Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Fine Art, London, from whom acquired by the previous owner
Their sale, Sotheby's London, 15th October 2007, lot 249, where acquired by the present owner

London, Royal College of Art, Degree Exhibition, 1955;
London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 3rd - 28th January 1956;
Austria, Alpbach/Tyrol, Europäisches Forum, Das Junge England, 19th August - 7th September 1960, with tour to Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Austria;
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Helen Lessore and the Beaux Arts Gallery, February 1968, cat. no.7;
New York, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Frank Auerbach, September - October 1969, cat. no.1;
Milan, Galleria Bergamini, Frank Auerbach, October 1973, cat. no.1, illustrated;
Zurich, Marlborough Galerie, Frank Auerbach, Paintings and Drawings 1954-1976, 6th May - 2nd June 1976, cat. no.1, illustrated;
London, Hayward Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 4th May - 2nd July 1978, cat. no.7, illustrated, with tour to Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh;
London, The Courtauld Gallery, Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62, 16th October 2009 – 17th January 2010, cat. no.4, illustrated p.83.

Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p.84, cat. no.50, illustrated p.84;
William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, cat. no.31, illustrated pp.30, 238.

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar of Hamish Dewar Fine Art Conservation, London. Structural Condition The artist's thick panel appears to be structurally secure and has a vertical baton on the reverse and is soundly held in the wooden frame. Paint surface The heavily impastoed and textured paint surface is also secure. There is inevitably some dust which has settled within the thick impasto. There are what would appear to be historic losses of impasto on the upper horizontal turnover edge which I assume occurred before the work was framed. Inspection under ultraviolet light shows some areas that fluoresce unevenly, most significantly: 1) an area measuring approximately 5 x 12 cm which is 35 cm in from the left vertical edge and 15 cm below the upper horizontal edge. 2) A small diagonal line, approximately 8 cm in length, in the lower right of the composition, approximately 24 cm in from the right vertical edge and 24 above the lower horizontal edge. These areas are both slightly different in colour and texture than the surrounding paint layers and this is consistent with the artist's working methods and the varieties of different materials he used at the time. I am therefore confident that these are the artist's workings rather than retouching by a later hand. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition. Tightly float-mounted in the Artist's thick, light wooden frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

‘Well - it’s not a unique memory – but it was pitted with bomb sites and of course the bomb sites regularly turned into building sites because people were rebuilding what had been destroyed. And there was … a sense of survivors scurrying among a ruined city…A city fully functional is to me what [was] formally [a] boring collection of cubic rectilinear shapes, but London after the war was a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags, full of drama formally, and I think that…I mean if I’d lived in the mountain landscape…I might have been drawn to try and paint that. But living in London it seemed mad to waste the opportunity not to take notice of the fact that there were marvellous images all around one…Being in Paris, you’d be haunted a little bit if you started to paint Notre Dame or a view of the Seine by the fact that other people had painted it before, but the London I knew and saw hadn’t really been painted…it was a new phenomenon.’ (The Artist, quoted in David Wright and Patrick Swift (eds.), ‘Fragments from a Conversation,’ X: A Quarterly Review, Vol.1, no.1, London, Barrie and Rockliff, 1959, p.34)

Frank Auerbach arrived in England as an émigré at the age of 8, and following the Second World War he settled as a young man in London to pursue a career as an artist. London was at the time in a period of flux. Much of the city was still riddled with destruction and bombed out buildings as a consequence of the blitz, and London was beginning to start on the slow process of rebuilding. For Auerbach, this landscape which combined elements of destruction and rebirth was an opportunity to engage artistically with a subject that was entirely fresh in terms of Modern representations of urbanity. Artists such as John Piper, David Bomberg, and William Coldstream had previously captured images of the blitz-ravaged sites around the UK, but Auerbach was especially interested in the groundwork, accrual and upheaval that resulted from the rebuilding process. He was drawn in particular to those areas where the re-building process was underway, but was in the early stages. Making frequent sketching trips to the working sites, he defied his disinclination of heights to pursue the most interesting views of the active and bustling scene. He visited many of the major areas of London’s reconstruction, including Oxford Street, Earl’s Court and St Paul’s, and after visiting several times over a short span of time, the sketches were pinned in his studio for reference as he worked on the oil, often for a series of many months.   

