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拍品專文
Painted in 2004-2005, Frank Auerbach’s Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent is a majestic vision of place and feeling. In bold, dynamic strokes of golden yellow, orange, red, green and cyan, Auerbach depicts the view towards Mornington Crescent in North London. The façade of the underground station is visible to the left, with the iconic Carreras cigarette factory a row of cherry-red verticals at the heart of the painting. The titular Christmas tree appears in a spray of green, and behind it, in blue, the receding terrace of the crescent itself. A yellow car and a passerby in profile infuse the scene with life. Auerbach had lived and worked in this area for half a century by the time he made this painting, which is aglow with fondness and familiarity. Exceptionally impressive in scale at over 52 x 60 inches, it is the largest picture Auerbach made of this subject, and among the ten largest paintings in his entire seven-decade body of work. In 2024, it was included in Frank Auerbach: Starting Again at the Palazzo da Mosto in Venice: the artist’s first show there since the 42nd Biennale in 1986, when he was awarded the Golden Lion for his presentation in the British Pavilion.
Auerbach had arrived in England from Germany as a child in 1939, and rarely left London for his entire adult life. He worked in his studio off Albert Street, just behind Mornington Crescent, from 1954 until his death in 2024. ‘This part of London is my world’, he said. ‘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 N. Rosenthal, ‘Auerbach and His History’, in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001 (exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2001, p. 15). This affection is palpable in late paintings such as the present, whose bright, rapturous handling departs from the earthy impasto of his early landscapes. He first depicted the Carreras factory in 1961, and made initial large-scale paintings of the station area in the mid-1960s, revisiting the scene across the decades alongside evolving views of nearby Hampstead Heath, Primrose Hill, and the alley leading to his studio. Auerbach’s ardent, intimate approach remained constant, with a single composition often requiring months of work. He returned to a subject repeatedly as he did with his portraits, making dozens of sketches en plein air before beginning his intensive studio process. Different pictures track the changes of the seasons: a sister painting to the present work, Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning (2004) is in the collection of Tate, London.
Auerbach’s exhibition in Venice was accompanied by an essay by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and critic Hilton Als. ‘Its size is in proportion to its depth’, Als wrote of the present painting. ‘Auerbach … doesn’t use paint to depict architecture but, rather, how architecture can be used in the service of glorious paint. Oranges, yellows, greens, blues, are used not to display differences between trees and greenery and buildings, but the harmony that can be found in the scene’s various differences. While Auerbach sees the painting as a whole, he’s excited by the ways in which he sees the various parts as not whole (no building is “complete” with windows and stoop, for instance) and how best to move the work away from illustration to abstraction, which allows for more feeling, and less fixity’ (H. Als, Frank Auerbach: Starting Again, 2024, online).
This sense of ragged splendour defined Camden for Auerbach. The area is a patchwork of Georgian architecture, light industry from the 1930s and developments built after wartime bomb damage. ‘I haven’t painted [Mornington Crescent] to ally myself with some Camden Town Group, but simply because I feel London is this raw thing’, he said. ‘… This extraordinary, marvellously unpainted city where wherever somebody tries to get something going they stop halfway through, and next to it something incongruous occurs’ (F. Auerbach quoted in I. Carlisle, ‘Landscapes’, in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, ibid., p. 100). The present painting looks out from in front of the concert venue Koko—previously Camden Palace—towards the arched façade of Mornington Crescent station, built in 1907. The art deco Carreras factory was built in 1928, and its distinctive Egyptian-style ornamentation restored upon its conversion to offices in the 1990s. The Christmas tree was erected by the local authority in late November 2004, interacting temporarily with the Victorian statue of Richard Cobden, which is just out of frame to the right. Cobden was the father-in-law of the painter Walter Sickert, who—as Auerbach was well aware—had lived at 36 Mornington Crescent.
