Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London

Bergamini Gallery, Milan

Private Collection, Europe (acquired in the 1970s)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Milan, Galleria Bergamini, Frank Auerbach, 1973, n.p., no. 19, illustrated in colour

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 82 and p. 272, no. 312, illustrated in colour (incorrectly titled)

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the red has fewer magenta undertones in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a few tiny losses to some of the impasto peaks, notably to the darker pigments towards the left edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Executed between 1971 and 1972, Morning – Mornington Place belongs to a tremendous period within Frank Auerbach’s oeuvre. Following a rapid maturation and evolution of technique throughout the 1960s, by the early ‘70s Auerbach had departed from the encrusted paintings articulated in mountainous impastos of yellow ochre and burnt umber, and was commanding a fluid painterly approach in magnificent syrupy tones of previously unexplored colour. Though maintaining a thick methodoloy, Auerbach’s facture now called for greater liquidity that required a procedure of endless scraping down, rather than adding to, the substance of previous work. Denoting the toiled physical matter imparted by months of scrutinous exertion and countless erasures, the present painting magnificently embodies the height of Auerbach’s painterly and graphic skill in communicating the essence of the small patch of North London to which he is assiduously dedicated. The exuberance and harmonic balance of colour delineating space and structure in this painting is not only remarkable but also rare. A scumbled verdant pavement that recedes into the distance of a warm silvery skyline anchors luscious crimson and purple tones intersected by lattice-like scaffolds of thick cadmium and orange pigment. As explicitly apparent in this painting, Auerbach’s structural use of colour is nowhere better than in his corpus of Camden cityscapes. Representing a consummate essay in chromatic power, the present work ranks alongside the most remarkable of urban-landscape paintings by the artist, easily rivalling eminent examples housed in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Mornington Crescent, 1967, Feaver no. 226); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (Mornington Crescent, Early Morning, 1999, Feaver no. 821); and The London Jewish Museum (Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II, 2004, Feaver no. 893). Having been preserved in the same collection since it was first acquired from Galleria Bergamini, Milan, and unseen in public since its exhibition there in 1973, the present work is a truly significant revelation.

Morning – Mornington Place magnificently embodies Frank Auerbach’s inimitable translation of London: not the picturesque spectacle of tourist London, but London as a city of day-to-day work, hulking building sites, traffic and wet-pavements. Providing physical testament to the artist’s statement that “this part of London is my world”, the vicinity close to Auerbach’s Camden studio denotes the inexhaustible subject of relentless painterly transpositions. Conveying his ambition to emphasise the city’s “massive substance” and explore its condition of “fullness and perpetual motion”, Auerbach’s work is tantamount to an ethical code in its visual manifestation of an ascetic working routine (Auerbach quoted in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 83). Returning obsessively to the same views, the artist sketches on the spot in either charcoal or pen then starts working in paint back at the studio for up to eight strenuous hours at a time. By repeatedly accruing a rich sediment of paint then stripping it away, he digs deeper and deeper into the essence of the subject. More so than his figurative work, the landscapes are: “[a] tremendous effort because… the way I work means putting up a whole image, and dismantling it and putting up another whole image, which is… physically extremely strenuous, and I don’t think that I’ve ever finished a landscape without a six or seven hour bout of work. Whereas, a person or a head is a single form and it can come about in a shorter period of time” (Auerbach quoted in: ibid., p. 171). Owing to the development of an increasingly graphic and fluid technique whereby the final composition, though comprising months of previous labour, emerges in the final hours of execution, the size of these paintings tested the physical limits of Auerbach’s practice. Spanning two years in execution, the present work, though hard-won, spectacularly evinces the resultant grandeur of this severe process. As outlined by the artist in typically self-effacing terms: “Almost all the paintings that I am not ashamed of have gone on for a painfully long-time” (Auerbach quoted in: ibid., p. 202).

Possessing surprisingly deep-rooted artistic associations, Auerbach’s North London neighbourhood has continued to fascinate for over forty-years. ‘Inherited’ from his friend and fellow artist Leon Kossoff in 1954, Auerbach’s workplace is located only a few doors down from the historic studio once occupied by the doyen of the Camden Town Group, Walter Sickert – a painter whose proximity is felt in Auerbach’s psychological treatment of portraiture. Far from the ominous character of Sickert’s North London however, the greatest influence redolent within Auerbach’s Mornington Place is the impact of Nicolas de Staël and his portrayal of the Midi from the early 1950s. De Staël’s block-like and abutting passages of oil paint thickly applied with a palette knife possess a Matissean papier collé quality that is translated in the present work via a formal architecture and illusion of depth by way of colour alone. Though first exposed to De Staël’s work in 1952 through an exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery in London, the bold and sunlit bearing of this Russian-French painter did not emerge in Auerbach’s work until the late 1960s and early 1970s when greater financial security facilitated the use of a wider spectrum of pigments. Viscous strokes and contingent flourishes juxtaposed against a palimpsest ground of scraped painterly strata are here articulated in an exquisite chromatic array. The lesson of De Staël’s bold blocky tones and reductive abstraction of Southern France here transfigures an insignificant Camden side street with a railway view into a dazzling interpretation infused with the warmth of a sunlit morning. Resonating with a profound sense of place that comes with knowing every nuance and situation of his chosen subject, Morning - Mornington Place magnificently extols the technical brilliance and psychological immediacy for which Frank Auerbach is celebrated as one of the greatest British painters of the Twentieth Century.