Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Private Collection
Sale: Christie's, London, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Evening Sale,  20 June 2007, Lot 70
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 319, no. 700, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the original is deeper and richer and with less yellow tones. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"Auerbach's artistic creativity is a simulacrum of the city's life, with his incessant revisions and accretions, with his scraping down of the surface of the board or canvas to make a fresh start."

Peter Ackroyd in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Marlborough Gallery, Frank Auerbach: Recent Works, 1994, n.p.


Arrestingly articulated in a magnificent confluence of vibrant hues and a striking topography of oil paint, Mornington Crescent - Dawn is a sublime example of the landscapes for which Frank Auerbach is celebrated as one of the greatest British painters working today. Capturing the peaceful luminescence of dawn breaking over the metropolis, this work dramatically reveals the urban landscape in an extraordinarily intimate way, providing physical testament to the artist's statement that "this part of London is my world" (the artist interviewed by Michael Peppiat in: Tate, no. 14, Spring 1998). It is central to a grand cycle of works that depict this archetypal vista of Auerbach's London, from which comparable examples are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Mornington Crescent, 1967); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (Mornington Crescent, Early Morning, 1999); and The London Jewish Museum (Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II, 2004).

Close to the Camden studio he has worked in since taking it over from Leon Kossoff in 1954, the subject of Mornington Crescent has continued to fascinate Auerbach for over forty years. The capacious houses of the Crescent were originally constructed in the 1820s amid the fields of Camden just north of Central London, and the area has long cultural associations: the painter Walter Sickert lived there and Charles Dickens attended a school nearby. The street also encloses the great white edifice of the Camden Theatre built in 1900. To the left of the composition a tall chimney dramatically ascends into the sky, standing as a Cleopatra's Needle of industry. This totemic obelisk provides a key compositional axis to Auerbach's composition: its soaring verticality set against the receding arc of the Crescent.

While the exceptional palette of vivid colour injects the picture with an overpowering sense of warmth and vibrancy, the paint surface narrates the highly dramatic process of this work's creation. The spectator's eye is invited to roam the multi-layered facets and crevices of the slick encrusted landscape of paint and to read the history of the artist's assault of mark-making. From the risk-laden strike of a palette knife to a brush skimming and merging ridges of material together, pigment and medium have been dragged, scuffed and swiped straight through, finally resolving into a sensational and haptic unity. Indeed, Auerbach's wrestling of paint has accumulated into a spectacularly sculptural work projecting towards the viewer and precipitates an exhilarating encounter beyond the mere window of the picture plane.

Auerbach's desire to emphasize the city's "massive substance" and explore its condition of "fullness and perpetual motion" is manifest in a dogmatic working routine, tantamount to an ethical code (the artist interviewed by Richard Cork in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 83). Auerbach returns obsessively to the same views and sketches on the spot, working in the studio for up to eight hours of strenuous effort. By repeatedly accruing a rich sediment of paint before then stripping it away, he digs deeper and deeper into the essence of the subject. In this way his method is reminiscent of the landscapes of Claude Monet, such as the views of the Houses of Parliament that the French Impressionist returned to so often. However, Auerbach's obsessive translation of his environments into oil paint is less to do with capturing the atmospheric effect that was the preoccupation of the Impressionists, and more resolved to fix in material the experience of reality. Mornington Crescent, Dawn recounts actually being in this place, and thereby responds to the city as a living, breathing and ever-changing organism. Peter Ackroyd has observed: "Auerbach's artistic creativity is a simulacrum of the city's life, with his incessant revisions and accretions, with his scraping down of the surface of the board or canvas to make a fresh start" (Peter Ackroyd in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Marlborough Gallery, Frank Auerbach: Recent Works, 1994, n.p.). Mornington Crescent, Dawn is rooted in both a geographical and psychological place with the result that it is more than a representation. In the hands of Frank Auerbach Mornington Crescent becomes a gloriously tactile and profoundly affecting entity in its own right.