To make his landscapes, Auerbach made up to two hundred drawings in-situ before the painting began, feeling out its contours and structure. Countless scrapings-back and reworkings of the canvas followed over a period of months, with the picture typically completed in one final, monumental sitting. Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent exemplifies the extraordinary immediacy Auerbach was able to achieve. The picture sings with energy and colour, born of a lifetime of accrued knowledge and unflagging devotion. ‘It is the architecture that gives his paintings such authority’, said the artist’s friend, Lucian Freud. ‘They dominate their given space: the space always the size of the idea, while the composition is as right as walking down the street. The mastery of these compositions is such that in spite of their often precarious balance, like a waiter pretending to slip while carrying a huge pile of plates, the structure never falters. It is the viewer who has to hold tight’ (L. Freud, ‘Frank Auerbach’s Paintings’, in Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery, London 1995, p. 5).
Auerbach had arrived in England from Germany as a child in 1939, and rarely left London for his entire adult life. He worked in his studio off Albert Street, just behind Mornington Crescent, from 1954 until his death in 2024. ‘This part of London is my world’, he said. ‘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 N. Rosenthal, ‘Auerbach and His History’, in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001 (exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2001, p. 15). This affection is palpable in late paintings such as the present, whose bright, rapturous handling departs from the earthy impasto of his early landscapes. He first depicted the Carreras factory in 1961, and made initial large-scale paintings of the station area in the mid-1960s, revisiting the scene across the decades alongside evolving views of nearby Hampstead Heath, Primrose Hill, and the alley leading to his studio. Auerbach’s ardent, intimate approach remained constant, with a single composition often requiring months of work. He returned to a subject repeatedly as he did with his portraits, making dozens of sketches en plein air before beginning his intensive studio process. Different pictures track the changes of the seasons: a sister painting to the present work, Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning (2004) is in the collection of Tate, London.
Auerbach’s exhibition in Venice was accompanied by an essay by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and critic Hilton Als. ‘Its size is in proportion to its depth’, Als wrote of the present painting. ‘Auerbach … doesn’t use paint to depict architecture but, rather, how architecture can be used in the service of glorious paint. Oranges, yellows, greens, blues, are used not to display differences between trees and greenery and buildings, but the harmony that can be found in the scene’s various differences. While Auerbach sees the painting as a whole, he’s excited by the ways in which he sees the various parts as not whole (no building is “complete” with windows and stoop, for instance) and how best to move the work away from illustration to abstraction, which allows for more feeling, and less fixity’ (H. Als, Frank Auerbach: Starting Again, 2024, online).
This sense of ragged splendour defined Camden for Auerbach. The area is a patchwork of Georgian architecture, light industry from the 1930s and developments built after wartime bomb damage. ‘I haven’t painted [Mornington Crescent] to ally myself with some Camden Town Group, but simply because I feel London is this raw thing’, he said. ‘… This extraordinary, marvellously unpainted city where wherever somebody tries to get something going they stop halfway through, and next to it something incongruous occurs’ (F. Auerbach quoted in I. Carlisle, ‘Landscapes’, in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, ibid., p. 100). The present painting looks out from in front of the concert venue Koko—previously Camden Palace—towards the arched façade of Mornington Crescent station, built in 1907. The art deco Carreras factory was built in 1928, and its distinctive Egyptian-style ornamentation restored upon its conversion to offices in the 1990s. The Christmas tree was erected by the local authority in late November 2004, interacting temporarily with the Victorian statue of Richard Cobden, which is just out of frame to the right. Cobden was the father-in-law of the painter Walter Sickert, who—as Auerbach was well aware—had lived at 36 Mornington Crescent.
To make his landscapes, Auerbach made up to two hundred drawings in-situ before the painting began, feeling out its contours and structure. Countless scrapings-back and reworkings of the canvas followed over a period of months, with the picture typically completed in one final, monumental sitting. Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent exemplifies the extraordinary immediacy Auerbach was able to achieve. The picture sings with energy and colour, born of a lifetime of accrued knowledge and unflagging devotion. ‘It is the architecture that gives his paintings such authority’, said the artist’s friend, Lucian Freud. ‘They dominate their given space: the space always the size of the idea, while the composition is as right as walking down the street. The mastery of these compositions is such that in spite of their often precarious balance, like a waiter pretending to slip while carrying a huge pile of plates, the structure never falters. It is the viewer who has to hold tight’ (L. Freud, ‘Frank Auerbach’s Paintings’, in Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery, London 1995, p. 5).