TEACHERS’ RESOURCE FRANK AUERBACH LONDON BUILDING SITES 1952–62 CONTENTS

WELCOME 1: INTRODUCTION TO THE EXHIBITION KS3+ 2: REBUILDING LONDON KS3+ 3: FRANK AUERBACH: AN INTERVIEW KS3+ 4: AUERBACH AND THE WOUNDED CITY KS5+ 5: A SECRET GEOMETRY KS5+ 6: REGARDE! KS3+ 7: IMAGE RESOURCE CD KS2+ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Teachers Resource packs are intended for use by secondary schools, colleges and teachers of all subjects for their own research. Each essay is marked with links to subject area’s and suggested Key Stage levels. We hope teachers and educators will use these resources to plan lessons, help organise visits to the gallery or gain further insight into the exhibition’s at The Courtauld Gallery.

Curriculum links are marked on each Cover: Frank Auerbach essay in blue. Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (detail) 1962 To book a visit to the gallery or to discuss Oil on board any of the education projects at The Private Collection Courtauld please contact: Left: [email protected] Oxford Street Building Site I (detail) 1960 Oil on board Tate, London WELCOME

The Courtauld Institute of Art runs an exceptional programme of activities suitable for young people, school teachers and members of the public, whatever their age or background. We offer resources which contribute to the understanding, knowledge and enjoyment of art history based upon the world-renowned art collection and the expertise of our students and scholars. The Teachers’ Resources and Image CDs have proved immensely popular in their first year; my thanks go to all those who have contributed to this success and to those who have given us valuable feedback. In future we hope to extend the range of resources to include material based on the permanent collection in The Courtauld Gallery which I hope will prove to be both useful and inspiring. With best wishes,

Henrietta Hine Head of Public Programmes The Courtauld Institute of Art Somerset House Strand, London WC2R 0RN 1: INTRODUCTION TO THE EXHIBITION

LONDON AFTER The exhibition explores an extraordinary did his close friend and fellow student, group of paintings of post-war London Leon Kossoff. There was, Auerbach THE WAR WAS building sites by Frank Auerbach (born says, “a sense of survivors scurrying 1931), one of Britain’s greatest living among a ruined city… and a sort A MARVELLOUS artists. The series of fourteen major of curious freedom… I remember a LANDSCAPE WITH paintings was produced during the first feeling of camaraderie among the decade of Auerbach’s career and gives people in the street”. For Auerbach, PRECIPICE AND a remarkable account of his early artistic the sense of survival must have seemed MOUNTAIN AND development. It was during this period particularly profound. He had been sent that Auerbach emerged alongside to England from his home city, Berlin, CRAGS; FULL OF Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud as shortly before his eighth birthday and part of a powerful new generation of the outbreak of war. Both of his Jewish DRAMA... British painters. The show gives the first parents were killed in the concentration comprehensive account of these works, camps and Auerbach made London which are among the most profound his new home. He combed the city, responses made by any artist to the post- filling his sketchbooks with details of war urban landscape. particular sites, capturing the activities of workmen and machinery as they Auerbach’s years as a young art student reshaped London’s bombsites into new in London, from 1947 to 1952, were structures. He recalls how he would spent in a city deeply scarred by the enter a site “by inching along the planks, ” aftermath of the Second World War and out over the excavation, just clinging at the beginning of a long period of on and dodging the wheelbarrows”. It recovery and rebuilding. The Blitz had was the early stages of a construction levelled whole areas of London and left site that most excited Auerbach, before numerous buildings severely damaged the building had fully emerged from the or destroyed. This wounded landscape ground and there was still a sense of was punctuated by remarkable survivals, struggle between the formlessness of most famously St Paul’s Cathedral the raw earth being excavated and the standing defiantly among the ruins. beginnings of architectural order. Another spectacular sight was the rebuilding effort which saw armies Auerbach’s first painting, in what would of workmen clearing the debris and become a group of fourteen excavating new foundations. Ubiquitous major works, was Summer Building Site, symbols of the rebuilding were the tower 1952, a construction site on the Earl’s cranes which sprang up across the city Court Road. It was a breakthrough work in advance of the new steel-framed for the twenty-one year old artist and he offices and blocks of flats which were to considered it to be his first truly original transform London’s urban landscape. picture. “I had done my own painting,” For Auerbach, hungry to prove himself Auerbach recalled, “I