David Landau is an art historian and businessman. He sold his free adverts newspaper in 2000 and has since diversified into venture capitalism. Alongside his business interests, he sustained a distinguished academic career as a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. In 1984, Landau founded the scholarly journal Print Quarterly and subsequently served as its editor for twenty-seven years, publishing several important articles relating to Auerbach as a printmaker. In 1994, he authored with Peter Parshall a seminal history of early modern printmaking, still used today as a reference work for degree-level art history. He belongs to the august roster of art historians and critics who have sat for Auerbach.

In 2001, Auerbach described Landau as ‘a marvellously reliable sitter’. For him, there is no quality more desirable in his models. Landau later described how their relationship began:

I first met Frank Auerbach in 1983, when I was looking for someone to paint a portrait of the historian Asa Briggs for Worcester College, Oxford. I thought – and still think – he is our greatest living painter. I wrote to Frank, telling him this, and he agreed to meet. Frank needs his subjects to sit every week for a very long time, sometimes for more than a year. This was impossible for Lord Briggs, so I suggested he paint me instead. “Well,” he said, “if you are reliable and can come on Fridays, then yes.” I have been doing so more or less ever since.

In Head of David Landau, the mass of the figure and the space of the room behind are evoked using extended brushstrokes applied wet-on-wet, using a mixture of broad and fine brushes. The substructure of the face is constructed from broad, fine textured strokes laid down in a diagonal grid: strokes across the forehead and nose run downwards from left to right, while those across the mouth and left-side cheek run downwards from right to left. Together these two contrary directions create a continuous thrusting movement. The details of the face are cursory, being suggested by complex, suggestive marks: the nose, eyes and mouth are finely worked in distinction to the broad treatment of the head.

If the 1970s and 1980s had witnessed in Auerbach’s work ‘a deepened expressive role for colour’, as Robert Hughes wrote, the 1990s was marked by brighter, more chromatic colouring. His paintings developed a lighter key throughout the decade, and this was accompanied by greater use of fine brushes and his adoption of lighter-bodied media such as graphite and acrylic paint. The result was brilliant colour contrasts and considerably brighter accents. Head of David Landau shows a further maturation of Auerbach’s palette: the accents of mauve and puce are closely related to nearby hues of purple and lilac. The palette is constructed around an axis between purple/lilac/puce and amber/yellow/ochre, a contrast that has recurred in other works by Auerbach from the 2010s, such as Head of William Feaver (fig. 1). This palette was also favoured by David Bomberg in his late work of the 1950s (fig. 2), made around the time that Auerbach attended Bomberg’s evening classes, and Auerbach’s own work shows a sophisticated response to that of his one-time teacher.