Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Fine Art, London

Acquired by the mother of the present owner in 1978

Thence by descent to the present owner

Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, n.p., no. 60, illustrated in colour

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 281, no. 389, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is fine craquelure in places to the red pigment in the lower right quadrant. Close inspection reveals some splashes of artist's medium in places. Examination under ultra violet light reveals two spots of fluorescence to the top right corner, which appear to be original.
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Up until the late 1970s Frank Auerbach’s celebrated landscapes were permeated by two central motifs: his jubilant renderings of Primrose Hill and his chaotic, architectonic illustrations of the corner between Camden High Street and Mornington Crescent. In 1977 Auerbach added a third theme to his illustrious repertoire, the exterior of his studio, which he painted in earnest until 1994, creating nineteen paintings and innumerable sketches on the motif. The second To The Studios work ever made, the present piece is a superlative example of this pivotal subject. Architecturally crafted with exclamatory swathes of brick-red, orange and crimson pigment, To the Studios is a chromatic explosion of vibrant, autumnal colour – the palette of his most influential early depictions of this seminal motif. Attesting to its importance within Auerbach’s oeuvre, two other To the Studios paintings are held in the eminent Tate Collection. Furthermore, this painting has remained in the Konows’ collection for over thirty-five years and was bought on the recommendation of Francis Bacon who held Auerbach in the highest esteem. 

The geographical surroundings of North London are as synonymous with Auerbach’s oeuvre as his signature dense application of viscous pigment. Since moving to Mornington Crescent in 1952, Auerbach has seldom left this small pocket of the city, finding in its rundown vistas a specifically engaging and vibrant chaos. As the artist describes “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 where whenever somebody tries to get something they stop halfway through, and next to it something incongruous occurs… this higgledy-piggledy mess of a city” (Frank Auerbach quoted in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 162). Indeed, much of the raw, authentic character that so captivated Auerbach is prevalent in his early paintings of North London. These cityscapes became, in effect, construction sites where angular orthogonals crash and collide in a visual melee of form and colour, where gabled roofs appear tangled and mired in thick gluttonous paint.

By the mid-1970s, however, Auerbach proclaimed that he was “tired of these angular geometries which I’ve dealt with and tried to supersede… I’ve drawn the clouds and there are certain massy, turning, pillowy, featherbeddy convultions of earth and sky that have seemed to me a stimulus to try and get an image that extends my repertoire” (Frank Auerbach in conversation with Catherine Lambert in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery (and travelling), Frank Auerbach, 1978, p. 11). The stimulus that he needed was his studio. The studio in question was one in a small cluster by Mornington Crescent, in Camden Town, which he took over from his great friend and artist Leon Kossoff in 1954. It was in 1977, when Auerbach almost lost his studio (a crisis averted by eventually buying it), that he happened upon the subject of the present painting: ‘To the Studios’ were the words emblazoned on the wall at the top of the stairs that led down to his small workspace. Reiterating quite how important it was to paint a place that was as meaningful to him as his studio, Auerbach explained: “there is a kind of intimacy and excitement and confidence that comes from inhabiting the painting and knowing exactly where everything is, and a sort of magic in conjuring up a real place, a record that is somewhere between one’s feeling… and the appearance” (Frank Auerbach quoted in: op. cit., p. 160).

In To the Studios the angular geometry of a clearly divided sky and ground is almost blurred and supressed; a rhythmic unity between earth and sky is innovatively enacted by charging the scene with the autumnal hues of oranges, ochres and fiery Spanish reds which suggest the rich density of the urban landscape. In its remarkable intricacies of scale, composition and colour, the present work is set apart from other depictions of this scene. Here the soft crumbling lines of the city are transformed into the viscosity of oil paint, its succulent stickiness, its mounding and glazing all reconstitute the heady mass of this small neighbourhood, whilst space and form materialise from an impenetrable lattice of brushstrokes, swirls, and dense patches of colour. To create his extraordinary cityscapes Auerbach had to radically alter his studio practice. His answer was to create deft sketches in situ and then return to his studio to create the final painting. The landscapes were a "tremendous physical effort because... the way I work means putting up a whole image, and dismantling it and putting up another whole image, which is... physically extremely strenuous, and I don't think I've ever finished a landscape without a six or seven hour bout of work. Whereas a person or a head is a single form and it can come about in a shorter period of time" (Frank Auerbach in conversation with Catherine Lambert in: ibid., p. 13).

As evidenced in the compositional ambition of To the Studios, its rich, tactile application of oil paint, and its North London subject matter Auerbach was profoundly inspired by Walter Sickert’s celebrated, charged cityscapes. Meanwhile, in terms of the artist’s use of impasto, hints of geometry and his opulent autumnal palette, To the Studio’s owes much to his teacher David Bomberg’s landscapes of Palestine. Speaking modestly about how he related to art history, Auerbach remarked: “one hopes somehow to make something that has a similar degree of individuality, independence, fullness and perpetual motion to these pictures. But actually one hopes… to surpass them” (Frank Auerbach quoted in: op. cit., p. 8). Indeed, in To the Studios Auerbach wholly surpasses his preceding cityscapes, taking the genre of landscape painting in an entirely novel and unprecedented direction.