didn’t know if I as a modern painter, the building sites would ever be able to do it again, but of London made the most compelling of at least I knew what it felt like.” The contemporary subjects. As he recalled composition is an interplay between the recently, “London after the War was a structuring diagonal lines of ladders and marvellous landscape with precipice and scaffolding and the broad areas of earth mountains and crags, full of drama… and and excavation, conveyed as almost it seemed mad to waste the opportunity uncontrollable masses of raw paint. One and not to take notice of the fact that of his next paintings of a nearby site, there were these marvellous images… all Building Site Earl’s Court Road, 1953, around one”. took these qualities to an even greater extreme. As he worked and reworked Towards the end of his studies at the composition, his paint surface various London art schools including, became ever thicker as he strove to most importantly, David Bomberg’s express what he describes as “the core” Above: Bomb-Damaged Ruins with St Paul’s Cathedral in inspirational teaching at the Borough of his subject. The result is a painting the Background, C.H. Holden and W.G. Holford, Polytechnic, Auerbach began voraciously more than an inch thick in places in The City of London: A Record of Destruction and sketching the city’s building sites, as which the sheer weight and density of Survival, London (Architectural Press, 1951. paint threatens to collapse in on itself, Gallery was a source of inspiration for obscuring the image completely. the work and the crane’s form faintly recalls that of a crucifix, further imbuing These thick, encrusted surfaces would the image with the theme of death and come to characterise the rest of the resurrection, which perhaps lies at the works in the group. All of them began heart of all Auerbach’s building site with Auerbach making sketches on a paintings. particular building site. He would pin these drawings up on his studio wall and Two exceptionally powerful paintings, begin to paint from them. Each work Maples Demolition, 1960, and was the result of many months labour Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, 1962, in the studio and it was not uncommon mark the end of Auerbach’s building for paintings to take up to a year to site series. The works’ palettes of complete. Auerbach is clear that he did strong yellows and reds contrast with not set out to create such heavily worked his earlier paintings in the group which paintings; their surfaces are simply the were painted in earth tones, as they outcome of his epic struggle with paint were the only colours he could afford in as he strove to achieve the most vital the large quantities he required. These expression of his subject matter. Such two paintings epitomise how Auerbach works pushed the boundaries of painting vividly translates chasms of mud and to an extreme that many commentators shored-up earth, cranes, scaffolding and of the day found unsettling at his first the workmen of the building sites into solo show at the Beaux Arts Gallery paintings which capture a powerful sense in 1956. However, David Sylvester of the destruction and reconstruction described the exhibition as “the most inherent in the redevelopment of exciting and impressive first one-man London’s bomb sites. His heavily show by an English painter since Francis worked, thick surfaces express the Bacon’s in 1949”. material character of the sites; a painted equivalent of the mountains of earth and Auerbach’s subjects included many rubble being excavated and reshaped of the major construction sites of the across the city. His own labours with period, such as the Time and Life paint over many months approached the Building on Bruton Street, the rebuilding timescale of the buildings themselves. around St Paul’s Cathedral and the In certain cases the buildings had John Lewis building on Oxford Street. been erected and opened by the time He made repeated visits to perhaps Auerbach had completed his paintings the most spectacular site of all: the of their foundations. Shell Building on the South Bank, London’s first ‘skyscraper’ built on the The exhibition brings together all site of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Its fourteen of Auerbach’s building site height necessitated dramatically deep paintings, drawing on public and private excavations which Auerbach described collections nationally and internationally. as being like the “Grand Canyon”. His It also displays a selection of Auerbach’s Shell Building Site from the Thames is few surviving pencil sketches (most of a particularly dramatic evocation of his which he destroyed) together with oil experiences there. The composition is studies to reveal the artist’s complex dominated by a crane from which a cable creative process. Research for the drops into a deep excavation which exhibition has been greatly enriched appears to radiate light from within. by interviews conducted with the artist Rembrandt’s Deposition in the National especially for this project.

