Frank Auerbach
1961
Oil paint on board
59.8 x 56.8 cm
Frank Auerbach often painted in black and white as well as earth tones at this time: those were the cheapest pigments and he was desperately short of money. However, he exploited the full creative potential of his limited palette. Here, through numerous attempts to form the head with his brush, he finally breathed life into the monochrome tones. One of the leading critics of this period, David Sylvester, greatly admired Auerbach’s strange new type of portraiture, writing: ‘a head becomes an object which, as we look at it, gives a sensation curiously like that of running our fingertips over the contours of a head in the dark, reassured by its presence, disturbed by its other-ness.’