.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The Studios under Snow (1991) is a luminous painting of one of Frank Auerbach’s most beloved subjects: the alley that leads to his Camden studio. Auerbach has worked there since 1954. This view became one of his favoured landscape motifs from 1977 onwards, joining the scenes of Primrose Hill and Mornington Crescent he had been painting since the 1960s. Here, in the dynamic impasto that defines his work of the period, Auerbach depicts the alley in snowbound splendour. Lush swathes of white lay down the snow, zigzagging among the vivid lines of the buildings. To the left is a flight of steps, which lead to a semi-detached Victorian villa. Two green ellipses to the right indicate a bicycle leant against a gate. Above it, stacked in bold strokes of red, ochre and sky blue, is a block of maisonettes. The studio entrance lies at the picture’s centre. Its warm tones offer a welcoming glow beneath the chill blue-green of the sky. In a swathe of red, scored with the end of a brush into the thick pigment, is a sign: ‘to the studios.’ The painting was previously in the collection of Ruth Bromberg, who sat for numerous portraits by Auerbach between 1991 and 2008. It was included on the back cover of William Feaver’s 2009 catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.
Auerbach fled Germany at the age of eight in 1932, and has rarely left London for his entire adult life. He has studied his environment with devoted attention, charting its constancy and change across seven decades of work. In the years after the Second World War, as building sites sprung up throughout the city, he forged a new painterly language to convey its drama. Surfaces of thick paint and linear structure made for analogues of broken earth, exposed scaffolding and busy human activity. His methods were informed by his teacher David Bomberg, under whom he studied in night classes at Borough Polytechnic during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bomberg exhorted his students to capture ‘the spirit in the mass.’ While Auerbach—as in the present work—would go on to paint more freely and with a brighter palette, he always retained this intense and intimate approach, seeking to grasp the essence of his subjects through repeated encounters and rich, layered mark-making.
‘I have a strong sense that London hasn’t been properly painted’, Auerbach once said. ‘... Monet on the Thames, Derain at the docks; bits and pieces, rather spottily, by Whistler and Sickert. But it has always cried out to be painted, and not been.’ Channelling the influence of these forebears—particularly Monet, who similarly returned to his subjects throughout the seasons—he has chronicled the changing light, weather and skyline of his locale over periods of weeks, months and years. ‘I think my sitters would tell you that I’m usually fairly abandoned when they’re there,’ he has observed, ‘but there’s a further degree of abandon when I’m doing the landscapes because I’m absolutely on my own’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, pp. 84, 170). The Studios under Snow, picturing his haven in the heart of North London, captures the tranquillity and freedom he has found there.
Auerbach fled Germany at the age of eight in 1932, and has rarely left London for his entire adult life. He has studied his environment with devoted attention, charting its constancy and change across seven decades of work. In the years after the Second World War, as building sites sprung up throughout the city, he forged a new painterly language to convey its drama. Surfaces of thick paint and linear structure made for analogues of broken earth, exposed scaffolding and busy human activity. His methods were informed by his teacher David Bomberg, under whom he studied in night classes at Borough Polytechnic during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bomberg exhorted his students to capture ‘the spirit in the mass.’ While Auerbach—as in the present work—would go on to paint more freely and with a brighter palette, he always retained this intense and intimate approach, seeking to grasp the essence of his subjects through repeated encounters and rich, layered mark-making.
‘I have a strong sense that London hasn’t been properly painted’, Auerbach once said. ‘... Monet on the Thames, Derain at the docks; bits and pieces, rather spottily, by Whistler and Sickert. But it has always cried out to be painted, and not been.’ Channelling the influence of these forebears—particularly Monet, who similarly returned to his subjects throughout the seasons—he has chronicled the changing light, weather and skyline of his locale over periods of weeks, months and years. ‘I think my sitters would tell you that I’m usually fairly abandoned when they’re there,’ he has observed, ‘but there’s a further degree of abandon when I’m doing the landscapes because I’m absolutely on my own’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, pp. 84, 170). The Studios under Snow, picturing his haven in the heart of North London, captures the tranquillity and freedom he has found there.