Right: Frank Auerbach Oxford Street Building Site II (detail) 1960 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

INTRODUCTION TO THE EXHIBITION Written by Dr Barnaby Wright, exhibition curator and Curator of 20th Century Art at The Courtauld Gallery.

CURRICULUM LINKS: KS3+ Art and Design, History, Art History, Geography and other Humanities 2: REBUILDING LONDON

A MARVELLOUS LANDSCAPE Three major architectural factions Frank Auerbach settled in London as emerged: Neo-Picturesque, Neo- a young art student after the Second Georgian and Modernist. The first two World War. He remembers the bomb- styles revived opposing eighteenth- scarred city as ‘a marvellous landscape century ideals. Where the Picturesque with precipice and mountain and crags, embraced irregularity, roughness and full of drama… everything rather used variety, the Georgian valued regularity, and worn and unpainted and grubby’. In symmetry and refinement. Modernism, the abundant construction sites dotting on the other hand, was a reaction against the post-war landscape, Auerbach found stylistic revival altogether. At its extreme, particularly dramatic and exciting subject Modernism advocated functional matter. Auerbach sketched at various buildings constructed from regular sites across the city, then painted from manufactured parts and devoid of these drawings in his studio. His lengthy extraneous decoration – the grid-pattern process of painting and repainting, tower blocks that sprang up across often for months on end, meant that he the city vividly illustrate this approach. would sometimes still be working on In reality, however, elements of these a painting after the building itself had ‘warring’ styles often merged in a single been completed. Auerbach’s works offer development. a vision of the extraordinary spectacle of the post-war rebuilding of London that HARD AND SOFT HOUSING took place during the 1950s and 1960s. Housing the millions left homeless by war became the Government’s top THE BLITZ priority. The County of London Plan The first wave of the bombing of London (1943) recommended a mixture of high- by the German Luftwaffe began on 7 and low-rise houses and flats set near September 1940 and lasted for 76 nights. schools, community centres, shops and Starting in the East End – an already businesses. deprived area – the Luftwaffe then moved onto central London and the The architectural historian Lionel Esher West End. Especially devastated was the described the housing developments area around St Paul’s Cathedral. By 1945, that sprouted across London as either 30% of the City and 20% of Stepney ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. ‘Hard’ estates were strictly and Southwark had been destroyed. In high-rise, with stark concrete total around 80,000 buildings had been architecture. ‘Soft’ estates might mix wrecked, a further 700,000 damaged and tower blocks with low-rise buildings, 80,000 people killed or seriously injured. individual houses and incorporate Above: landscaping to evoke traditional English Map Depicting Bomb Damage around St Paul’s, WARRING STYLES towns. Among these sites were two that City of London Metropolitan Archives The war’s end marked the beginning Auerbach sketched and painted: the of the battle to rebuild London. massive Regent’s Park Estate and the Widespread destruction presented an more modest Portobello Court. The opportunity to solve London’s pre- former spread over thirty-two acres, with war planning problems: sub-standard a mixed development of 1,700 flats and housing, lack of open spaces and houses alongside shops, pubs and a congested traffic. The Government school. It took a decade to complete and was flooded with city-planning survives today. proposals. The most radical of these, ‘A Futurist Fantasy’, presented by the MARS BOWING TO ST PAUL’S Group, recommended demolishing the By the end of the war, St Paul’s entire city and starting again from scratch Cathedral had become more than an – an ambition they had held even before architectural masterpiece. Standing the war. Such radically comprehensive defiantly among the ruins, it was a schemes were not taken up. Instead, the symbol of the city’s resilience. The London County Council (LCC) oversaw Government was determined to the piecemeal reconstruction of the city preserve the unencumbered views of in a baffling array of types and styles. the landmark opened up unexpectedly by surrounding destruction (see cover with glass-fronted office blocks, which image). The LCC purchased most of the one critic dubbed ‘huge cubic goldfish neighbouring land and imposed strict bowls’. planning laws. As a result, the first two buildings to emerge behind St Paul’s Equally contentious were the stone- – Gateway House and New Change clad Modernist office blocks that House – presented bland Neo-Georgian forever changed the cityscape. The facades that were widely criticised as construction sites for the Board of Trade representative of a loss of architectural on Victoria Street and the Royal Dutch nerve. Auerbach’s preparatory sketches Shell Company on the South Bank for Building Site near St. Paul’s were were colossal. Auerbach drew both and made during the early stages of the marvelled at their scale, comparing the construction of New Change House, Shell building site to the Grand Canyon. built for the Bank of England. It has recently been demolished to make way Architecture critics were less enthusiastic, for a new building. christening the Shell Building a ‘vertical failure’ before it was even finished. As LANDMARKS REBORN London’s first skyscraper, it threatened Department stores and cinemas the Americanisation of the city’s laboured heroically throughout the war architecture. The Board of Trade building to maintain ‘business as usual’. Maple & required the demolition of Westminster Co had occupied an entire block on the Chambers, a nineteenth-century ARCHITECTURE CRITICS corner of Euston and Tottenham Court building unscathed by war. It was seen CHRISTENED THE SHELL Roads before the war. It was the leading as evidence of ‘the rampant speculation furniture retailer in the country, a major in office building… one of the worst BUILD A ‘VERTICAL London landmark and a popular tourist features of non-planning in the second FAILURE’ BEFORE IT destination. After being laid waste by half of the ‘50s’. The Modernist Time-Life the Blitz, it took a decade to rebuild and building, which still stands at the corner WAS EVEN FINISHED. emerged a shadow of its former self. of Bruton and New Bond Streets, was In contrast, John Lewis on Oxford Street one of the few office blocks to receive emerged stronger than ever. After virtual much praise. destruction during the Blitz, the store sold its wares on the pavement while At a time of post-war austerity this space was cleared among the ruins. Its building was lavishly bedecked in marble new Modernist building was spacious and graced by a Henry Moore sculpture, and bright, hailed by one critic as ‘a a testament to the economic power of well-modelled, honest-to-god twentieth American capital backing the project. ” century store’. Auerbach made sketches as work began to erect its steel-framed structure. London’s famous Empire Cinema was less a victim of war than modernisation. PICTURESQUE LONDON In 1962, it was stripped of its ornate Rather than rising like a phoenix from the nineteenth-century interior to make way ashes, London emerged piecemeal in for a sleek modern design and reopened a bewildering variety of jumbled styles. boasting the largest screen in London Today, the city still harbours many of its and a lavish ballroom. Construction post-war buildings. Peter Ackroyd, in his on each site progressed quickly and book London: A Biography, celebrates Auerbach sketched with great urgency to London as ‘an ugly city’ which has grown capture a moment of change. organically rather than conforming to an over-arching plan or grand design. GOLDFISH BOWLS As Auerbach put it, the post-war spirit To stimulate commercial redevelopment, of the times was ‘improvisatory’. To this in 1954 the Government sparked a day London’s unruly, rough and irregular ‘bonfire of controls’. The resulting cityscape remains a constant source of building boom led to the rise of powerful inspiration to him. developers. Historic buildings came down in the blink of an eye, replaced

Above: Time Life building 1951-53 Photograph: The Conway Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Right: New Change House under construction, 1955 Photograph: Hulton Archives/Getty Images

REBUILDING LONDON Written by Viktorya Vilk, research assistant of the Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952–62 exhibition with thanks to Margaret Garlake and Dr Barnaby Wright.

CURRICULUM LINKS: KS3+ Art and Design, Art History, History, Geography and other Humanities. 3: FRANK AUERBACH: AN INTERVIEW

