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Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952-62, at The Courtauld Gallery

Summer Building Site, 1952

Frank Auerbach (born 1931)
Summer Building Site, 1952
Oil on board, 76.2 x 106.7 cm
© The Artist, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

Study for Shell Building Site from the Festival Hall

Frank Auerbach (born 1931)
Study for Shell Building Site from the Festival Hall
c.1958
Pencil on paper, 19 x 22 cm
© The Artist, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

Construction of One New Change Street, behind St Paul’s

Frank Auerbach (born 1931)
Construction of One New Change Street, behind St Paul’s
Cathedral, 1955 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Maples Demolition Site, 1960

Frank Auerbach (born 1931)
Maples Demolition Site, 1960
Oil on board, 148.6 x 153.7 cm
Leeds City Art Gallery

Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952-62, at The Courtauld Gallery

This exhibition explores an extraordinary group of paintings of post-war Londonbuilding sites by Frank Auerbach (born 1931), one of Britain’s greatest living artists.The series of fourteen major paintings was produced during the first decade ofAuerbach’s career and gives a remarkable account of his early artistic development.It was during this period that Auerbach emerged alongside Francis Bacon and LucianFreud as part of a powerful new generation of British painters. Frank Auerbach:London Building Sites, 1952-62, on view at The Courtauld Gallery from 16 October2009 to 19 January 2010, will give the first comprehensive account of these works,which are among the most profound responses made by any artist to the post-warurban landscape.

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Auerbach’s years as a young art student in London, from 1947 to 1952, were spent ina city deeply scarred by the aftermath of the Second World War and at the beginningof a long period of recovery and rebuilding. The Blitz had levelled whole areas ofLondon and left numerous buildings severely damaged or destroyed. This woundedlandscape was punctuated by remarkable survivals, most famously St Paul’sCathedral standing defiantly among the ruins. Another spectacular sight was therebuilding effort which saw armies of workmen clearing the debris and excavatingnew foundations. Ubiquitous symbols of the rebuilding were the tower cranes whichsprang up across the city in advance of the new steel-framed offices and blocks offlats which were to transform London’s urban landscape (fig. 10). For Auerbach,hungry to prove himself as a modern painter, the building sites of London made themost compelling of contemporary subjects. As he recalled recently, “London after theWar was a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountains and crags, full ofdrama… and it seemed mad to waste the opportunity and not to take notice of the factthat there were these marvellous images… all around one”.

Towards the end of his studies at various London art schools including, mostimportantly, David Bomberg’s inspirational teaching at the Borough Polytechnic,Auerbach began voraciously sketching the city’s building sites, as did his close friendand fellow student, Leon Kossoff. There was, Auerbach says, “a sense of survivorsscurrying among a ruined city… and a sort of curious freedom… I remember a feelingof camaraderie among the people in the street”. For Auerbach, the sense of survivalmust have seemed particularly profound. He had been sent to England from hishome city, Berlin, shortly before his eighth birthday and the outbreak of war. Both ofhis Jewish parents were killed in the concentration camps and Auerbach madeLondon his new home. He combed the city, filling his sketchbooks with details ofparticular sites, capturing the activities of workmen and machinery as they reshapedLondon’s bombsites into new structures. He recalls how he would enter a site “byinching along the planks, out over the excavation, just clinging on and dodging thewheelbarrows”. It was the early stages of a construction site that most excitedAuerbach, before the building had fully emerged from the ground and there was still asense of struggle between the formlessness of the raw earth being excavated and thebeginnings of architectural order.

Auerbach’s first painting, in what would become a group of fourteen major works, wasSummer Building Site, 1952, (fig. 1), a construction site on the Earl’s Court Road. Itwas a breakthrough work for the twenty-one year old artist and he considered it to behis first truly original picture. “I had done my own painting,” Auerbach recalled, “Ididn’t know if I would ever be able to do it again, but at least I knew what it felt like.”

Auerbach’s subjects included many of the major construction sites of the period, suchas the Time and Life Building on Bruton Street, the rebuilding around St Paul’sCathedral (fig. 7) and the John Lewis building on Oxford Street. He made repeatedvisits to perhaps the most spectacular site of all: the Shell Building on the SouthBank, London’s first ‘skyscraper’ built on the site of the 1951 Festival of Britain (figs.9, 10 and 11). Its height necessitated dramatically deep excavations which Auerbachdescribed as being like the “Grand Canyon”. His Shell Building Site from the Thames(fig. 4) is a particularly dramatic evocation of his experiences there. The compositionis dominated by a crane from which a cable drops into a deep excavation whichappears to radiate light from within. Rembrandt’s Deposition in the National Gallerywas a source of inspiration for the work and the crane’s form faintly recalls that of acrucifix, further imbuing the image with the theme of death and resurrection, whichperhaps lies at the heart of all Auerbach’s building site paintings

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Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952-62, at The Courtauld Gallery