.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
With clear blue skies and sundrenched buildings, Tower Blocks Hampstead Road is a glittering example of Frank Auerbach’s late landscape paintings. The lively brushwork of orange-yellow tower block, surrendering to the open sky, gives a snapshot of the summer’s day in north-west London. Auerbach's love of London – particularly of the area around the Mornington Crescent studio he occupied since 1954 – was as uncompromising and obsessive as his approach to portraiture. He wrestled for months or even years with repeated compositions of the same subject, making sketches en plein air before striving to recreate his reality on canvas. With the paradox of rehearsed spontaneity, Auerbach's portrayal of Hampstead Road appears effortlessly achieved, not simply from sketches of this particular scene, but as the culmination of decades spent living and observing the city.
'This part of London is my world', Auerbach declares with characteristic intensity, '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' (F. Auerbach, quoted in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001, p. 15). This profound attachment, forged over nearly seven decades in his Mornington Crescent studio, infuses every brushstroke with the weight of lived experience. The artist who arrived in England as an eight-year-old refugee on the Kindertransport, fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, would find in London's war-torn and regenerating streets not just a home but an inexhaustible subject – a city that demanded to be painted anew. In the early 1950s, Auerbach studied under David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic. There he was taught, not the importance of accuracy and precision, but rather the processes involved in conveying the dynamic energy of a subject: described by Bomberg as ‘the spirit of the mass’. This finds perfect embodiment in Auerbach's tactile approach: each loaded brushstroke carries not just pigment but intention, emotion, and the physical trace of the artist's engagement with his subject.
What distinguishes Tower Blocks, Hampstead Road II is its marriage of painterly exuberance with urban vitality. The tower blocks – likely part of the Ampthill Square Estate built in the 1960s – represent the fulfilled promise of those building sites Auerbach had obsessively documented in the 1950s. Where once there were excavations and scaffolding, precipices and crags of bombed-out London, now stand the completed monuments to postwar reconstruction. Yet Auerbach's treatment of these structures refuses nostalgia; instead, he captures them as living elements of a twenty-first century metropolis, alive with contemporary energy. The foregrounding of the 'RED ROUTE' sign – marking Hampstead Road as one of London's arterial traffic routes – anchors the composition in the present moment. This is no romantic vision of urban decay or regeneration, but a clear-eyed celebration of the city as it exists now: bustling, congested, vibrantly alive. The visual hubbub of traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, creates a rhythm of movement that courses through the entire canvas, transforming static architecture into dynamic experience.
Auerbach describes his approach to portraiture as ‘somewhere between one’s feelings about the facts and the appearance. Well, more than appearance – substance’ (F. Auerbach, 1983, quoted in R. Cork, Face to Face: Interviews with Artists, London, 2015, p. 68). Auerbach’s landscapes even more than his portraits capture a deeply personal portrait of place. Street signs, traffic markings, and architectural elements form a complex matrix of angles and intersections, while Auerbach's characteristic impasto technique transforms these rigid urban geometries into something organic, almost breathing. This is London not as it appears to the casual observer, but as it exists in the accumulated experience of decades of walking, watching, and painting these same streets. The painting becomes a palimpsest of memory and immediate sensation, where past and present coexist in the thickness of paint itself. As Robert Hughes explains, ‘His work by now took just as long to finish, not because of slow addition of layers, but because of ceaseless scraping off and beginning again. Picasso’s dictum that “a painting is the sum of its destructions” was, and still is, literally true of Auerbach, and nowhere more so than in his landscapes. A painting might take months but it would have to stay liquid right through to the end, which meant repainting it entirely every session’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 2000, pp. 170-171).