I DIDN’T WANT THEM THE FOLLOWING EXTRACTS, FROM or anything like that. This was really the AN INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY fabric of one’s life. I walked quite often TO BE THICK, THEY JUST EXHIBITION CURATOR DR BARNABY to St. Martins or cycled for a short time WRIGHT WITH FRANK AUERBACH IN to the Borough Polytechnic surrounded CAME OUT THICK... HIS STUDIO, CAN ALSO BE HEARD ON by bombsites and craggy buildings EVERY TIME I STARTED THE CD PROVIDED OR AS PODCASTS standing in the middle of an empty piece FROM OUR WEBSITE. of ground and everything rather used ANOTHER PAINTING, and worn and unpainted and grubby. I THOUGHT THIS WILL PODCAST 1 Perhaps sentimentally, I remembered a Exhibition curator Barnaby Wright sort of curious feeling of camaraderie BE A THIN ONE AND introduces this series of podcasts and amongst the people in the street, so that begins by asking Frank Auerbach to it did seem possible – I mean one moved IT TOOK A LONG TIME recall his experiences of living in London as a student from rented room to rented BEFORE ONE OF THEM in the 1950’s. room – but it seemed quite possible to meet somebody in a pub and be able to WAS... Frank Auerbach (FA): Well – it’s not a find a room to rent or to get a job in the unique memory – but it was pittered holidays. It was improvisatory. with bomb sites and of course the bomb sites gradually turned into PODCAST 2 building sites because people were In 1952 Auerbach produced Summer rebuilding what had been destroyed. Building Site as the first painting in the And there was, a little bit I think, of a series. In this podcast Dr Wright asks sense of survivors scurrying among how this particular painting came about. inner ruined city. Somebody asked ” me about the building sites and in my FA: Yes, well I used to live in the Earl’s memory they were nothing like the way Court Road and by then I’d moved to they are now, with hard hats and visible West Kensington. I spent the whole clothing and regulation boots. I seem summer trying to do this in fairly sort of to remember people in trousers and naturalistic terms, deeply frustrated. I shirts and possibly an ordinary peaked never wanted to be a figurative painter cap wheeling wheel-barrows along in the sense of simply portraying planks to convey materials or cement something, I wanted to make a great or something from one part to another. image. It was, as far as I remember, it was What is was, in a way, was a city fully- in fairly sort of sub-fast quasi-naturalistic functional is a, to me, somewhat formally colours and feeling a sense of crisis on boring collection of cubic rectilinear the date I went to the Royal College of shapes, but London after the war was Art, having already seemed to me spent a marvellous landscape with precipice too much time in art schools, I went back and mountain and crags, full of drama and repainted the whole thing from top formally and I think it was that… I mean to bottom in the form which you see it if I’d lived in the mountain landscape, now, totally disrupting it. I think I felt it which I’m very pleased to say I didn’t was the beginning of my life as a painter because that had been mined in the and I still think that. previous century, I might have been drawn to try and paint that, but living Barnaby Wright (BW): Was it in a sense in London it seemed mad to waste the your way also into city-scape painting, opportunity to not take notice of the fact landscape painting? that there were these marvellous images, FRANK AUERBACH: AN INTERVIEW compost for images all around one. Conducted by Dr Barnaby Wright, FA: I’m not entirely certain. You see the Also, one wasn’t unique, it was austerity, paintings I did when I was at St. Martins, exhibition curator and curator of 20th people were poor, and there was a Century Art at The Courtauld Gallery. I did one or two building sites and sort of curious freedom and mateyness destroyed them because they weren’t among the survivors. I think, certainly in CURRICULUM LINKS: KS3+ good enough. Later, I had a lot of stuff my case, I had not even a full student up there when it wasn’t a gallery. It wasn’t Art and Design, History, Geography, grant, one felt much closer to what was Art History, Media Studies, identity and a planned enterprise. It was really, as going on in the street. There wasn’t any all my life has been, sleepwalking. One cultural diversity and other particular indoor life, silver chandeliers Humanities. does one picture and then, as a rebound from it or as a continuation of it one does and a hammer and thought that I would another. I’ve never had a programme. create some sort of connection between I’ve just proceeded from one to another, painting from life and painting from often by going against it and sometimes drawings. I think that in some paintings by feeling I haven’t gone far enough as it were, perhaps something like, I and trying to take it further. I don’t quite don’t know, perhaps Courbet’s studio, know what the next one was the Bruton something that I’d seen, it seemed to me street one, I think? that certain pictures that I admired had BW: Yes, that’s this work, a year later, I done this and that the conflict between think. the slight sheerness and blandness that comes in working from drawings and the FA: What I do remember this fairly vividly awkwardness and oddity that the objects because it went through so many stages. in front of one have might make a more It was fairly thinly painted and at the convincing image. Again, I think my beginning painted in sort of prismatic rather divine impatience drove me much colours and by that time I was at the further and came up with this object. I Royal College of Art and I went on with actually do think that painting is rather that, but I think by then I’d realized that good. I can see that my early work, which my way of going on would be to repaint seems now to me to have some quality, the thing again and again and transform is as difficult to read probably as any it as much as possible, in a sense of paintings that have ever been done. seeing how far one could go, perhaps in an attempt to find a secret internal BW: What will be interesting in the geometry that lay behind it, the core as exhibition is to have some drawings to it were. First, it was definitely painted illustrate how these works are based in from these laborious drawings in sort of observation in a very detailed way. blue and purple and green and yellow, and thin paint. Then that was definitely FA: I know. I must say people when said dead and bitty and unalive, and I painted something about them later seem to it more freely over the top. I remember think that I spent my time in the studio John Minton, who taught at the Royal piling paint on canvas and one can only College of Art coming around to see wonder what people’s lives are like if they my work - I had it in my room in West think that this is what anybody would do, Kensington - saying at the stage where but there it is. They came out like that. I thought it might be finished that t’isn’t Obviously I didn’t have a programme of finished and then I realized sometime wanting to do thick painting or wanting later that was right. Again, I think it was a to do paintings in earth colours. The sort of coup de foudre, I think I repainted only reason I used earth colours, was the whole thing in earth colours in that I went on and on, I didn’t have the the form which you see it now. What confidence to scrape off as radically as I happens is that I draw things, I do make do now, and earth colour was cheaper, drawings for every painting and all of and the paint accrued and I was not sorry them come from something specific and to have an object that didn’t look like Above: then sort of internalize the information anything that already existed, or seemed Frank Auerbach and try to make an image out of my to me not to look exactly like anything Building Site, Earls Court Road, Winter (detail) sense of what it is that I’ve drawn, so it’s that had already existed. 