Frank Auerbach

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

New York, Marlborough Gallery, Frank Auerbach, Recent Works, 1994, no. 24, illustrated in colour
San Francisco, Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery, Frank Auerbach, Recent Works, 1995, illustrated in colour on the back cover
Woollahra, Rex Irwin, Frank Auerbach, Paintings and Drawings, 1996, no. 8
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., Frank Auerbach, Recent Works, 1997, no. 29
Amstelveen, Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, De Londonse School, 1999
London, Blains Fine Art, Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, 2000, n.p., illustrated in colour
Madrid, Marlborough Galeria, Frank Auerbach, Pinturas y Dibujos, 2002, no. 5, illustrated in colour

Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning is a sublime example of the landscapes for which Frank Auerbach has become celebrated as one of the greatest British painters working today. This painting promises the deepest of visual experiences, because, as the artist has said, "this part of London is my world" (the artist interviewed by Michael Peppiat in: Tate, no. 14, Spring 1998). As a whole, Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning reveals the drama of experiencing the physicality of a landscape in an extraordinarily intimate way. The physical weight of the picture matches its significance: a crust of oil paint protrudes into the viewer's space, offering a heavy window into the artist's world.

This is a composition of remarkable balance and poise, which retains a thrilling immediacy and sense of momentum. Buildings, cars and roads are pared down to girder-like lines, criss-crossing and jabbing each other in a kind of skeletal analysis which is reminiscent of the derelict post-war landscape, still vivid in 1954 when Auerbach took over Leon Kossof's Camden studio (he has used it ever since). Famously, he revels in the constancy of change in "this extraordinary, marvellously unpainted city where wherever somebody tries to get something going they stop halfway through, and next to it something incongruous occurs" (the artist interviewed by Judith Bumpus in: Art & Artists, June 1986, p. 27). A vanishing point pulls the picture towards the base of the Carreras cigarette factory, visible from the back of Mornington Crescent, an art deco icon of the locality. From there, lines of perspective radiate out towards the edges, as if trying to rupture the confines of the canvas in an art deco-esque sun-burst. Meanwhile the left hand side is compressed into a slice of red and black building right at the edge, which imitates a curtain being swept aside. At centre-stage, a tree, with branches pleading to the sky, is captured mid-pirouette.

There is deep-felt drama in the evidence of the creative process, as it is ingrained on the canvas - from a risky strike of a palette knife, to the marbling effect of a brush kissing the top layer of paint. Big brushes slide over layers of different colours, dragging or merging them, or swiping straight through; the traces of previous layers of colour inspire the scene with a hectic unity, entirely appropriate to what Auerbach has called "this higgledy-piggledy mess of a city" (the artist interviewed by Judith Bumpus in: Art & Artists, June 1986, p. 27). The particular palette of subtle colours in Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning imbues the picture with an overpowering sense of close air, especially as the grey of the sky filters down through the entire scene, making it feel thick with heat. There is a visceral pleasure at being in the presence of this oil painting, which has everything to do with its slick-and-crusty textural character.

Auerbach's desire to emphasize the city's "massive substance" and explore its condition of "fullness and perpetual motion" is manifest in a dogmatic working routine, tantamount to an ethical code (the artist interviewed by Richard Cork in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 83). Camden had been the focus of many previous imaginations, but Auerbach's painting follows, above all, in the footsteps of Walter Sickert, who had similarly been intent on communicating the experience of reality. Auerbach returns obsessively to the same views and sketches on the spot, limbering up for stints in the studio of up to eight hours of strenuous effort. By repeatedly accruing a rich sediment of paint before then stripping it away, he digs deeper and deeper into the essence of the subject. Thus Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning recounts the process of getting under the skin of this place, thereby treating the city as a living, breathing, ever-changing creature. Peter Ackroyd, with specific relevance to the landscapes of the early 1990s, has observed: "Auerbach's artistic creativity is a simulacrum of the city's life, with his incessant revisions and accretions, with his scraping down of the surface of the board or canvas to make a fresh start" (Peter Ackroyd in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Marlborough Gallery, Frank Auerbach: Recent Works, 1994, n.p.).

In the Royal Academy retrospective catalogue Catherine Lampert remarks that "reading an Auerbach painting is an energetic experience, while colours prompt the unfolding of memories in the mind's eye" (Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, 2001, p. 100). Indeed, the present painting makes for an exhilarating encounter. It is not simply to be looked at: the accumulated gestures amount to more than a two-dimensional experience. Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning is rooted in both a geographical and psychological place with the result that it is more than a representation. In the hands of Frank Auerbach Mornington Crescent becomes a gloriously haptic and profoundly moving entity in its own right.