Auerbach completed a series of 14 building site paintings in the first decade of his career, which are amongst the most powerful and intense landscapes he has ever produced. The series includes the present work and Shell Building Site: Workmen Under Hungerford Bridge (sold in these rooms 26^th May 2010, for £825,250), and set him on a course to becoming one of an exciting new generation of emerging British artists, which included his contemporaries Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff and Lucian Freud.

Kossoff was a friend and a fellow student at the Royal College of Art and when he vacated his studio in 1954, Auerbach took on the tall, dark and claustrophobic space in Camden, close to Mornington Crescent tube station. St Pancras Building Site, Summer is one of the first paintings he completed in this new space. Located on the same street as Walter Sickert's studio had been during the heyday of the Camden Town group years before, the physical confines of this new environment prompted a more direct and expressive method of painting that extolled the medium's infinite materiality and malleability. Rendered in a virtual monochrome of densely layered ochres and browns, here the colour, shape, tone and line of the composition become one material unity. The sheer quantities of paint used lend the surface a physical presence and endow it with a jewel-like, shimmering viscosity that evokes the uninhibited pleasures of painting advocated in the classes of David Bomberg, under whom Auerbach had studied at the Borough Polytechnic.

Auerbach has remained in his Mornington Crescent studio to this day. The present work, which documents a major residential development replacing war damaged 19^th Century terraces designed by John Nash only a few blocks from the studio, records the beginnings of Auerbach's passionately-felt emotional connection with the area in which he lives and works. Like his human subjects, which he limits to a handful of family and close friends that he knows and trusts intimately, the landscapes he has chosen to paint throughout his career are all those within the small corner of London that he has experienced daily on his pilgrimages to and from his studio. ‘I go out each morning and draw,’ Auerbach explained. ‘I can't really start a painting in the morning until I've done a drawing... I feel dissatisfied with what I'm doing, so I go out and try to notice some fact that I haven't seen before, and once I've been provided with a reason for changing my picture, I can come back to the studio and change it... usually it is a new sensation of proportion or connection, often revealed by the light’ (The Artist quoted in Michael Peppiatt, 'Frank Auerbach', Tate Magazine, no. 14, Spring 1998). 

St Pancras Building Site, Summer was included in Auerbach’s first solo show, held by the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956. The critical response to the exhibition was decidedly mixed. While certain writers appeared somewhat affronted by Auerbach’s uniquely virtuoso method, writing that ‘His technique is quite terrifying…It is by its very nature repulsively messy’ (‘Pictures on Exhibit,’ February 1956, publication unknown, cutting held in the Beaux Arts Archive), others recognized in Auerbach’s work a shift towards a truly distinctive manner of painting. As David Sylvester stated, the show was 'the most impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon's in 1949…Here at last is a young painter who has extended the power of paint to re-make reality…’ Auerbach has all ‘the qualities that make for greatness in a painter – fearlessness; a profound originality; a total absorption in what obsesses him; and, above all, a certain gravity and authority in his forms and colours’ (David Sylvester, ‘Young English Painting,’ The Listener, 12^th January 1956, p.64). The extremity of the critic’s reactions emphasized just how much of a leap Auerbach had made in these early landscapes; how innovative, surprising, and in some cases unsettling, these thickly painted renderings were to contemporary audiences. Their sombre palettes and pared-down geometric compositions speak of Post-War rationing and uncertainty in a bombed out London, whilst the energy and perpetual movement embedded within their laboriously worked impasto surfaces becomes an existential affirmation of survival.