1953 not really a recording enterprise. Oil on board Private Collection BW: Another work I’m pleased we have PODCAST 3 in fact two drawings for is the Shell One of Auerbach’s most Building Site from the Festival Hall uncompromising paintings is his Building Site, Earls Court Road: Winter, FA: That was a magnificent building site. in podcast 3 Auerbach explains more Fantastic! It was Superb! It was a vast about this particular painting. building site and it looked absolutely superb. It was like the Grand Canyon. FA: I actually posed a still life in the I remember going there – well, I did front of a saw and a pair of pinchers two paintings from it and doing these drawings – it was almost a gift you embarrassing way was also judged by know, the thing was so superb in itself contemporary biographies, Rembrandt’s that you could have taken it and put it embarrassment for some time. in a museum being what it is, it such a marvellous thing. BW: What do you mean by the paint accruing in an embarrassing way? IT WAS A VAST BW: And you were there onsite, in the pits – BUILDING SITE AND IT FA: Absolutely yes. I’ve got no head for FA: Well, I didn’t want them to be thick, “ LOOKED ABSOLUTELY heights or anything. I remember in those they just came out thick. I’ve got a days going to places where I was scared feeling that every time I started another SUPERB. IT WAS LIKE to stand and drawing. I remember where painting, I thought, well this will be a on these planks that people wheeled thin one and it took a long time before THE GRAND CANYON... wheelbarrows totally confidently, I would one of them was. I remember having a AUERBACH REFERRING sit down and edge my way along them quite thick painting of Helen Gillespie in order to do my drawings. I’ve got no some years later and thinking at last this TO THE SHELL BUILDING head for heights at all, but certainly I is a normal painting and now, of course, SITE. went to these building sites and did the it looks rather thick to me. It’s taken me drawings. Which, as I say, a vast majority sixty years to get to a reasonable amount of them have got lost and I remember of paint on the canvas. actually quite a few of them are covered with spots of paint from top to bottom. BW: On all of these sites, you seem to pick a moment quite early on in the PODCAST 4 building process, so there’s some sort In podcast 4 Dr Wright asks Auerbach of early scaffolding or bits of structure, about his influence during the building and there’s a contrast between the site period and if there were any kind of mud and the pits and then particular artists he found inspiring. the beginnings of some order being imposed on that. FA: I thought about Rembrandt all those years. Obviously, one’s head was full FA: Yes, well I think that’s when it’s of all the paintings one admired, but closest to mountain landscape really, of all the old master paintings, it was with quarries and with declivities and Rembrandt I was most moved by. The hills and so on because that’s the drama thing is like I think almost everybody of it. Once it’s a piece of scaffolding that else; I don’t know about you, my first looks already like a rectilinear building, real excitement about painting came it’s probably rather less exciting, or was from modern painting. I used to draw in in those days and still is. the National Gallery quite a lot, but I’ve never drawn from a twentieth-century BW: Is there something of the sort of painting in my life because when I look at sublime of mountain landscapes as it it I know exactly how it came about, but used to be talked about, in your mind? with old masters, which I came to later and more slowly, I didn’t really know what FA: For me, yes, very much, very very it was that made them so exciting and much. And of course, like everybody moving. So I had to draw them in order else, I was affected by Turner and that to try and understand what the qualities sort of pictorial grandeur. of the pictures I admired were that distinguished them from the paintings that didn’t move me. I drew Rembrandt in those days more than anybody else, and also Turner and certain other people, but Rembrandt more than anybody and you’re quite right and even of course the colours that I used were more or less Rembrandt’s palette and Above: The Shell Building under construction c.1958 the fact that the paint accrued in that Photograph: Sir Robert Macalpine Ltd. PODCAST 5 a sort of heaving, bubbling cauldron The exhibition devotes a section to with continual change. Not as much, Auerbach’s monumental Oxford Street of course, as leaves falling off trees Building Site paintings, in the final and so on and branches coming off podcast in the series Dr Wright begins them, but pretty alive. A building site is by asking Auerbach about the sketching unrecognizable after a month very often trips he made whilst producing this pair because they’ve made a different thing of magnificent paintings. of it. BW: In taking a building site, you were in FA: I know where it was. It was not far fact taking an immense challenge as an from Oxford Circus. That’s where I did my artist to take on such a subject drawings and then I think, in those days I used to do the drawings and fairly rarely FA: Well, I was taking on something that go back afterwards. Whereas now I go put me on my mettle. almost everyday to what I’m painting and do a drawing. BW: Sickert talked a lot about that, how one should take subjects that really, as BW: So you might have visited the site, you say, put you on your mettle. what, once or twice? FA: I’ve always felt that. I think subject is FA: Oh no, five or six times. At the tremendously important. A thing that has beginning, I realized I didn’t know no great surface interest these days, but enough about this or that and tried that I am in some way familiar with and to get drawings of it. The thing about attached to, seems now to me to offer building sites, whereas now I don’t paint a challenge as well. But in those days it building sites, you can’t go back because was very much something to sharpen three months later, it’s an entirely one’s claws… something that will put different scene. There’s no question one on one’s mettle, you’re quite right. of going everyday. One does these Obviously one tries to do what moves drawings and then out of one’s painting one. There was something about these ambitions, tries to extend the thing into building sites. Of course, if I think about a painting. them now, long after, there’s just a tiny echo of the Creation of the first book of BW: So there was a sort of urgency about Genesis in all these building sites. getting down the information. BW: In terms of form? FA: Absolutely, there was very much an urgency. Even an ordinary cityscape, until FA: Yes, and then there’s mud and you start drawing, you don’t realize how gradually the thing, yes. In terms of much London changes. The Mornington creation, after all it is a creation, they’re Crescent paintings that I’ve done, creating a building. They’re creating in the road, with existing buildings, it out of soil in the way that we are suddenly they take down a church spire supposed to have been created. or pull down a building. London is like

