Frank Auerbach

Executed in 1977, the year before his first major retrospective exhibition was staged by the Arts Council of Great Britain, when the international appreciation of his work was soaring, Camden Theatre in the Rain is a masterpiece from Frank Auerbach’s most artistically fertile and commercially sought after period. The present work was completed at the pinnacle of his rise to artistic maturity, as he harnessed, honed and refined his expressive gestures to create this crescendo of dramatic brushwork.  Illustrated on the poster for the 1978 Arts Council retrospective, this painting was also one of the stars of the Royal Academy exhibition British Art in the 20^th Century, where it was exhibited alongside masterpieces by Auerbach’s School of London peers, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

Camden Theatre in the Rain combines Frank Auerbach’s two primary passions: painting and London. He explains, “My first consideration on getting up in the morning every day of my life has always been about painting”. Since arriving in London in 1939 as a Jewish refugee, Frank Auerbach has always felt a strong affinity with the place. Seeing himself as a “born again Londoner” who has embraced the city’s cultural baggage and richly layered identity, his love affair with his adopted home represents one of the most significant attachments in his life. “I hate leaving my studio…I hate leaving London,” he explained. “I don’t think I have spent more than five weeks abroad since I was seven.” (the artist cited in Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 83) This intense attachment to London - specifically the area between Mornington Crescent and the park of Primrose Hill around his Camden Town home and studio - is powerfully expressed through the landscapes he has painted of it for most of his later life.

For over thirty years Auerbach has returned to the walls of the Camden Theatre for inspiration, beginning in 1966 with the first series of this subject. Auerbach infamously only paints people and places he knows intimately, as familiarity affords him the freedom to express himself, relinquished from the boundaries set by the subject, and furthermore the intimacy allowed a new kind of knowledge of something to be found.  He feels that ‘the virtue of repetition lies in being able to make statements of the kind that no-one else less familiar with the subject could have possibly made.’ Camden Theatre in the Rain is an extraordinary example of how effective this approach was.  This grand painting both in size and execution represents all that is great in Frank Auerbach’s landscapes.  Auerbach’s confident thick brushstrokes describe the symmetrical façade of W. G. R. Sprague’s masterpiece, articulating the four ionic columns and large copper dome.  Located at the junction of Camden High Street, Mornington Crescent and Crowndale Road, the constantly evolving function from theatre to cinema, to BBC radio station, to nightclub lends itself well to Auerbach’s interest in the constantly evolving urban landscape.  The sweeping view from the tube station, labelled by the red orb of the underground sign and green awning, across the tracks to the Camden theatre is executed in a complex of confident sculptural brushstrokes guiding the viewer’s eye as it slides across the geography of peaks, channels and merging colours.  The composition is angular and hazy, capturing effectively the mood of a rainy day in London through the integration of the earthy colours and bright highlights of red, green and yellow.   

Auerbach’s assured fusion of colour and form is simultaneously spontaneous and deeply mediated, impacted with cultural memories and desires. Painted indoors rather than en plein air from life, he looks to small charcoal sketches made ‘in situ’ as the structural foundations for each landscape: “I go out each morning and draw. I can’t really start painting in the morning until I’ve done a drawing… I feel dissatisfied with what I’m doing, so I go out and try to notice some fact I haven’t seen before, and once I’ve been provided with a reason for changing my picture, I can come back to the studio and change it…usually it is a new sensation or proportion or connection, often revealed by the light.” (ibid.)  This approach to painting was initiated by his teacher David Bomberg, who taught Auerbach from the age of 17, and whose doctrine on the centrality of drawing profoundly affected Auerbach’s approach to art. Auerbach says of his master: “I didn’t realise that I had met with probably the most original, stubborn, radical intelligence that was to be found in art schools… There was a feeling that in the rest of the art schools something presentable had to be presented, but in those classes there was an atmosphere of research and of radicalism which was extremely stimulating. He was enormously courageous and enormously serious in a way that very few painters are… I think that on the whole in my time as a student Bomberg was far more important to me than anyone else.” (The artist cited in: Richard Cork, David Bomberg, New Haven and London 1987, pp. 283-286). 

He instilled in Auerbach a deep instinct as to how a painting should develop, his pedagogic teaching imparting a cogency and quality of form liberated of affectation or mannerism that is clearly discernible in the present work. One of the few paintings Bomberg made of London, Evening in the City of London of 1944 bears striking parallels to Auerbach’s mature style: the application of brushstrokes loaded with paint, the architectural compositional construction, the muted tonal range and expressionistic charge all derive from Bomberg. While the elder artist paints London turned to rubble during the Blitz, his disciple takes as his subject his neighbourhood under construction, the facades of the Camden streets often lined with scaffolding. 

The streets that Auerbach painted made critics suggest a genealogy stretching back through Bomberg to the artists of the Camden Town Group, who included Walter Sickert (who taught Bomberg) and Spencer Frederick Gore (fig. 2). Auerbach feels no strong alliance, however, and his predilection to paint this particular corner of London derives from a much more urgent need: “I haven’t painted [Mornington Crescent] to ally myself with some Camden Town Group, but simply because I feel London is this raw thing…This extraordinary, marvellously unpainted city… this higgledy-piggledy mess of a city”. (The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Frank Auerbach, 2001, p. 100)

As a consequence of Auerbach’s strict method, the landscape is built from a combination of feeling, experience and a passion rather than from a precise, single visual reality. This technique involves working and reworking the image, rubbing down the surface and starting again fresh to nurture a deliberate tension between analysis and expression; between the balance of objective depiction and expressive emotional realism. The finished version emerges weeks, often months, later, from an urgent crescendo of expressive brushwork in which each mark has a sense of chance exactitude and inexplicable correctness. In Camden Theatre in the Rain the marbled surface beneath the geography of thickly-trowelled, geometric brushstrokes records the archaeological echoes of previous paint layers from the furrowed landscape beneath.

As seen here, the personal expression in Auerbach’s landscapes frequently surpasses that found in his portraits. This, in part, is because of the greater element given over to memory and invention, and also because they allow him to work in total isolation. Unlike portraits, landscapes do not require a mutual relationship - they do not stare back, and are open to a different realm of invention. “I think my sitters would tell you that I’m fairly abandoned when they’re there, but there’s a further degree of abandon when I’m doing my landscapes because I’m absolutely on my own” (The artist cited in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 170) Furthermore, because the colours they contain are those of the environment outside, painting landscapes also gives him the chance to liberate his palette from the oppressive light of his dark and cluttered studio in which they are painted. They give voice to his colourist tendencies and encourage a more creative union between colour, emotion and form.