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Lot Essay
Frank Auerbach is a painter of the familiar. Be it in terms of the models he chooses, many of whom he has known for decades, the Old Masters that he takes as occasional inspiration or that great surrounding muse, London, it is to that which he knows that he continues to turn his ever-investigative eye. And committing it to canvas in his pulpy, palpable oils, he brings out a quality that is at once familiar and fresh, strikingly vivid. In Primrose Hill Study-- Autumn Evening, painted in 1979, this is clear in the electric palette with which the scene has been rendered. Some of the flashes of colour burn incandescent on the canvas. And they have been applied with a lushness, a thickness, and a sweeping gesturality that hints at the artist's own intense involvement with the scene.
Auerbach's more pastoral landscapes underwent a change when, the year before Primrose Hill Study-- Autumn Evening was painted, the artist visited Tretire in Herefordshire. There, he was struck by the monumental power of a single tree in a landscape, and took this knowledge back with him, using it to great effect in his paintings of Primrose Hill in particular. Here too, under a sky shot through with a twilight blue, such a tree is evident, filled with a strange potency, its gnarled form visceral, disrupting the sense that Primrose Hill is an isolated Arcadia. For Primrose Hill, a strange pool of rustic tranquillity within the hurly burly of the metropolis, has long been a source of particular fascination to Auerbach and had emerged as a theme much earlier in his work, when he was also focussing on the bomb damage and reconstruction that littered so much of London. Even in Primrose Hill Study-- Autumn Evening, painted decades later, by choosing to depict Primrose Hill, Auerbach exploits the area's peculiar status, creating a strange tension. For this is a pastoral oasis within the hurly-burly of the bustling metropolis, a pool of calm and of green. In Primrose Hill Study-- Autumn Evening, Auerbach manages to convey a sense of space, a sense of freedom, but at the same time hints too, through the vivid and expressionistic movements and palette, at the slightly confected nature of the quasi-bucolic scene that he has depicted.
Auerbach's more pastoral landscapes underwent a change when, the year before Primrose Hill Study-- Autumn Evening was painted, the artist visited Tretire in Herefordshire. There, he was struck by the monumental power of a single tree in a landscape, and took this knowledge back with him, using it to great effect in his paintings of Primrose Hill in particular. Here too, under a sky shot through with a twilight blue, such a tree is evident, filled with a strange potency, its gnarled form visceral, disrupting the sense that Primrose Hill is an isolated Arcadia. For Primrose Hill, a strange pool of rustic tranquillity within the hurly burly of the metropolis, has long been a source of particular fascination to Auerbach and had emerged as a theme much earlier in his work, when he was also focussing on the bomb damage and reconstruction that littered so much of London. Even in Primrose Hill Study-- Autumn Evening, painted decades later, by choosing to depict Primrose Hill, Auerbach exploits the area's peculiar status, creating a strange tension. For this is a pastoral oasis within the hurly-burly of the bustling metropolis, a pool of calm and of green. In Primrose Hill Study-- Autumn Evening, Auerbach manages to convey a sense of space, a sense of freedom, but at the same time hints too, through the vivid and expressionistic movements and palette, at the slightly confected nature of the quasi-bucolic scene that he has depicted.