Frank Auerbach

(1931-2024)

Six Etchings of Heads, 1980-81

Footnotes

Provenance
Gifted by the artist to his friend and fellow artist Philip Holmes.
Thence by descent to the current owner.

Literature
Craig Hartley, Frank Auerbach: Etchings and Drypoints 1954-2006, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in association with Marlborough Graphics, London, 2007, nos. 9-14.

The sitters are Joe Tilson, R.B. Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud, Gerda Boehm and Julia Auerbach.

Six Etchings of Heads was Auerbach's first series of portrait etchings.
The artist did not find the etching process an easy one, but he relished the chance to experiment to achieve the desired result.

The first etching was produced when Auerbach visited Joe Tilson in 1980. He produced sketches, drew the image onto the copper plate, then Tilson bit the plate in acid and his son Jake printed it. The other portraits which followed were also of friends such as Kitaj, Kossoff and Freud, or relations, his wife Julia and his cousin Gerda. After preparatory sketches, he drew on the plates using a dart, keeping to the principal of using simple convenient materials.

Auerbach took a different approach to each plate, perhaps to reflect the different personalities he was portraying. He used four plates for the head of Freud, achieving a rich tonal quality. For Kossoff he used two plates and for Kitaj the plate was bitten in two stages, resulting in two distinctive qualities of line. Gerda and Julia are given a more delicate touch with single-plate lines.

Although printmaking had its challenges, Auerbach was fascinated by the process and the act of physically working on the plate to transform an image from one medium to another was an ultimately satisfying one:

"The Graphic mark which was made spontaneously, quickly, and then by some magic turns into a form of permanence that can be stamped down – no other medium has got that. And to me it is a tremendous magic that something that could have been done in 20 minutes is preserved not as a sketch, but as something of more permanence and authority."