Frank Auerbach

E.O.W. Nude

1953–4

Not on display

Artist: Frank Auerbach born 1931
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 508 × 768 mm
frame: 683 × 945 × 106 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Purchased 1959
Reference: T00313

Display caption

Auerbach studied with Bomberg longer than anyone else. He started at Borough Polytechnic in January 1947 and went to evening classes there until 1953, while officially attending St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art.

Auerbach said he learnt from Bomberg not technique but ‘a sense of the grand standards of painting.’ He developed a distinctive manner of painting in which thick paint is given an independent reality of its own, as well as being used as a means of representing a physical object.

Gallery label, September 2004

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Catalogue entry

T00313 E.O.W. NUDE 1953–4

Not inscribed.
Canvas, 20×30 1/4 (51×77). The back of the canvas is covered with paint.
Purchased from the Beaux Arts Gallery (Knapping Fund) 1959.
Exh: Summer Exhibition, Beaux Arts Gallery, July–September 1955 (6); Beaux Arts Gallery, January 1956 (20).

The artist wrote (2 December 1959) that this nude was started in May 1953 and finished February 1954. There are two similar pictures of the same subject. A small sketch in the collection of the artist Leon Kossof and another larger version in a private collection in the U.S.A.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, I