Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm is a highly original depiction of the human figure, painted in a mature period of Frank Auerbach’s career defined by brooding colour, bristling forms and emotional complexity. The sitter’s head is viewed on a horizontal axis leaning back against a pillow. The facial features co-exist as tightly grouped description and dislocated paint marks: each application of the brush is terse, exactingly placed, and expressive of the form it represents. Though the chin, mouth, nose and eyes are legible as such, they also register as singular strokes of the brush. A robust sense of structure is apparent in this painting and every aspect of it corresponds to form a unified, artful ‘gestalt’. The oily white-grey impasto of the head and its darkened surroundings balance to create a remarkable paint surface, at once gestural and loaded with detail.

Gerda Boehm was Frank Auerbach’s cousin. Her mother Helene was an elder sister of Max, Frank’s father. She and her husband Gerhard settled in Hampstead after escaping Nazi Germany in 1938, and towards the end of the Second World War they accommodated Frank for part of the school holidays when he was at Bunce Court. Auerbach later recalled that, having lived in Berlin in the 1930s, she had ‘a desire to dress well and cut a figure in the world, and an appetite for going out’. She first sat for him in 1961 and continued for over twenty years. Michael Podro perceived in Auerbach’s portraits of her ‘a certain mocking worldliness with which the artist seems complicit’. She was proud of her younger cousin’s achievements and his work hung in her home until she died aged ninety-nine in 2006.

Auerbach has only painted reclining heads of his female sitters. These works are among the most sinewy, irreducible paintings in his career, and he has spoken appreciatively of ‘these unfamiliar angles of the human head’. Their vivid structures and strange shapes do not resolve easily into a comprehensible image. The sharply ridged forms in Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm represent a steeply foreshortened view of the sitter. Over the course of sustained contemplation, the painting shifts between representation – with readily identifiable features and a definite sense of volume – and a flat surface of tightly interwoven shapes and accent lines.

Boehm sat for several reclining heads including three in the early 1980s (fig. 1). As she grew older and as other sitters came to fill the artist’s emerging ‘timetable’, these were some of the last portraits she modelled for. All three arrange the chin at the left edge of the picture and the crown at the right. Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm was made over the winter of 1980 and 1981. A strong contrast is apparent between oleaginous rich-bodied paint, the white-grey impasto strokes of the face, and matt paint in surrounding areas, which recedes around the head evoking a spatial relationship between figure and ground. Surfaces near the head were scraped back and forth with the brush handle. A brilliant blue highlight in Boehm’s right eye is answered by underlayers of turquoise at the lower left-hand corner, revealed by scraping, the colour of which presumably indicates the sitter’s clothing.

Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm was owned for some years by Jonathan and Ruth Roemer, the son and daughter of Auerbach’s oldest friend and earliest collector Michael Roemer. (Michael has one other son, David Roemer.) Auerbach and Roemer attended the progressive school Bunce Court together and although Roemer moved to New York, they remained in touch and saw one another during Auerbach’s rare visits to the US when Marlborough Gallery held exhibitions of his work there in 1969 and 1982. Michael Roemer’s children were key lenders to the Royal Academy of Arts Auerbach retrospective held in 2001.