Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2000

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, pp. 150 and 316, no. 681, illustrated in colour

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Exhibiting a stunning array of vibrant hues and a striking topography of oil paint loaded onto the canvas, Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning is a sublime example of the landscapes for which Frank Auerbach is celebrated as one of the greatest British painters working today. Broadcast on a very impressive scale, this work dramatically reveals the urban landscape in an extraordinarily intimate way, providing physical testament to the artist's statement that "this part of London is my world" (the artist interviewed by Michael Peppiat in: Tate, no. 14, Spring 1998). It is central to a grand cycle of works that depict this archetypal vista of Auerbach's London, from which comparable examples are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Mornington Crescent, 1967); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (Mornington Crescent – Early Morning, 1999); and The London Jewish Museum (Mornington Crescent – Summer Morning II, 2004). It is among the largest of the artist's canvases ever to appear at auction and delivers a uniquely fulfilling and quite enthralling visual experience.

While the exceptional palette of vivid colour injects the picture with an overpowering sense of warmth and vibrancy, the paint surface narrates the highly dramatic process of this work's creation. The spectator's eye is invited to roam the multi-layered facets and crevices of the slick and crusty landscape of paint and to read the history of the artist's assault of mark-making. From the risk-laden strike of a palette knife to a brush skimming and merging ridges of material together, pigment and medium have been dragged, scuffed and swiped straight through, finally resolving into a sensational and haptic unity. Indeed, Auerbach's wrestling of paint has accumulated into a spectacularly sculptural work projecting towards the viewer and precipitates an exhilarating encounter beyond the mere window of the picture plane.

Close to the Camden studio he has worked in since taking it over from Leon Kossoff in 1954, the subject of Mornington Crescent has continued to fascinate Auerbach for over forty years. The capacious houses of the Crescent were originally constructed in the 1820s amid the fields of Camden just north of Central London, and the area has long cultural associations: the painter Walter Sickert lived there and Charles Dickens attended a school nearby. The street also encloses the enormous white edifice of the Carreras factory built in 1926. This is a monument to Art Deco and the architectural vogue for incorporating Egyptian motifs into grand buildings during the inter-war years. Although now a modern office block named Greater London House, in the 1930s more than three thousand women worked here manufacturing Craven A and Black Cat cigarettes. At the centre of the back of the building a tall chimney dramatically ascends into the sky, standing as a Cleopatra's Needle of industry. This totemic obelisk provides a key compositional axis to Auerbach's composition: its soaring verticality set against the receding arc of the Crescent.

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). Auerbach returns obsessively to the same views and sketches on the spot, engaging in 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. In this way his method is reminiscent of the landscapes of Claude Monet, such as the views of Rouen Cathedral that the French Impressionist returned to so often. However, Auerbach's obsessive translation of his environments into oil paint is less to do with capturing the atmospheric effect that was the preoccupation of the Impressionists, and more resolved to fix in material the experience of reality. Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning recounts actually being in this place, and thereby responds to the city as a living, breathing and ever-changing organism. 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.). 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 tactile and profoundly affecting entity in its own right.