Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Gallery, New York

Mr and Mrs David Kangesser, Ohio (acquired from the above in 1982)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Los Angeles, L.A. Louver Gallery, This Knot of Life: Paintings and Drawings by British Artists, 1979, p. 9, illustrated in colour 

New York, Marlborough Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 1982, p. 28, no. 18, illustrated in colour

Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art of Collecting Modern Art: An Exhibition of Works from the Collections of Clevelanders, 1986, n.p., no. 47, illustrated 

Venice, British Pavillion, XLII Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1977-1985, 1986, pp. 32-33, no. 14, illustrated in colour

Hamburg, Kunstverein; and Essen, Museum Folkwang, Frank Auerbach, 1986-87, pp. 46-47, no. 14, illustrated in colour

Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Frank Auerbach: Retrospectiva, 1987, pp. 42-43, no. 14, illustrated in colour 

Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 100, no. 61, illustrated in colour

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, pp. 104 and 283, no. 401, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairy accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some hairline drying cracks in places, most notably in the yellow pigment towards the top right corner. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals some drips of the artist's medium to the lower left of the composition that fluoresce lightly.
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"The magnificence of space, the canopy of overhanging branches moving wildly in the wind, and the two doughty figures are terrific, but perhaps it is the glowing, deep colours and interlocking forms that convey pleasure and, indeed, Auerbach's general state of being in 1978." 

Catherine Lampert, 2016.

A strikingly vivid depiction of one of Frank Auerbach’s most beloved subjects, Primrose Hill from 1978 is an exuberant display from the artist’s corpus of landscape paintings. Throughout his career, Auerbach has chosen to paint only a select few landscapes around his home, and none more important than his treasured Primrose Hill. First documenting the rolling parkland near his studio in Mornington Crescent in 1954, the artist recorded the changing appearance and shifting seasons of the panoramic North London location for more than three decades. With fierce zig-zags of deep crimson cutting through vibrant autumnal impastos, Primrose Hill exhibits the visceral brushwork and vibrant fields of colour so intrinsic to Auerbach's most acclaimed landscape works. Shown in one of the artist’s key exhibitions – the British Pavillion at the XLII Venice Biennale in 1986, which toured to the Kunstverein, Hamburg and the Museum Folkwang, Essen between 1986-87 - the work is a beautiful example of this unparalleled series of paintings and has been housed in the same private collection for over three decades. The sister painting is currently on view at the artist’s major retrospective at Tate Britain, London, and is discussed in Jake Auerbach’s new film Frank. Along with Catherine Lampert’s recent publication on the artist’s work, this landmark exhibition heralds Frank Auerbach as one of the most relevant and dynamic painters working today.

Fields of canary yellow, deep orange, and forest green emerge from a dense lattice of fierce jagged brushstrokes and vigorous swirls. The chromatic intensity of the present work – and the other two in this group – stands in contrast to the artist’s largely muted, earth-toned early practice and exhibits a joy and liveliness that is utterly unique. A large crimson form outlined with thick strokes of dark green governs the centre of the composition. Below this, two passing figures stroll down the hill on a pink footpath – fleeting forms that seem to gradually succumb to the heady mass of viscous impasto. The heavy topography of paint is at once inviting and hostile in its fluid abstraction of form. Rendered with such pulpy, palpable oils, one is almost tempted to walk into this utterly enthralling scene.

In the mid-1970s, Auerbach’s paintings of this park changed. Where in former works the artist explored space and colour, the paintings from 1973 onwards display an emphasis on the structural power of a central focal point; a compositional feature that takes its precedent from a visit to Tretire in Herefordshire that same year. Here the artist was struck by the beauty and arresting presence of a single tree that stood alone in the sloping landscape. In the present work this is evident in the umbrella of large trees dominating the composition.

These large, vigorous depictions of Primrose Hill are the result of a long and laborious process. The sheer volume and viscosity of paint used in these considerable landscape paintings meant that any attempt at working outdoors would be impossible. Instead, the artist would prepare several sketches in situ, of which at least one was made earlier that day as a way of gathering information. Back in his studio he then began an intense process of continual erasure in order to arrive at the final painting. Famous for his intensely worked canvases, Auerbach ruthlessly scraped off the toiled surface of works that failed to please his ever-critical eye and began again the next day. In 1978 he said, about the Primrose Hill pictures, “I visualise a piece of recalcitrant fact and I have a hope of an unvisualised picture which will surprise me arising out of my confrontation with this fact” (Frank Auerbach quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain, (and travelling), Frank Auerbach, 2015, p.143). These large heavily worked paintings demanded extreme physical exertion. As the artist explained: “The bigger pictures are an actual physical effort, they mean keeping a degree of physical tension and activity going for weeks and weeks on end. One just hopes the thing is finished, so that one can slightly relax and start on something where one proceeds in a more manageable way, but one turns it to the wall, hopes it’s finished, but one looks at it the next day and it just isn’t at all! And one has to break it up and make a further effort, that’s the way I work: I finish pictures again and again several times a day until finally it seems to me that it’s got a little something... I actually change a painting that is purple and blue with most of the weight at the bottom, into a painting that might be orange and green and yellow with three centres of activity. It really changes because the essence isn’t in the surface look but somehow in the imaginative grasp one has of the activity of one’s material” (Ibid.). Auerbach’s method of relentless re-revaluation eventually reaches a point of distillation; a poignant conflation of what he has seen and experienced.  

For Auerbach, Camden – a pocket in North London that he has called home for most of his life – is both an endless source of inspiration, as well as one of his greatest loves. Describing his treasured neighbourhood, the artist proclaimed: “This part of London is my world. I've been wandering around these streets for so long that I have become attached to them, and as fond of them as people are of their pets” (Frank Auerbach quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, 2001, p. 15). Primrose Hill, in particular, was for many years a cherished Arcadian escape from the grime and noise of the hectic metropolis. Its stimulating pastoral landscape and invigorating visual effect is nowhere more perfectly captured than in the warm glow of the present work.