ABOVE: Frank Auerbach, Summer Building Site, 1952
They look like they are made from the materials of the subjects they depict—the construction sites amid the bombed-out ruins of London after the second world war. Some resemble the wall of a building, whose plaster has been blasted off, the remaining stone or concrete partially blackened by the force of an explosion and marked by the impact of shrapnel. Others seem to be carved out of the thick, wet mud of a rain-soaked derelict plot or excavation. Frank Auerbach’s paintings of London building sites are among the most important and powerful—but also visually challenging—cycle of paintings of postwar Britain, on a par with Francis Bacon’s portraits of the Pope.
Yet they have rarely been shown in public and never alongside the preparatory oil sketches and pen-and-ink drawings, as they are now at this historic exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. They offer revelations about the mysterious power of Auerbach’s painting and his place within postwar abstract art, while also conveying the feel of London after the war: a paradoxical landscape of ruins and renewal, deprivation and hope.
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