Seeing London through Frank Auerbach’s eyes

Around the time of the Frank Auerbach retrospective at Tate Britain in 2015, I conceived a plan for a walk themed around the artist’s London haunts. The obvious itinerary, taking in the sites he repeatedly depicted over the decades, would form an almost uninterrupted curve across a map of the city’s inner-northwest, arcing from the top of Primrose Hill, through Park Village East and past Mornington Crescent tube, then down Hampstead Road to University College Hospital, the juncture at which the N-prefix disappears from postcodes and street signs and central London begins. The journey would end in an abrupt right-angle, shooting off towards St Pancras station and coming to a dead halt at the steps leading down from its dramatic forecourt, remarkably unchanged since Auerbach painted it in 1978–79.

You could take it further, for a bit more biographical depth: down to Soho; to the South Bank, where the painter worked as a barman during the Festival of Britain (‘serving beer and sweeping up below a Pasmore mural’, William Feaver writes in his biography of Lucian Freud); and on to the Shell Centre, which he captured more than once as a building site in 1959. Or further into Southwark, where Auerbach and Leon Kossoff transformed their art by studying under David Bomberg at the former Borough Polytechnic in the late 1940s. It wouldn’t be much of a walking tour, the focal points of the artist’s gaze being busy traffic junctions and through-roads. And, in any case, I never went: looking at the paintings seemed enough.

Spring Morning, Primrose Hill Study (1974–75), Frank Auerbach. Private collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates, London; courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects; © Frank Auerbach

The plan was forgotten until I visited a superb show of Auerbach’s ‘London Portraits’ staged by Offer Waterman and Francis Outred in early October. The exhibition (until 7 December) is a reminder that the painter’s urban landscapes are among the most exciting works of art produced in Britain in the 20th century. Some of them, with hindsight, might appear to reflect contemporary fashion. The building-site pictures of the 1950s are among the murkiest visions ever put to canvas. The comparatively explosive palette Auerbach deployed in the ’60s could be seen to be in tune with the more cerebral end of British Pop art. Yet for all the stylistic hallmarks that distinguish separate periods of his career – the relief-like impasto of the early work, the iconoclastic zigzags that appear in otherwise harmonious compositions from the 1960s and ’70s – the vision remains consistent and fundamentally undramatic.

The paintings sometimes have only a loose visual association with what they purport to show: Building Site, Earls Court Road: Winter (1953), a breakthrough early work so tenebrous as to be almost completely inscrutable, might leave you scratching your head as to the geographical specificity of the title; many of his Mornington Crescent views might be identifiable only because our memory of that street, seen from the main road, is so deeply mediated by Auerbach’s many renderings of it.

Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law III, Summer Morning (1966), Frank Auerbach. Private collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates, London; courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects; © Frank Auerbach

Yet in the rare interviews he gave, Auerbach provided a perfect rationale. ‘[There is] a sort of magic in conjuring up a real place,’ he told Richard Cork in 1983. ‘A record of it that is somewhere between one’s feeling about the facts and the appearance. Well, more than appearance – substance.’ Take any suite of his views of a particular location, from any decade, and you start to see how masterfully he navigated these straits and the tension between ‘objective’ record and subjective perception.

His Primrose Hill pictures, for instance, are recognisable as such solely on account of the spindly, twig-like stroke he deployed as a stand-in for the distant Post Office Tower. Yet a random selection, swayed by personal preference, might take in Primrose Hill: Spring Sunshine (1961–64); Primrose Hill (1967–68), a late summer storm of a painting carved up by jagged bolts of blue, red and black; and the Barber Institute’s impressionistic Primrose Hill – Winter (1981–82) – the last perhaps my own favourite. Having looked at any of these, a visit to the park will never again be just a simple stroll with a nice view.

Primrose Hill – Winter (1981–82), Frank Auerbach. Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

It is of course reductive to think of Auerbach only as a painter of his adopted home city. Even by comparison to his portraits – notoriously long in gestation, according to some of his sitters – the landscapes took an immense amount of time to realise, and constitute a relatively small proportion of his total output. Yet it seems likely that he will be best remembered first as a chronicler of the capital’s post-Blitz reconstruction, then of incremental changes in the city, within an ever tighter radius of his Camden studio.

That city has changed since the millennium, in some parts dramatically. It’s interesting to wonder what the skyline of a contemporary view from Primrose Hill would resemble, in Auerbach’s hands, or how many of the locations I identified in 2015 still exist in a recognisable sense. Perhaps, before it’s too late for a last glimpse of Auerbach’s London in the actuality, it might finally be time to take that walk.

Albert Street II (2010), Frank Auerbach. Private collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates, London; courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects; © Frank Auerbach