Right: Frank Auerbach in his studio, 1964 Photograph by Snowdon Camera Press, London 4: AUERBACH AND THE WOUNDED CITY

The Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition of their material processes not only Frank Auerbach’s paintings of London represented in paint but also taken up as building sites executed between 1952 an extended metaphor for the painting and 1962 provides a unique opportunity process. The building site paintings to examine this artist’s interpretations are constructed and interpreted using of the London cityscape afresh. This terms that create connections between I THINK THE UNITY IN essay seeks to make connections engineering and brushstrokes. Frank ANY PAINTER’S WORK between Auerbach’s representations of Auerbach hopes for a dynamism and specific sites of activity and a broader even a consciousness in his work: ‘I do “ARISES FROM THE consideration of a bombed city as want them to be alive,’ he says, ‘and they FACT THAT A PERSON, an injured body to which the painter don’t come alive to me in ways that are was attentive and innovative. Order full of clichés or if they seem incomplete BROUGHT TO A and disorder, surface and depth, and or not coherent… I think the unity in any construction and deconstruction will painter’s work arises from the fact that a DESPERATE SITUATION, be considered as conceptual pairs person, brought to a desperate situation, WILL BEHAVE IN A through which viewers may engage with will behave in a certain way… That’s what Auerbach’s paintings. real style is: it’s not donning a mantle CERTAIN WAY… or having a programme, it’s how one The philosopher Elaine Scarry published behaves in a crisis.’3 From the onset of The Body in Pain in 1985 in order to war until the 1960s, London’s cityscape provide a fresh view on the reflexive showed the marks of crisis in its people symbiosis between bodies and the and its architecture. Destruction begat cities people create as extensions of powerful opportunity as bomb sites were self, and what happens to these sites transformed into building sites and thus when they are threatened or destroyed. death transformed into life through a Scarry’s ideas frame a discussion which powerful rhetoric of recovery. However, positions two of Auerbach’s Shell London’s rebuilding schemes did not Building Site paintings alongside work unite the city spatially or aesthetically: by George Scharf (1788-1860) and David ‘Rather than rising like a phoenix from Muirhead Bone (1876-1953). All three the ashes, London emerged piecemeal artists were concerned with the city’s in a bewildering variety of jumbled urban architectural processes as sites of styles.’ This apparently chaotic and destruction and change; each depicted improvisatory process was mirrored in building projects as extensions of bodily Auerbach’s project, which took inanimate conditions and the city’s needs. By materials and manipulated them into viewing Auerbach’s thick, earthy visions a vivid state seeking to capture and of postwar London via Scharf and Bone’s perpetuate the developments of spaces interpretations of the city, we may begin and places scarred by war. to dig through layers of visual material in order to capture the artist’s interactions ‘The main purpose and outcome of with the city’s fragile body at its most war,’ Scarry claims, ‘is injuring…[and] Above: ‘dense [and] violently alive’.1 to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to Frank Auerbach Shell Building Site from the Thames cut) human tissue as well as to alter the 1959 In a review of the Royal Academy’s 2001 surface, shape and deep entirety of the Oil on board Auerbach retrospective, James Beechey objects that human beings recognize as Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid suggests the earthy masses of paint extensions of themselves.’4 In the city, which populate Auerbach’s postwar architectural damage and individual images of people and buildings alike are injuries or fatalities echo and reflect responses to the ongoing excavations each other. Frank Auerbach’s celebrated for local building projects. Additionally, Shell Building Site: from the Thames of in these sites’ ‘ladders, cranes and 1959 closely recalls his close study and girders… Auerbach found the necessary unstinting admiration for Rembrandt’s scaffolding for his own compositions.’2 The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Beechey implies the painter treated his painted c.1635 and housed at the building site subjects architecturally, 3 Undated interview between Frank Auerbach and Richard Cork, p. 2, cited in Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1 Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990. 1990. 2 James Beechey, ‘Frank Auerbach’, The Burlington 4 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking Magazine, Vol. 143, No. 1185 (Dec. 2001). of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). National Gallery at Trafalgar Square. under construction or demolition, with By employing strong diagonals and all the attendant paraphernalia, in such pyramidal dynamism in the composition, a manner that out of superficial chaos Auerbach transposes the suffering there emerged a beautiful and ordered and death of God into the cavities and design.’5 Bone’s quest for order can be foundations of a building site and its powerfully contrasted against Auerbach’s protrusions of heavy machinery. This Shell Building Site: Workmen under tactic recalls another aspect of Scarry’s Hungerford Bridge from c.1958-61. The argument about conflict and destruction, tight network of diagonals, attention to when she claims that in ‘the body-state restrained compartmentalisation, and relation’ – exacerbated and magnified in dark ‘sepulchral’ palette recall Bone’s war – a bomb site and an individual injury and indeed Auerbach’s own charcoal are marks of ‘the literalness with which sketches. Auerbach’s dissatisfaction the human body opens itself and allows with his initial effort, which resulted “the nation” to be registered there in in an urgent, spontaneous reworking the wound.’ That a quintessential image of the canvas ‘in a day’ produced an of Christ’s crucifixion so openly informs encrusted surface replete with textural Auerbach’s arrangement of cranes and variety: ‘Areas of surface have dried to cables draws a clear parallel between an almost chalky finish – reminiscent suffering and hope for a city Auerbach of his contemporary charcoal drawings may well have perceived as an extension of heads – but where he has broken of human frailty and vulnerability, through this dry skin to pick out salient searching for salvation and prosperity in details the paint appears glossy, like the midst of traumatic disorder. the oozing sap of tree bark.’6 This description of Auerbach’s thick canvases Across the river from the Shell building as fleshy, presenting the viewer with site, Charing Cross Station had been an apparently unstable dermis, is established as a terminus for trains not unique. Robert Hughes notes from England’s Southeast since the that the ‘glistening, granular surface’ 1860s. In 1905 a portion of the shed’s of Auerbach’s postwar building site roof structure collapsed, killing six paintings invited and responded to people. Workers rapidly erected an incredulous touch: ‘one poked at [the enormous gantry to act as a support picture] with an inquisitive finger and system and scaffolding in the safe the paint surface gave, like human removal and reconstruction of the faulty skin.’ Hughes goes on to suggest that roof. In 1907 David Muirhead Bone, Auerbach’s repeated use of deep, known as ‘the Scottish Piranesi’, took thrusting diagonal cuts across his this gantry as the subject of a series compositions – which I take to be of sketches exploring the temporary embodied trajectories of injury and the structure as a site of recovery and a inscription of conflict on the canvas-body sign of damage. Bone, who would go as an extension of the corporeal city – on to become an official war artist on ‘wiped aside the clutter of pentimenti the Western Front in the First World under the paint-skin.’7 This is as certain War, fills the surface with insistent, thick in the jaundiced Shell Building Site cross-hatching, segmenting the paper from the Thames as it is in the bruised into an array of layers constructed as Shell Building Site: Workmen under a simultaneous expression of anxiety Hungerford Bridge. and order. The diagonals reinforce and interweave across the arc of the train 5 Meirion and Susie Harries, The War Artists: British Official shed, establishing rhythms of support. War Art of the Twentieth Century, exh. Cat. (London: Imperial War Museum, 1983). Writing about Bone’s work, Susie and 6 Barnaby Wright, ed., Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites Meirion Harries state that he was drawn 1952-62 (London: Courtauld, 2009). to study ‘great masses of buildings 7 Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, 1990.

