Frank Auerbach’s small corner of North London – a patch that encompasses Camden, Chalk Farm, Primrose Hill and Mornington Crescent – is as inextricable from the artist’s oeuvre as his signature application of thickly impastoed oil paint. On a scale that ranks among the largest paintings in Auerbach’s catalogue raisonné and possessing a chromatic register that is unsurpassed, the present work – Mornington Crescent of 1969 – is a breakthrough early painting that undoubtedly belongs among the most epic and ambitious of the artist’s acclaimed body of landscapes. This painting dramatically conveys a sense of London’s urban environment in an extraordinarily intimate way, providing physical test.mes nt to the artist's stat.mes nt that "this part of London is my world" (Frank Auerbach interviewed by Michael Peppiat in: Tate, no. 14, Spring 1998, online). It is central to a grand cycle of works that depict this archetypal vista of Auerbach's London, from which an impressive number are held in public collects ions worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Mornington Crescent, 1967); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (Mornington Crescent – Early Morning, 1999); Government Art collects ion, UK (Mornington Crescent, 1970); Art Gallery of Western Australia (Looking Towards Mornington Crescent Station, Night, 1972-73); Graves Gallery, Sheffield, (Looking Towards Mornington Crescent Station, Night 1973); Bristol Art Gallery and Museum (The Chimney Mornington Crescent, 1987-88); Glasgow Museums (Mornington Crescent – Winter Morning, 1989);Tate collects ion, London (Mornington Crescent – Summer Morning, 2004), and the London Jewish Museum (Mornington Crescent – Summer Morning II, 2004). Having been preserved in the same collects ion since it was first acquired from Marlborough Gallery in 1982 and exhibited only once on the occasion of the Royal Academy’s momentous retrospective of Auerbach’s oeuvre in 2001, the present work is a truly significant revelation.
COMPARABLE WORKS IN MUSEUM collects IONS
Executed in 1969, Mornington Crescent is one of the artist’s earliest and largest painterly musings on North London. Architecturally crafted via scaffold-like bars of paint, seemingly applied direct from the paint tube, the present work is a feat of painterly ingenuity. Veins of blue pigment form compositional armatures that connect striated red pools of matter with floods of pure yellow pigment; accents of green punctuate the almost grid-like panorama whilst a scraped and scumbled multi-coloured passage in the upper portion implies an almost emblazoned sunset sky. Rigid structures are thus balanced against the organic fluidity of Auerbach’s technique, a sculptural application and manipulation of paint that engenders a concert of pure colour and form to convey an utterly unique sense of place. Mornington Crescent is rooted in both a geographical and psychological sense of place; it is a deeply psychological rendering that positions the painting beyond mere representation. In this sense Mornington Crescent exists as a gloriously tactile and profoundly affecting entity, or portrait, in its own right.
“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.”
Image: © John Deakin / John Deakin Archive / Bridgeman Images
Private collects ion
Image/Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2023 / Bridgeman Images
Painted in tandem with his inimitable portrayals of the human figure, London’s topography has remained a central focus of Auerbach’s career for over half a decade, counterbalancing yet corresponding to the zoomed in focus of the studio-based recordings of his sitters. In this regard, Auerbach's dynamic landscape paintings go beyond mere landscape; they are a daring recreation, rather than representation, of a place that resonates on a profoundly personal level with the artist. Close to the Camden studio he has worked in since taking it over from Leon Kossoff in 1954, the subject of Mornington Crescent has continued to fascinate Auerbach for over forty years. The capacious houses of the Crescent were originally constructed in the 1820s amid the fields of Camden just north of Central London, and the area has long cultural associations: the painter Walter Sickert lived there, and Charles Dickens attended a school nearby. It is a place as familiar to him as the faces of his longest standing models such as JYM and Julia, and like them, it provides a means of liberating his hand from subservience to form. Orchestrated through an energetically composed concert of colour and fluid, bold brushmarks, Mornington Crescent is built upon an intuitive understanding of form, character and atmosphere that overcomes the structure of its architecture. Indeed, often the personal expression found in Auerbach’s landscapes surpasses that found in his portraits. This is because painting landscapes allows him rare opportunity to work in total isolation. Unlike portraits. Where his focus is upon the physical and emotional presence of the model with him in his studio, the landscapes offer greater personal freedom: “I think my sitters would tell you that I’m fairly abandoned when they’re there, but there’s a further degree of abandon when I’m doing my landscapes because I’m absolutely on my own,” Auerbach explained to Robert Hughes. (Frank Auerbach cited in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 170) Furthermore, because the colours they contain are those of the environment outside, painting landscapes also give him the chance to liberate his palette from the stagnant light of his dark and cluttered studio. They give voice to his colourist tendencies and encourage a greater degree of emotional invention.
Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands
Image: © Replica Handbags Images/Heritage Images/Scala, Florence
To create his landscapes Auerbach approaches his subject in a wholly different way to the way he begins his portrayal of the human form. Owing to the intense way he observes his sitters and commits these observations directly onto board or canvas – a process that takes months and somet.mes s years of in-person observation –Auerbach acknowledges the impossibility of taking this practice outside. Instead, he begins by creating deft and swift sketches in situ, then returning to his studio to create the final painting. No longer confined indoors, the artist found great abandon drawing en plein-air and the resultant paintings are largely characterised by the way in which Auerbach was able to conflate memory and his recorded impressions. Speaking about the tension between the factual and the imagined, specifically in relation to his landscape paintings, Auerbach has expanded: “There has to be a conflict of what one wants and what actually exists; so one goes out and does a drawing, and it’s always easier to do a drawing of a place nearby. Also there is a kind of intimacy and excit.mes nt and confidence that comes from inhabiting the painting and knowing exactly where everything is, and a sort of magic in conjuring up a real place, a record that is somewhere between one’s feeling… and the appearance. Well more than appearance. Substance.” (Frank Auerbach quoted in: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 160) The impact of recording the landscape outdoors, a practice he only began in the mid-1960s, further enabled Auerbach to free up his palette. The first large scale landscape paintings, of which Mornington Crescent is an outstanding example, are like an explosion of iridescent colour in contrast to a largely muted, earth-toned earlier landscapes which portrayed the urban fallout of post-war London.
Musee National d'Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris
Image: © Josse/Scala, Florence
Herein Mornington Crescent magnificently embodies Frank Auerbach’s inimitable translation of London: it is not the picturesque spectacle of tourist London, but London as a city of day-to-day work, hulking building sites, traffic and wet pavements. From the mid-1960s onwards, the vicinity close to Auerbach’s Camden studio would become the inexhaustible subject of relentless painterly transpositions. Conveying his ambition to emphasise the city’s “massive substance” and explore its condition of “fullness and perpetual motion”, Auerbach’s working method is tantamount to an ethical code in its visual manifestation of an ascetic working routine (Ibid., p. 83). Returning obsessively to the same views, Auerbach would paint in the studio for up to eight strenuous hours at a t.mes
. By repeatedly accruing a rich sediment of paint then stripping it away, his works dug deeper and deeper into the essence of his subject. More so than his figurative work, the landscapes are: “[a] tremendous effort because… the way I work means putting up a whole image, and dismantling it and putting up another whole image, which is… physically extremely strenuous, and I don’t think that I’ve ever finished a landscape without a six or seven hour bout of work. Whereas, a person or a head is a single form and it can come about in a shorter period of t.mes
” (Ibid., p. 171). Owing to the development of an increasingly graphic and fluid technique whereby the final composition, though comprising months of previous labour, emerges in the final hours of execution, the size of these paintings tested the physical limits of Auerbach’s practice. Resonating with a profound sense of place that comes with knowing every nuance and situation of his chosen subject, Mornington Crescent magnificently extols the technical brilliance and psychological immediacy for which Frank Auerbach is celebrated as one of the greatest British painters of the last century.