Auerbach’s art

It’s the thickness of the paint that strikes you when confronted with a Frank Auerbach painting for the first time. Great splodges, ridges, swirls and dollops of oils that create a raised, textured landscape that almost takes over from the subject that’s depicted.

Words Pamela Buxton

Auerbach’s 14 paintings of London building sites from 1952-62 have been brought together for the first time in an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. It’s a show that‘s revealing as both a development of Auerbach’s art and as a highly personal visual account of a pivotal moment in London’s built history – the re-building of the capital after the devastation of the Blitz.

These were exciting times.  Bomb sites that had laid fallow for years became building sites, and a new, confident architecture emerged. For Auerbach, who’d come to Britain from Berlin as a kindertransport child, these construction sites were exhilarating, a “marvellous landscape with precipices and mountains and crags full of drama.”

He was captivated, and spent a decade sketching emerging buildings such as the Shell Building, Time Life Building and John Lewis on Oxford Street, turning these into powerful, increasingly abstract oil paintings. His first, Summer Building Site, is a relatively literal depiction but he swiftly adopted a thickly over-painted approach that causes the structures depicted to recede almost entirely. It was an attempt, he says, to find a ‘secret internal geometry’.

This is elusive in his darkest paintings, but these are the ones I am drawn to the most.  Building Site near St Paul’s, Winter is a particularly dark work, with the shape of the structure receding into the gloom, animated by the blur of two blue figures and a red digger. Hungerford Bridge is even more funereal, with the shadowy figures of the workmen gradually making themselves clearer the longer you look.

Paintings such as his acclaimed Shell Building Site from the Thames are clearer depictions of the sheer scale of the construction excavations. What a contrast with the meticulously detailed work of Piranesi, who two hundred years earlier was entranced by the drama of architecture with very different results. Piranesi’s The Smoking Fire is in a selection of paintings with architectural imagery shown in an adjacent gallery. But this powerful Auerbach show is very much the main event. Where better to bring this collection, gathered from as far afield as Australia, back together than in London, so close to the very buildings that grew out of the monumental construction sites that Auerbach depicted.

Frank Auerbach:London Building Sites 1952-62, until January 17, Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, London www.courtauld.ac.uk