Material Oil on canvas
Dimensions 56 x 51 cm
Place of Creation London, UK
Status Vetted

About the Work

Catherine Lampert Seated II depicts one of Frank Auerbach’s regular models who began sitting for him in 1978. Auerbach often repeated the same subject or composition in a small number of successive paintings and drawings. He was motivated by an insatiable thoroughness: his sitters continually presented new and unexpected aspects, and small revelations—defined against previous observations recorded in paintings and drawings—provided the impulse to continue studying the same models. Catherine Lampert Seated II belongs to a sequence of three half-length paintings made in 1990 and 1991, all of which depict Lampert seated in a chair with her hands clasped together in her lap.


Auerbach’s mature style of painting, which he referred to as an ‘idiom’, is partly defined by richly textured surfaces. Like all of his work, Catherine Lampert Seated II was executed in a single round of painting after an extended period of sittings; the work of previous sittings was always scraped away before he began again at the next session. By completing his paintings in ‘one wet’, Auerbach was able to create dense layers and overlapping structures of brushwork. Each application of paint was made with a loaded brush, and each stroke extends through a remarkable length without loss of intensity or richness of colour. Each brush mark is singular and legible. As Auerbach explained to Richard Cork in 1983, he regarded painting as ‘drawing in slabs rather than edges, but it’s all drawing to me.’ Owing to his wet-on-wet technique, each slab of fresh paint quivered against existing marks and picked up other colours along its edges. The thickness and body of Auerbach’s oil medium is also remarkable, and this quality enabled him to overpaint while retaining the textures and colours of underlying brushwork. The result is a complex surface, at once superficial and densely layered.

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Provenance

Private Collection, given by the artist
At Christie's, London, 23 June 2005, lot 23
Richard Green, London
Private Collection
At Christie’s London, 28 Feb. 2023, lot 13
Private Collection

Literature

British Figurative Painting of the 20th Century, exh. cat., The Israel Museum, 1992, no. 18, pp. 27–28 (col. illus.) (mistitled 'Portrait of Catherine Lampert II')
La Mirada Fuerte: Pintura figurativa de Londres, exh. cat., Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2000, no. 64, p. 85 (illus.)
William Feaver with Kate Austin, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, 2009, no. 668, p. 315 (col. illus.) (listed as 'Catherine Lampert Seated')
William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, 2022, no. 668, p. 357 (col. illus.) (listed as 'Catherine Lampert Seated')

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