Christie’s is selling a fresh-to-market Frank Auerbach painting that was once owned by a British aristocrat who worked for the highly secret Y-Service during World War II.
Titled Nude on Bed III and painted in 1961, the work will headline the house’s Modern British and Irish Art evening sale on March 19 in London. It’s expected to fetch over $1 million.
Auerbach died last year. He was born in Germany in 1931 to Jewish parents and became a British citizen in 1947. His auction record is $7.1 million for Morning Crescent (2023), which was sold by Sotheby’s London in 2023.
The painting was purchased by the Hon. Moyra Campbell – who died last year aged 99 – in 1962. She was the work’s sole owner and held onto it for more than six decades. It was last publicly shown in Auerbach’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 1978.
She was 15 when the war broke out and after seeing an advert for the Royal Navy on the BBC, she volunteered for the Women’s Royal Naval Service, known as the Wrens. As a fluent German speaker, Campbell worked for the Y-Service secret intelligence operation tapping into German radio voice messages in the North Sea. She passed the coded transmissions to Bletchley Park, the English country house that was the Allied HQ for codebreaking. These deciphered messages helped the Allied Navy to intercept German U-boats.
Alice Murray, the head of Christie’s Modern British and Irish Art evening sale, told ARTnews that Nude on Bed III “offers a rare opportunity to acquire a work from Auerbach’s early period.”
“Moyra Campbell and Auerbach share some similarities in their lives,” she said. “Both lived for most of the 20th century and had careers that spanned seven decades, passing away last year. Campbell made significant contributions in a male-dominated field, notably aiding the war effort by assisting to crack German codes at Bletchley Park.”
Christie’s described Nude on Bed III as “sculpted from thick swathes of impasto, the supine figure emerges like a beacon of light from dense, geological layers of paint. Within the monochromatic tones – typical of the artist’s early palette – the female figure emerges in relief from her surroundings.”
The house is yet to release the other lots for the evening sale. The Auerbach is the first of two major auction offerings of the artist’s work since his death. The other is Primrose Hill – Early Summer (painted in 1981-82). It’s going under the hammer at Christie’s 20th/21st Century evening sale in London on March 5 with a high estimate of $3.7 million.
