Frank Auerbach

Ruth Bromberg, London
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Twentieth Century British Figurative Painting, 1992-93

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, pp. 149 and 315, no. 673, illustrated in colour and illustrated in colour on the back cover

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the tonality of the reds and oranges are slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Since moving into his studio close to Mornington Crescent in 1954, Frank Auerbach has ceaselessly embarked on the task of portraying his most immediate surroundings in the North London borough of Camden. Working tirelessly and always from a reduced number of sitters and locations, Auerbach builds up paint to scrape it down in a painstaking process where images seem to eventually emerge from the canvas. Until the late 1970s, the artist devoted himself primarily to representing the nearby scenery in Primrose Hill and Camden locations such as the Camden Theatre and Mornington Crescent; at first favouring the earthy tonalities that are synonymous with his early practice and slowly introducing brighter and more vivid hues that imbued his work with a singular intensity. In 1977 Auerbach introduced a further subject into his repertoire; the entrance to his studio. Initially rendered in darker colours, this motif, too, has been subsequently represented under different lights and at different times of the day and year, revealing the artist’s intimate knowledge of his chosen subject. Executed in 1991, The Studios Under Snow is an extraordinary example of the To the Studios series, in which the doorway to the artist’s workplace has been depicted in a wintry setting. Indeed, it is the only painting of Auerbach's entire oeuvre that depicts a landscape under snow - even if there exist around twenty landscapes painted in winter. Indicating its importance, the present work is illustrated on the back cover of William Feaver’s exhaustive catalogue raisonné of the artist’s oeuvre, and other works from the same series reside in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London and the Saint Louis Art Museum.

In 1992, a year after the present work was finished, art historian Ruth Bromberg started sitting for Auerbach. In one of the rare occasions in which the artist has accepted commissions, Auerbach agreed to paint her portrait after her husband Joseph wrote asking for it. This sitting marked the starting point of a 17-year long friendship during which Bromberg regularly sat for the painter on Thursday afternoons. Of the twenty portraits that Auerbach finished of Bromberg, two remained in her collection, the first and the last. These were not the only works that the Brombergs kept in their collection however; the couple also acquired The Studios Under Snow.

In order to create his landscapes, Auerbach relies partly on memory and partly on the countless sketches that he skilfully produces on the spot, which is exemplified here by the works on paper which are also part of this private collection. His idiosyncratic creative methodology enables long sittings at the studio when he works on a portrait, but the quasi-Sisyphean manner in which the paint is slowly applied onto the surface of the canvas to be fiercely pared down prevents the artist from working en plein air. Nonetheless, in his landscapes Auerbach successfully achieves his aim to “catch hold of the world of fact and experience at some point at which it hasn’t been caught before, so that one remakes it in a sense that speaks to oneself directly” (Frank Auerbach quoted in: John Christopher Battye, ‘Frank Auerbach speaks to John Battye’, Art & Artists, London 1971, p. 55). In a manner similar to Claude Monet, who repeatedly painted his garden in Giverny, or Vincent van Gogh, whose depictions of his bedroom and countryside in the South of France have become synonymous with his troubled character, Auerbach revisits his subjects again and again, until through his painterly testimony he is able to capture the true essence of these places.

Auerbach’s landscapes have often been likened to John Constable’s depictions of the English countryside. Indeed, Constable’s manner of building up texture in his windswept renderings of Hampstead Heath is also present in Auerbach’s own interpretations of north London, as demonstrated in The Studios Under Snow, where a sultry grey sky looms over the freshly snowed architecture. Here, the pale sky contrasts with the darker, dynamic diagonal lines that delineate the buildings, whilst slivers of white pigment almost acquire the texture of soft snow. Despite the artist’s energetic brushwork, the composition is instilled with stillness, as if Auerbach had managed to capture the quiet atmosphere that reigns after a snowstorm. Speaking of Auerbach’s landscapes, T.J. Clark has expressed how “nature for him seems to be instantaneous. It leaps out of the void. The paint contorts to capture it, but always what the impasto seems to be after is not the ‘character’ of a scene or even its atmosphere, but rather, its simply being there for once” (T.J. Clark, ‘On Frank Auerbach’ in: Exh. Cat., Bonn, Kunstmuseum (and travelling), Frank Auerbach, 2015-16, p. 12). Indeed, The Studios Under Snow undeniably attests to the art historian’s statement, and stands as a commanding example of the series.