ABOVE: Frank Auerbach, Summer Building Site, 1952
They look like they are made from the materials of the subjects they depict—the construction sites amid the bombed-out ruins of London after the second world war. Some resemble the wall of a building, whose plaster has been blasted off, the remaining stone or concrete partially blackened by the force of an explosion and marked by the impact of shrapnel. Others seem to be carved out of the thick, wet mud of a rain-soaked derelict plot or excavation. Frank Auerbach’s paintings of London building sites are among the most important and powerful—but also visually challenging—cycle of paintings of postwar Britain, on a par with Francis Bacon’s portraits of the Pope.
Yet they have rarely been shown in public and never alongside the preparatory oil sketches and pen-and-ink drawings, as they are now at this historic exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. They offer revelations about the mysterious power of Auerbach’s painting and his place within postwar abstract art, while also conveying the feel of London after the war: a paradoxical landscape of ruins and renewal, deprivation and hope.
The meticulous Auerbach began sketching construction sites in London in 1948, but only executed his first canvas in 1952. Jewish and German, he had come to Britain in 1939, aged seven, as part of the Kindertransport programme. His parents died in a concentration camp. He studied painting under the inventive British modernist David Bomberg. The building sites were his formative works. In Summer Building Site (1952), the flat geometric compositions of Bomberg’s modernism are still very much to the fore. Yet Auerbach’s paint is already acquiring its texture and thickness, and the ladders that glow in yellow paint as if they are on fire presage the way he would transform a vocabulary of ordinary building items—scaffolding, rubble, wheelbarrows, workmen—into a new kind of abstract painting.
The curators have carefully sourced photographs of the original locations at the time Auerbach painted them, so you can see how he followed and departed from what he saw. Over the next decade, he painted 14 pictures, each of which took six months to a year to complete. Several showed the Shell Building site—one in impasto greys, highlighted by shiny passages of pure black, a shadow of St Paul’s on the horizon (1958-61). Another is a melange of ochres, browns and black (1959).
The longer one looks at his work, the more details emerge from the oily slurry: scaffolds, mounds of earth, distant office blocks and cranes. He remembers that London “was pitted with bomb sites gradually turning into building sites because people were rebuilding what had been destroyed. And there was… a sense of survivors scurrying among a ruined city… a city fully functional is to me a somewhat formally boring collection of cubic and rectilinear shapes, but London after the war was a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags.”
Today Auerbach tends be considered alongside Lucian Freud as one of Britain’s conservative but classic painters, at one remove from the ebbs and flows of international movements and new ideas in art. But this exhibition, and the accompanying scholarly catalogue essay by curator Barnaby Wright, places him right in the frontline of European painting. Auerbach turned against the picturesque “neo-romantic” surrealism-flavoured views of bombed British cities by his contemporaries John Piper and Graham Sutherland. His primitive surfaces align him with Jean Dubuffet and the informe painters of postwar France. The coagulating impasto he worked in was also favoured by those masters of swirling colours, the Cobra painters such as Asger Jorn. His knots, nodules and squishes of paint make Auerbach our very own Cy Twombly. Like all these painters, he was interested in the idea of “starting again,” of painting having its own post-Holocaust “zero hour.”
Yet Auerbach was different, too. He was more severe that his European and American colleagues, eschewing the accessible colours and sexy gestural brushstrokes of the abstract expressionists. The pictures in this exhibition show how he not only painted his pictures, but remarkably carved the picture in the paint—a kind of reverse process in which the image was imprinted in the thick paint surface with gouges of his finger and the end of a paintbrush. He studied the way divine weather fronts swept over man-made architecture in Turner’s paintings and he was awed by the ant-like teams of construction workers he saw, dwarfed by the building projects they were undertaking. Auerbach’s painting style itself was a historical metaphor for the emergence of structure out of destruction, and a philosophical symbol for the tension between order and chaos.
They look like they are made from the materials of the subjects they depict—the construction sites amid the bombed-out ruins of London after the second world war. Some resemble the wall of a building, whose plaster has been blasted off, the remaining stone or concrete partially blackened by the force of an explosion and marked by the impact of shrapnel. Others seem to be carved out of the thick, wet mud of a rain-soaked derelict plot or excavation. Frank Auerbach’s paintings of London building sites are among the most important and powerful—but also visually challenging—cycle of paintings of postwar Britain, on a par with Francis Bacon’s portraits of the Pope.
Yet they have rarely been shown in public and never alongside the preparatory oil sketches and pen-and-ink drawings, as they are now at this historic exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. They offer revelations about the mysterious power of Auerbach’s painting and his place within postwar abstract art, while also conveying the feel of London after the war: a paradoxical landscape of ruins and renewal, deprivation and hope.
The meticulous Auerbach began sketching construction sites in London in 1948, but only executed his first canvas in 1952. Jewish and German, he had come to Britain in 1939, aged seven, as part of the Kindertransport programme. His parents died in a concentration camp. He studied painting under the inventive British modernist David Bomberg. The building sites were his formative works. In Summer Building Site (1952), the flat geometric compositions of Bomberg’s modernism are still very much to the fore. Yet Auerbach’s paint is already acquiring its texture and thickness, and the ladders that glow in yellow paint as if they are on fire presage the way he would transform a vocabulary of ordinary building items—scaffolding, rubble, wheelbarrows, workmen—into a new kind of abstract painting.
The curators have carefully sourced photographs of the original locations at the time Auerbach painted them, so you can see how he followed and departed from what he saw. Over the next decade, he painted 14 pictures, each of which took six months to a year to complete. Several showed the Shell Building site—one in impasto greys, highlighted by shiny passages of pure black, a shadow of St Paul’s on the horizon (1958-61). Another is a melange of ochres, browns and black (1959).
The longer one looks at his work, the more details emerge from the oily slurry: scaffolds, mounds of earth, distant office blocks and cranes. He remembers that London “was pitted with bomb sites gradually turning into building sites because people were rebuilding what had been destroyed. And there was… a sense of survivors scurrying among a ruined city… a city fully functional is to me a somewhat formally boring collection of cubic and rectilinear shapes, but London after the war was a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags.”
Today Auerbach tends be considered alongside Lucian Freud as one of Britain’s conservative but classic painters, at one remove from the ebbs and flows of international movements and new ideas in art. But this exhibition, and the accompanying scholarly catalogue essay by curator Barnaby Wright, places him right in the frontline of European painting. Auerbach turned against the picturesque “neo-romantic” surrealism-flavoured views of bombed British cities by his contemporaries John Piper and Graham Sutherland. His primitive surfaces align him with Jean Dubuffet and the informe painters of postwar France. The coagulating impasto he worked in was also favoured by those masters of swirling colours, the Cobra painters such as Asger Jorn. His knots, nodules and squishes of paint make Auerbach our very own Cy Twombly. Like all these painters, he was interested in the idea of “starting again,” of painting having its own post-Holocaust “zero hour.”
Yet Auerbach was different, too. He was more severe that his European and American colleagues, eschewing the accessible colours and sexy gestural brushstrokes of the abstract expressionists. The pictures in this exhibition show how he not only painted his pictures, but remarkably carved the picture in the paint—a kind of reverse process in which the image was imprinted in the thick paint surface with gouges of his finger and the end of a paintbrush. He studied the way divine weather fronts swept over man-made architecture in Turner’s paintings and he was awed by the ant-like teams of construction workers he saw, dwarfed by the building projects they were undertaking. Auerbach’s painting style itself was a historical metaphor for the emergence of structure out of destruction, and a philosophical symbol for the tension between order and chaos.