Left: David Muirhead Bone Study for the Great Gantry, Charing Cross 1907 Graphite, pen and ink, watercolour paper Courtauld Gallery, London This drawing is on display in room 12 as part of the Auerbach exh bition. In central London a century prior to the and extinction of life.’ This language onset of the Second World War, the city of corporeality uniting London’s sites was a hive of activity as rapidly increasing of architectural change with the bodies urban density led to the development of its inhabitants can be traced forward of complex above and below-ground into Auerbach’s experience of pushing systems and the provision of diverse paint across a canvas’ surface: ‘Paint is public and private social spaces. Many at its most eloquent when it is a by- of the areas of London to suffer the product of some corporeal, spatial, most severe bomb damage in the 1940s developing imaginative concept, a were built up at this time of exponential creative identification with the subject. Victorian industrial expansion. George I could no more fix my mind on the Scharf the elder, whose son became the character of paint than if maybe an Director of the National Portrait Gallery, alchemist could fix his on mechanical was one of London’s most prolific and chemistry.’9 Auerbach’s body in contact incisive visual interpreters of city life as with the city’s exposed sites of pain and a network of processes: the city’s body injury drives the creative impulse in a was always contracting, expanding, dynamic painting event wherein liquid destabilising and differentiating. Two of and solid characteristics model urban his images demonstrate this fascination transformation and thus comment on with urban change in ways that provide a living body’s healing processes. His points of engagement with Auerbach’s pictures, which Auerbach hopes may building site canvases. Both finished ‘remain in the mind like a new species in 1845, Scharf’s Building Common of living thing’10 are building sites Sewers in London: Men Laying Pipes themselves: layers of paint-skin adhere to at the Corner of Drury Lane and Laying canvas as buildings rise out of the earth the Foundations at the Lycian Room, on the city’s scarred surface. the British Museum interrogate the very nature of surface and flux. Caroline Auerbach’s canvases are an extension of Arscott has pointed out that in these self as much as the city is an extension images ‘the dynamic elements have of the interconnected corporeality of overtaken the markers of stability.’8 In its inhabitants. David Muirhead Bone, Men Laying Pipes Scharf’s composition Geroge Scharf, and Frank Auerbach is dominated by a bulbous cross-section – each of whom have distinctive of piping protruding from the broken approaches to London’s transitory ground like a major artery, attended by architectural processes – produced art adjacent detached and connected drains which struggled with the relationship like so many associated capillaries. between bodies and buildings. This is literally an image of a circulatory Auerbach, however, reveals a particular system without which the city could concern for materials and surfaces, and not function – it is a marker of survival this sets him apart from my two earlier as well as of progress, and the quality examples of artists who documented of voyeuristic exposure affirmed in the modern London spaces. Regarding figures of the workmen anonymously the transitional and animate qualities engaged with their task suggests, as of earth, which are explored variously Auerbach’s workmen do, that the city’s in each of Auerbach’s building site sites of damage and transition are like paintings on display at the Courtauld, components of an enormous creature the artist recently commented, ‘London needing care in order to provide for is like a sort of heaving, bubbling its population. Similarly, in Laying cauldron [of] continual change…there’s the Foundations at the Lycian Room just a tiny echo of the Creation of the Scharf has placed the circular lime- first book of Genesis in all these building mixing apparatus in the centre of the sites… In terms of creation, after all it is picture. The Victorian building site’s a creation, they’re creating a building. foundations, like Auerbach’s postwar They’re creating it out of soil in the way structures, required copious amounts that we are supposed to have been of what Caroline Arscott has referred to created.’ as ‘this instance of life in stone, and the building process of liquefication and solidification… [which] offers a parallel to the processes of the emergence 9 From correspondence with the author, 11 April 1998, subsequently published in James Elkins, 1999. 8 Arscott, Caroline, ‘George Scharf and the Archaeology of 10 Catherine Lampert, ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach’ the Modern’, in Kierkuc-Bielinski, Jerzy, ed., George Scharf: in Frank Auerbach, exh cat, Hayward, London, 1978, cited in from the Regency Street to the Modern Metropolis, exh cat, Catherine Lampert, Norman Rosenthal and Isabel Carlisle, (London: Soane Museum/Paul Holberton, 2009). Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, 2001

Left: George Scharf, Building Common Sewers in London: Men Laying Pipes at the Corner of Drury Lane 1845 Graphite on paper The British Museum GUIDE TO FURTHER READING: James Elkins, What Painting Is: How to Think About Oil Painting Using the Language of Alchemy (New York and London: Routledge, 1999).

