Welcome to The Courtauld Gallery's latest exhibition
Frank Auerbach, London Building Sites 1952-62.
The exhibition unites for the first time Auerbach's remarkable series of London building site paintings,
which he produced during a period when London was emerging from the debris of the Second World War.
Today, Auerbach is generally considered to be one of this country's greatest living artists.
But this exhibition looks back to his very early years, when he emerged, during the 1950s,
alongside Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, to represent one of a powerful new generation of radical painters.
Auerbach came to London in 1939 as an 8 year old, escaping the rise of the Nazis.
He attended a boarding school in Kent, called Bunce Court. And during the period of the Second World War
discovered that both of his parents had been killed in the concentration camps. And so after the war he came to London
really alone in the world, to pursue a career as a painter.
He attended a number of art schools but from the very outset of his time in London he was fascinated by the spectacle of
the city being rebuilt after the bombing of the Blitz. And he almost immediately began making numerous sketches of the building sites that were multiplying
across the city. The first of these sketches that he was able to turn into a painting was Summer Building Site
and it's this picture that he felt represented his breakthrough as an artist.
He described it as being the beginning of his life as a painter.
He remembered working on it for many months, struggling to find the image that he wanted,
and painting it in a relatively naturalistic way.
Then one day he returned home and attacked it again with a brush, repainting it from top to bottom,
distorting certain elements and creating the image that we see today.
And it is a really sort of radical and powerful evocation of the building site and the forces of creation and destruction at work on those sites.
Having completed Summer Building Site, Auerbach continued to sketch on the construction sites of London, and over the next 10 years he
produced a group of 14 major paintings of London's building sites. This exhibition is the first time that they've been united as a complete group.
Some of them have rarely been shown before.
During that decade he traveled widely across the city, sketching on the various sites and all of his paintings are based on the drawings that he made sitting on site.
The exhibition begins with a drawing, a large scale drawing, and really one of the only large drawings that he made for his building site paintings.
The majority of his preparatory works were small sketches, made on site.
This drawing would have been made from one of his small sketches and you can see it is squared up,
ready for transfer onto his painting board. It clearly shows
the steel-gridded structure of a building going up.
And in fact it's the Time Life building on Bruton Street, one of the most famous post-war offices to go up,
shortly after the bombing.
What's extraordinary hanging these works side by side is to see the transformation that's taken place between the rather detailed, squared up drawing
and the finished painting.
At this time Auerbach was realising that the only way he could achieve his desired image was to work and rework his paintings,
over many months and even more than a year.
As he worked the paint accrued, piling up on top of itself until you have surfaces sometimes
over an inch thick. In the process much representational detail is often lost
and what emerges is some basic and primal forms. And what really engages us is the quality of the paint itself, which
seems like a raw equivalent for the earth that was being moved and the rubble that was being excavated on the building sites.
And it was that that really fascinated Auerbach.
The first paintings in the Building Sites series are characterised by their extraordinary thickness of paint
and darkness of palette. He was using paint in extraordinarily large quantities and in fact earth tones and blacks and whites were
the only colours that he could afford. A painting like this, for example, of a building site on Portobello Road
seems at first glance to be almost unreadable and unrepresentational.
But when you spend time with Auerbach's paintings and your eyes begin to adjust to his light, forms begin to emerge.
For example, in the centre here this circular form is in fact the crouching figure of a workman beginning to emerge from
the murkiness of the background.
Auerbach has described the building sites and bombsites of London after the war as being a bit like the scene of survivors,
scurrying among the ruins. And in a sense the battle of representation that's played out in his paintings is a parallel
to that experience of seeing London emerging from the devastation of the war.
After this initial period of work, Auerbach visits a site on the South Bank, the Shell building site, and his style
begins to change quite extraordinarily, in a work such as this.
Shell Building Site from the Thames. Gone is the heavy, dark and impenetrable palette.
And what emerges is a very explosive theme, with a crane dropping its cable into a deep excavation and light appearing
to emanate from the soil itself. The formal excitement of the picture contrasts sharply
with the earlier work. And it suggests that Auerbach was finding in this building site an extraordinary spectacle, an awesome and
even sublime mountainous landscape.
The Building Sites series culminates in two masterpieces. The first, painted in 1960 is the Maples demolition painting, which you see here.
It's subject was the Maples furniture store on the Euston Road, which was almost completely destroyed during the Blitz.
And Auerbach visited it and made sketches as it was being cleared for rebuilding.
The result is this extraordinarily dynamic painting.
An earlier preparatory sketch, the only surviving sketch for this work, shows that in fact this very dominant line which runs all the way
across the board originated in a beam of about this length, but sometime during the painting process he decided that to
complete the composition he'd extend the line, slashing all the way across the board itself.
The result is a painting of extraordinary energy and tension, that captures really those moments, that sense of drama on the
building site as Auerbach was witnessing London being demolished and then rebuilt following the war.
The second masterpiece that finishes the show is this painting, Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, from 1962.
And it would prove to be the very last building site painting that Auerbach produced.
He remembers sketching at this site, of the Empire cinema on Leicester Square, and he recalled how
he sneaked inside as the auditorium was being town down and modernised, and made some quick, rapid sketches before being
told to leave the site by the foreman. That sense of urgency, and again excitement, is well captured in this
painting, which positions the viewer teetering over the edge of what appears to be a void in the foreground, spanned
by these beams, which he paints in this extraordinary thick red pigment. And I think the painting perhaps more than any other in the
series, also captures that sense of creation and destruction which Auerbach found so compelling on the building sites of London.
And his technique, the way that he captured that experience, in this new and radical language of painting, I think is still
as powerful today as it was when they were first received by the critics.
One critic in particular, David Sylvester, spoke very well of Auerbach's work.
And he said that Auerbach had extended the power of paint, to remake reality.