Auerbach visited many building sites in London to make sketches, but of all of
them it was perhaps the Shell building site on the South Bank that excited him
most, and it was a site that led to no less than three paintings, this being
perhaps the most dramatic of all of them. He described the building works of the
Shell building site as being like the Grand Canyon.
They were mountainous. The earthworks had excavated deep into the ground and left
huge piles which appeared like enormous mountains. Auerbach much
admired the work of artists such as Turner, who had captured a mountain
landscape in an earlier generation. Auerbach described the Shell building
site as being like the Grand Canyon. He said it was so extraordinary and
wonderful that you could just pick it up and put it in a museum just as it was.
But what he did, in fact, with the Shell site was to paint no less than three
major paintings of it, this being one of the most dramatic and exciting of all of
them what excited him particularly about the site was that it was like a mountain
landscape put in the heart of London the excavations for the foundations of what
would become London's first skyscraper was so deep that he remembers being
fearful of edging his way along the side of the chasms to get drawings which
would in turn be translated into these extraordinary paintings for this second
painting in the shell building site group we are lucky to have three
preparatory works auerbach destroyed most of the sketches that he made on
site but a few survived including some that have just recently come to light
and are exhibited in this exhibition the drawings are instructive because they
show how he worked in quite close observational detail
capturing different elements of the site such as the cranes workmen and
it meant and the preparatory works culminate in this painting in which a
certain degree of representational detail is retained and close looking
reveals this as the large Bank of Earth that culminates in this light area where
cranes and workmen and different rigs and the beginnings of the tower itself
can be seen perhaps the most startling and radical painting of the shale
building site group is this picture of Hungerford bridge painted in blacks our
bark recalls that originally he produced the work in colors and exhibited it at
one of his bows our gallery exhibitions where it was quite well received by the
critics but he was dissatisfied with it took it out of the exhibition and had it
back in his studio where it stayed for many months until he says one evening
he'd drunk some brandy and felt he'd plucked up enough courage to rework the
picture painting it from top to bottom in this extraordinary monochrome where
he's used wife in the pigment the oil has dried to an almost chalky finish but
where he's used pure black there is a glassy surface to it and it looks like
the paint is almost boozing away from the board when we spend some time with
the painting we see that the forms of the Hungerford railway bridge arches
begin to emerge in the top and the figures of workmen and equipment can be
discerned in the arches themselves the Hungerford railway bridge itself which
still stands today was really the only historic survival on the shell building
site the area had been badly bombed during the war it had been completely
flattened and redeveloped as the festival of britain in 1951 and then
from around 1956 onwards had been redeveloped again to make way for the
shale oil companies head Porter's and in this rather ghostly
vision of the Hungerford bridge I think we feel a sense of the site's earlier
history coming through