HEAD OF JAKE
FRANK AUERBACH, 2006-07
This is a face, technically. But Auerbach is not making this easy for anybody. You look at it and your first thought is: that is a lot of paint for one guy. And fair enough. Most portraits are trying to help you out. Here’s the person. Here’s the mood. Here’s the face. Not this. This feels more like the face had to be dragged out of the paint. Like it was buried in there somewhere and only partly agreed to come up. The eyes are there. The nose is there. The mouth is there. But none of it arrives politely. Auerbach spent years painting the same few people again and again. Not because he ran out of material. Because he didn’t believe a person was something you finished seeing. Because Jake is his son. So this isn’t just a painter wrestling with a face. It’s a father trying to see somebody he knows too well to simplify. And Auerbach paints like the first answer is never good enough. He’d build a painting up, scrape it back, start again, keep going until something held. So what you’re looking at is not the first attempt. It’s what survived. You can feel that in the surface. The time. The revisions. The refusal to fake clarity. And that feels right. Because really seeing somebody, especially somebody close to you, does not get easier. It gets messier. More specific. A little stranger. A lot of portraits are trying to get you to nod. To say: yes, I see him. This gives you something harder. The fact that a human face is not actually a clean problem. And neither, usually, is a son.