Frank Auerbach

“I haven’t painted Mornington crescent to ally myself to some Camden Town Group, but simply because I feel London is this raw thing…this extraordinary, marvellously unpainted city…” Frank Auerbach

Auerbach’s urban ‘portraits’ reveal his love affair with the North London landscape around his home and studio to be as impassioned as any of his human relationships. As specific and personal as his most intimate and emotionally wrought portrait studies, like the individual character and physiognomy of the people he paints, each are locations constructed from his intimate feelings rather than from a precise visual reality. This heartfelt devotion to his environment is powerfully conveyed in Mornington Crescent - a curving Georgian terrace which lies on the short walk between the artist’s home and studio, down which he has travelled twice daily for nearly fifty years and which he has painted regularly since the mid 1960s. It is a place as familiar to him as the faces of his longest standing models like JYM and Julia, and like them, provides a means of liberating his hand from subservience to form. Orchestrated through an energetically composed concert of colour and fluid, bold brushmarks, Mornington Crescent is built upon an intuitive understanding of form, character and atmosphere that goes beyond the structure of its architecture. Depicting the sloping Crescent illuminated under the soft light of a fading autumn sky, every mark compliments the next, merging together as Auerbach works the viscous paint surface like butter through constant energetic mutations towards the ultimate crescendo of frenetic brushwork that shapes the final image.

Auerbach’s close friend, Leon Kossoff, describes the impression of these paintings as follows: “…in spite of the excessive piling on of paint, the effect of these works on the mind is of images recovered and conceived in the barest and most particular light, the same light which seems to glow through the late, great, thin Turners. This light, which gleams through the thickness and finally remains with us is an unpremeditated manifestation arising from the constant application of true draughtsmanship.” (cited in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 86)

Without intending to be a series painter like Monet or continue in the tradition of his teacher, David Bomberg – or his teacher Sickert who had a studio on Mornington Crescent - Auerbach has painted the same fixed group of landscapes in North London for over forty years. In his landscapes as in his portraits, he sees the virtue of repetition as being able to make a statement of the kind which no-one less familiar with the subject could have possibly made. Just as Giacometti was content to forever delineate and make real his small select, group of sitters, Auerbach too delights in painting only subjects familiar to him. His pictorial realm is the immediate environment inhabited by himself, his subjects and his paintings, the streets around his small, cave-like studio in Camden. “This part of London is my world,” he explained. “I’ve been wandering around these streets for so long that I have become attached to them, as fond of them as people are of their pets.” (Michael Peppiatt, ‘Frank Auerbach’ (interview), Tate, no. 14, Spring 1988)

Because of his laborious working process and the volumes of paint expended during it, Auerbach paints his landscapes in his studio rather than from life and looks to small charcoal sketches made ‘in situ’ as the structural foundations for each composition. The finished painting thus arises from a dynamic and often volatile combination of study, memory and invention, and there is often a deliberate tension between analysis and expression; between the balance of objective depiction and expressive emotional realism. The result of an obsessive process of working and reworking the image; of rubbing down the previous days, even weeks efforts and starting again, there is a feeling of chance exactitude to each urgent mark that gives the overall a self-perpetuating cohesion. Carving into the paint encrusted landscape in rutted strokes to reveal archaeological echoes of each preceding stage, the impasto immediacy of the surface brushwork contains minute marbled striations of colour whose rippling effects in paint are solidified for posterity. In a way that reflects the ongoing nature of the artist’s relationship to the subject; the composition pulsates with the vitality of its present state whilst simultaneously recounting a concurrent narrative of its history. Every fluid, deft accent is certified by those which have gone before it - by the infinite workability of paint. The strength and unpredictability of the brushstrokes constructing the scene are forever changing and interacting with each other; their angular vortexes at once abstract and supremely descriptive. The inexplicable correctness to every mark combines unwavering determination to get it absolutely right with the element of chance invention.

Frequently the personal expression found in Auerbach’s landscapes surpasses that found in his portraits. This is because painting landscapes allows him rare opportunity to work in total isolation. Unlike portraits in which his focus is upon the physical and emotional presence of the model with him in his studio, landscapes give him greater personal freedom both in his thought and working process. “I think my sitters would tell you that I’m fairly abandoned when they’re there, but there’s a further degree of abandon when I’m doing my landscapes because I’m absolutely on my own,” Auerbach explained in a rare interview. (Frank Auerbach cited in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 170) Furthermore, because the colours they contain are those of the environment outside, painting landscapes also give him the chance to liberate his palette from the stagnant light of his dark and cluttered studio. They give voice to his colourist tendencies and encourage a greater degree of emotional invention. As Auerbach elaborated, “There has to be a conflict between what one wants and what actually exists; so one goes out and does a drawing, and it’s always easier to do a drawing of a place nearby. Also there is a kind of intimacy and excitement and confidence that comes from inhabiting the painting and knowing exactly where everything is, and a sort of magic in conjuring up a real place, a record that is somewhere between one’s feeling…and the appearance.” (Frank Auerbach in Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p.160)

The freedom Auerbach gives to personal expression in his landscapes is even more significant when one considers that he has never painted a self-portrait. As well as providing a backdrop to his notoriously private existence, his landscapes are invaluable for the pulsations of the environment which are Auerbach’s own; the colours of his feelings, and the mood enriched by his own memories and experiences over many decades.