The work stands as a culmination of Auerbach's lifelong project to paint 'the London I knew and saw' – a London that, as he recognised, 'hadn't really been painted.' From the building sites of the 1950s to the completed tower blocks of the twenty-first century, Auerbach traced the city's transformation while remaining true to his fundamental vision. Tower Blocks, Hampstead Road II thus emerges as both document and devotion, a work that captures not just the appearance of a particular stretch of north London road, but its essential spirit – that ineffable quality of place that can only be conveyed through the total commitment of an artist who has made these streets his world. In its juxtaposition of tactile intensity and chromatic exuberance, topographical clarity and painterly abandon, the work stands as a triumphant expression of Auerbach's singular vision: a London perpetually renewed through the transformative power of paint.
'This part of London is my world', Auerbach declares with characteristic intensity, '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' (F. Auerbach, quoted in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001, p. 15). This profound attachment, forged over nearly seven decades in his Mornington Crescent studio, infuses every brushstroke with the weight of lived experience. The artist who arrived in England as an eight-year-old refugee on the Kindertransport, fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, would find in London's war-torn and regenerating streets not just a home but an inexhaustible subject – a city that demanded to be painted anew. In the early 1950s, Auerbach studied under David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic. There he was taught, not the importance of accuracy and precision, but rather the processes involved in conveying the dynamic energy of a subject: described by Bomberg as ‘the spirit of the mass’. This finds perfect embodiment in Auerbach's tactile approach: each loaded brushstroke carries not just pigment but intention, emotion, and the physical trace of the artist's engagement with his subject.
What distinguishes Tower Blocks, Hampstead Road II is its marriage of painterly exuberance with urban vitality. The tower blocks – likely part of the Ampthill Square Estate built in the 1960s – represent the fulfilled promise of those building sites Auerbach had obsessively documented in the 1950s. Where once there were excavations and scaffolding, precipices and crags of bombed-out London, now stand the completed monuments to postwar reconstruction. Yet Auerbach's treatment of these structures refuses nostalgia; instead, he captures them as living elements of a twenty-first century metropolis, alive with contemporary energy. The foregrounding of the 'RED ROUTE' sign – marking Hampstead Road as one of London's arterial traffic routes – anchors the composition in the present moment. This is no romantic vision of urban decay or regeneration, but a clear-eyed celebration of the city as it exists now: bustling, congested, vibrantly alive. The visual hubbub of traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, creates a rhythm of movement that courses through the entire canvas, transforming static architecture into dynamic experience.
Auerbach describes his approach to portraiture as ‘somewhere between one’s feelings about the facts and the appearance. Well, more than appearance – substance’ (F. Auerbach, 1983, quoted in R. Cork, Face to Face: Interviews with Artists, London, 2015, p. 68). Auerbach’s landscapes even more than his portraits capture a deeply personal portrait of place. Street signs, traffic markings, and architectural elements form a complex matrix of angles and intersections, while Auerbach's characteristic impasto technique transforms these rigid urban geometries into something organic, almost breathing. This is London not as it appears to the casual observer, but as it exists in the accumulated experience of decades of walking, watching, and painting these same streets. The painting becomes a palimpsest of memory and immediate sensation, where past and present coexist in the thickness of paint itself. As Robert Hughes explains, ‘His work by now took just as long to finish, not because of slow addition of layers, but because of ceaseless scraping off and beginning again. Picasso’s dictum that “a painting is the sum of its destructions” was, and still is, literally true of Auerbach, and nowhere more so than in his landscapes. A painting might take months but it would have to stay liquid right through to the end, which meant repainting it entirely every session’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 2000, pp. 170-171).
The work stands as a culmination of Auerbach's lifelong project to paint 'the London I knew and saw' – a London that, as he recognised, 'hadn't really been painted.' From the building sites of the 1950s to the completed tower blocks of the twenty-first century, Auerbach traced the city's transformation while remaining true to his fundamental vision. Tower Blocks, Hampstead Road II thus emerges as both document and devotion, a work that captures not just the appearance of a particular stretch of north London road, but its essential spirit – that ineffable quality of place that can only be conveyed through the total commitment of an artist who has made these streets his world. In its juxtaposition of tactile intensity and chromatic exuberance, topographical clarity and painterly abandon, the work stands as a triumphant expression of Auerbach's singular vision: a London perpetually renewed through the transformative power of paint.