Frank Auerbach

Acquired by the present owners in December 1977

London, Beaux Arts Gallery, 1959, in its original form;
London, The Courtauld Gallery, Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62, 16th October 2009 - 17th January 2010, cat. no.7, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue p.91.

The board is sound and is in good original condition. The paint surface is slightly dirty and is intentionally pitted and uneven. The work has been painted into the frame along the left, lower, and right edges. There are some minor cracks to the paint between the right edge of the painting and the frame, but the paint surface generally appears to be in wonderful original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a few areas of fluoresce, but these appear to be inherent to the work. Held in a simple painted wooden frame in fair condition.
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Painted circa 1958-61.

Frank Auerbach settled in London as a young man after the Second World War and began to pursue a career as an artist. He immediately became fascinated by the spectacle of the numerous building-sites that were multiplying across the city as London emerged from the debris of the Blitz. '[It] was a marvellous landscape' he recalled recently, 'with precipice and mountain and crags, full of drama... it was a new phenomenon... and it seemed mad to waste the opportunity and not to take notice of the fact that there were these marvellous images, compost for images, all around one.'

Between 1952 and 1962 Auerbach produced a group of fourteen major paintings of London building-sites, each based upon drawings he made on his regular sketching trips to construction sites across the city. The paintings chart Auerbach's development as an artist in the first decade of his career when he emerged alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff as part of an exciting new generation of British painters. The building-site paintings are also a profound response to the unprecedented landscape and culture of post-war London.

The fourteen paintings in the group cover many of the major areas of London's reconstruction, including St Paul's, Oxford Street and one of the largest and most impressive of all the city's post-war building sites - the Shell Centre on the South Bank, the subject of the present work. Auerbach visited the Shell Building site on many occasions from around 1958 when the deep foundations for what would become London's first 'sky-scraper' were being excavated. 'Fantastic! It was superb! It was like the Grand Canyon... it was almost a gift,' he remembered, 'you could have taken it and put it in a museum being what it was, such a marvellous thing'.

This work is the first of three paintings of the site that Auerbach produced which were shown together at his 1959 solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London. (The other two works are Shell Building Site: from the Festival Hall, 1959, Gray Art Gallery and Museum Hartlepool, and Shell Building Site: from the Thames, 1959, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). Its principal subject is the Hungerford Railway Bridge, which runs through the middle of the Shell Building complex. In the foreground a grid of piles and beams is being laid with further building works underway within the railway arches themselves. The composition is closely related to that shown in a small pencil sketch which Auerbach made on site (fig. 1). Working closely from this and other drawings, he painted and repainted the composition repeatedly over many months, trying to achieve his desired form of expression. As he worked the paint accrued resulting in a thickly built-up, tactile surface that was characteristic of his work at this time.

Auerbach completed and exhibited the painting initially in very different colours; earth tones with the addition of red, which can still be seen at the edges of the board. However, he was dissatisfied with it. 'It just seemed timid,' he recalled, 'as though it was done from the shoulder'. He took it back from the Beaux Arts Gallery and it remained for a long period in his studio whilst he gathered up the courage to repaint it. 'I must have had some brandy because I remember drinking and repainting the whole thing in black and white from top to bottom... In a day!' The spontaneous reworking of paintings after months of laborious endeavour was not unprecedented for Auerbach, however, the speed and decisiveness with which he transformed Workmen under Hungerford Bridge was uncharacteristic. Yet the resulting image, shrouded in black tones, does not obviously express the speed of its completion. Rather, it offers a sepulchral vision in which forms gradually emerge through the darkness as one's eyes become accustomed to Auerbach's light. The materiality of paint itself also plays a particularly important role. Areas of the surface have dried to an almost chalky finish – reminiscent of his contemporary charcoal drawings – but where he has broken through this surface to pick out salient details in pure black the paint appears glossy, as if oozing from within.

Although Auerbach was driven by formal concerns, the work's sombre palette and charred-looking surface are suggestive of themes of life and death. Set in the context of the site itself, the work can be understood to connect with the lives and deaths of this particular area of the South Bank. The site had been destroyed and rebuilt in its near entirety no less than three times in little over a decade; its nineteenth-century housing and docks were heavily bombed during the Blitz of 1940-41, then bulldozed and redeveloped at the Festival of Britain in 1951 and then levelled once again shortly afterwards for the construction of the Shell Building. Indeed, the only remnant of its earlier history was Hungerford Bridge itself.

Barnaby Wright, Daniel Katz Curator of 20^th Century Art, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

This text is based upon that published in Barnaby Wright (ed.), Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952-62, (exhibition catalogue), The Courtauld Gallery, London, 2009. All quotes are taken from this text.