‘It Changed Lives’: The Famed Art Historian Who Spent 46 Years Sitting for Frank Auerbach | culture

toLast November, a work titled Potiphar’s Wife by British painter Ioanoglu appeared at a special auction held by Christie’s in London. “We were all very excited,” says art historian and curator Catherine Lambert. “I tried several times to find out where that photo was.” It depicts a woman lying on the floor against a blue wall, her legs crossed and her arms extended behind her, apparently to prevent a man in a shirt from leaving. They both cling to a beautifully wrapped orange cloth.

This is the last painting that Uglow talked about with Lambert as he was dying of cancer in August 2000. She had known him since her early twenties, had organized his first major show in 1974, and in those final months of his life, she had been working on his catalog of paintings—an annotated list of Uglow’s complete oeuvre.

“Ewan was very mysterious,” she says. “But in recent months he has allowed me to record it in anticipation of this book and then it will be quiet” – she taps the table decisively with her hand – “that is what this picture is about.” The last time I went to see him in the hospital, he said, “Let’s go to work.” Lambert only logged a few minutes that day. But the details she collected—about the vertical yellow stripe that anchored the entire composition “being silky and still” and the way the curtains “moved”—she cherished like gold dust.

Lambert sits at an antique square table that has been in her London home for 50 years, as she has. The many people sitting around her (Uglow and Frank Auerbach among them), not to mention the art (Alison Turnbull) and photography (David Hockney in Lucian Freud’s studio; Auerbach and Leon Kossoff in Dinner) on the walls, speak to her status as a quiet giant of contemporary art.

And just in the last 12 months, she has co-authored the catalogue, The Reason for Freud’s Paintings. He curated Auerbach’s retrospective; and essays written for Horvin Andersson’s recent exhibition in New York and the current Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery; Last week, she opened ‘Euan Uglow: An Arc from the Eye’ at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, the artist’s first major exhibition in 20 years.

It’s a lot of work for an 80-year-old. “Yes, I never seem to want to stop working,” she says. “It’s very distracting to think about art and also see it.”

Lambert was born in Washington, D.C., in 1946 and came to London when he was 20 years old as an exchange student to study sculpture at the Slade. She mostly did her own thing. “I didn’t want to be in Reg Butler’s class,” she says, who was then head of the sculpture department. “I didn’t communicate. So when I was trying to make something, I would go to the Camden Arts Centre. Downstairs was run by a distinguished Sudanese potter called Mohamed Abdullah.” [also known as Mo Abbaro]People were allowed to come and use the clay.

She also made contacts. After postgraduate studies in the United States and Rome, she worked at the Arts Council, then at the Hayward Gallery and, since 1988, as director of the Whitechapel Gallery, both in London. She left in 2001, the year Whitechapel turned 100.

“I was persistent, I pushed,” she says. It describes Freud’s persuading head of exhibitions Norman Rosenthal to exhibit Auerbach at the Royal Academy after a long period of obscurity. So too is a 2019 show of paintings by Paola Rego that she curated (also at MK Gallery), at a time when “there was no apparent interest in her work.” Demand for Rego has remained high ever since; It’s possible that Uglow could be poised for a similar comeback.

“Obviously a good relationship with the artists is the first thing,” Lambert says. “Also, you find their work exciting and want to do something to expand the visibility around it.” She happily describes recently purchasing a work by Charles Avery (“We’re going to collect it from the framers this afternoon, and it’s going to eat with us on Friday. I can’t wait to have it.”) and attending Brian Eno’s stint as a DJ at the Peter Doig Gallery at the Serpentine: “It’s so nice to be able to sit for two hours and have a painting right next to you. That doesn’t happen very often — and to listen to the music, too.”

Lambert is the person who sat for Auerbach the longest, after his wife: weekly two-hour sessions from 1978 until his death in November 2024. “It’s a very special way of living your life, for 46 years. Frank and his work and the privilege of being in his studio changed my life. It affected me very emotionally.”

In 2013, while preparing for the Daumier exhibition she curated at the RA, she took a trip to Berlin. I said: Frank, where do you live? And tell me the address. So I was the first person to go into that building and see Stolperstein on the floor. They are small concrete cubes with copper panels in memory of those killed in the Holocaust. Auerbach’s parents were murdered at Auschwitz after he escaped to Britain when he was eight years old.

“If you’re not just rushing for a story, those kind of little details start to mean something,” Lambert says. “You can imagine Frank in the yard. Your emotional connection to art and to the artists means that they are not just professional colleagues. I don’t mean that you have an intimate relationship, I mean that you care an enormous amount.”

She brought a framed photo taken on his 93rd birthday, in April 2024. “He was feeling really uncomfortable. So at one point, I got up and massaged his shoulder. And [The Wolseley founder] Jeremy King looks a little surprised, like, “Why would you do that?” But I felt like this was what he needed. He was in a completely frail condition.

“I really, really miss him,” she continues. “It’s very hard to adjust. I miss his voice and the rhythm of things.” She spent several months after his death documenting the books in his studio, noting the images on the pages he had left open on the floor. For Freud’s catalog raisonné, she and co-author Toby Treves compiled a list of all the names in his daily appointment books, to find out who he was: the secret names he had for his children, and the nicknames of his models (“AR” stands for “Arborio,” after a woman who once made him rice for dinner).

Compiling such a catalog is one of the most difficult art historical tasks. Some of them can be boring to read. However, Freud is like delving into John Rewald’s take on Cézanne’s work: the immersion is so complete, the written details so lively and lively, that you sometimes forget to look at the pictures.

Lambert met Freud a few years after Auerbach, in 1981. At first she saw him weekly. One of Freud’s models, Sophie de Stempel, told her that he would sometimes send a postcard saying: “I haven’t seen you. Come let’s dance”, which Lambert euphemistically explains might mean “embrace etc”, but was also a summons to be spontaneous. “It’s the way he dealt with a lot of people. It was his spirit, his sense of humor, his honesty,” she says. “Lucian was very charming. He could just touch someone’s shoulder, and no one else was there, you know?”

Browsing through Freud’s archives at the National Portrait Gallery, Lambert found postcards she had sent him over the years that he had kept, “of Courbet or something like that,” she says. “And I think I’m glad I sent that. Sometimes there was no reply, and sometimes he would say, ‘Come and look at this picture.’” And that continued until the end of his life.

“Lucien said he was going to ask me to sit down,” she adds. “When you’re sitting down, you can walk, like someone next to you in the car. That would have been a really cool experience, too. But you have to have a lot of time in your day.”

And she was already fully committed to another artist, I think. “And a husband,” she says. “And a job. A lot of his babysitters were young, working in a club or as a waitress, and they didn’t have responsibilities.”

Hockney likes to point out that the painting Freud painted took 120 hours. Others, including Uglow, rejected Freud. “He said: ‘I can’t give up that time.’ And it happened that Ewan died young, in his 60s, so maybe he was right not to give that up.”

For Auerbach, she says, it was very important that his sitters arrived on time. “And that was true for Uglow, Freud and Kossoff. They couldn’t cope if there was any doubt about whether someone was going to come or not.”

What benefit did Lambert gain from sitting for a long time? “Everything, everything. I always came out in a really good mood. I never failed,” she says immediately.