed with typical intensity. J.Y.M.’s head is titled back and facing slightly to one side, resting against the back of a chair, a pose that Auerbach frequently painted her in the 1970s and 1980s. The work is painted with heavily laden brushstrokes that are characteristic of Auerbach’s working methods and leave areas of thick impasto and peaks of paint that rise and trail across the surface. The dynamism conveyed in these often broad strokes convey the energy with which the painting was created.

Auerbach does not use initial underpainting or outline sketches. Instead he will scrape the day’s accumulated oil from the surface and return to repaint the work at the next appointed sitting. The result of this technique is that a ghost of the previous day’s work remains, retaining an impression of what was painted before. Each time Auerbach returns to his subject he is painting with a greater knowledge and intensity and his mesh-like brushstrokes retain a vitality and freshness betrayed in the glistening viscosity of the oil paint used.

In this large-scale work Auerbach has included the chair behind and also suggested other background details. He has used thick black lines to describe J.Y.M.’s features, her forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, cheekbones and chin. These dark diagonals, which are typical of Auerbach’s work of the early 1970s, define her face, pinning her down within the energetic paintwork with which this painting was created.

In 1956 Julia Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.) a professional model, met Auerbach at Sidcup College of Art and offered to pose privately for him. She was a key sitter for a number of portraits, visiting Auerbach’s Camden studio, every Wednesday and Sunday until 1997.

Catherine Lampert notes the closeness of the relationship between Auerbach and J.Y.M. as they called one another, Jimmie and Frankie: ‘Often she [J.Y.M.] would sense that Auerbach was depressed, his posture more bent over as he began. She realised that ‘after he stops, he is working in his brain ... 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’ (see exhibition catalogue, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, London, Royal Academy, 2001, pp. 26-7).