Meirion and Susie Harries, The War Artists: British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century, exh. Cat. (London: Imperial War Museum, 1983).

Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990).

Kierkuc-Bielinski, Jerzy, ed., George Scharf: from the Regency Street to the Modern Metropolis, exh cat, (London: Soane Museum/Paul Holberton, 2009).

Catherine Lampert, Norman Rosenthal and Isabel Carlisle, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001 (London: Royal Academy, 2001).

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Barnaby Wright, ed., Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62 (London: Courtauld, 2009).

AUERBACH AND THE WOUNDED CITY Written by Ayla Lepine, visiting lecturer Top: Above: at The Courtauld Institute of Art George Scharf Frank Auerbach Laying the Foundations of the Lycian Room, Shell Building Site: Workmen under Hungerford CURRICULUM LINKS: KS5+ the British Museum Bridge Architecture, Art and Design, History, 1845 c. 1958-61 watercolour over graphite on paper Oil on board Art History, Material Culture, Sociology, British Museum Private collection Construction and Philosophy. 5: A SECRET GEOMETRY MUSICAL THEMES FOR FRANK AUERBACH: LONDON BUILDING SITES 1952–62

Frank Auerbach is uncompromisingly the simplicity of this belief. For example, categorical about his painting. For him, Auerbach considered the study of Old the synthesis or cross-fertilization of Masters as crucial to the learning of artistic endeavour detracts from the the ‘language’ of paint; he regarded focus requisite to each particular genre the museum as a site for conversation of art and the idea that all art aspires with ‘one’s dead peers’.1 Furthermore, to the condition of music was regarded throughout his career, Auerbach is ever by him as ‘that rubbish of Pater’s’. In aware of his own artistic genealogy bringing music to Auerbach’s paintings through his tutor, David Bomberg, to then, this essay does not attempt to Walter Sickert, the father of British root out hidden influences but rather Modernism. Respectful of tradition, to investigate what commonalities the Auerbach is adamant that his endeavours separate arts shared by looking at three should be directed to the making of ‘a themes: the relation between tradition new thing that remains in the mind like a and innovation; tactility and sense new species of living thing’, continuing perception; exile and existentialism. ‘the only way I know how […] to try and do it, is to start with something I know In spite of Auerbach’s contention that specifically, so that I have something to he ‘must be completely unmusical’, he cling to beyond aesthetic feelings and has nevertheless been known to use a my knowledge of other paintings.’ A Above:: musical terminology in the discussion of case in point is Shell Building Site from Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn paintings. For example, in discussion of the Thames (1959) whose cruciform joists The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (also known as The Deposition) Rubens’ Samson and Delilah (1609-10), recall Rembrandt’s The Lamentation over c. 1635 Auerbach states: Everyone must have the Dead Christ (1635) in the National Oil on paper and pieces of canvas mounted on oak noticed the musical poignancy of the Gallery. Simultaneously, a narrative panel. yellow, the red, the purple drapery. That fundamental to Western culture is The National Gallery, London great purple knot at the top like a tear evoked and negated. which underscores the fleshy drama with a sort of orchestral accompaniment of Narration, or the struggle for poignancy and waste. communication, was a concern shared by the post-war generation. Like Auerbach, Auerbach thus associates music with the composer Györgi Ligeti was caught emotional intensity. Music conjures a between a traditional training and an chaotic maelstrom of untamed creativity, interest in the avant-garde. Ligeti’s counter to the necessity for order in work, perhaps best known for Kubrick’s a post-war climate. For, as Margaret unofficial use ofLux Aeterna in 2001: Garlake clarifies in her catalogue essay A Space Odyssey, broke many of the on Auerbach, post-war refers as much formalities no longer deemed suitable to a ‘cultural process’ as it does to a for a post-war climate: ‘I am in a prison. particular time: against geographical One wall is the avant-garde, the other wreckage and fragmented lives, is the past. I want to escape.’2 Whilst organisation and construction held Auerbach saw language as debased physical and mental trauma at bay. by everyday use, painting, he felt, was immune to bastardization, and the same The unappeasable horror of the Second could be said for music. The problem World War was felt as a hiatus from was perhaps less the threat of cliché progress. It became imperative to but rather how to communicate in a negotiate this break in continuity in state of shock: ‘how one behaves in a the search for an appropriate artistic crisis’ Auerbach said; ‘that’s what real Above: (and more broadly, cultural) vocabulary. style is’. Auerbach wanted a painting Frank Auerbach Decimated London offered a clean slate to be ‘resistant to time’, yet his subject Shell Building Site from the Thames 1959 for innovation such as the Modernists matter and experience was inescapably Oil on board could scarcely have dreamt of. As of its time. Seeking the universal in Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Auerbach expressed, ‘the only possible the particular, his painting has been progress is to destroy [. . .] then one’s likened to a ‘darkened room […] we can left with nothing one began with but a new fact.’ However, other factors belie 1 Auerbach in Robert Hughes 2 New York Times, June 13 2006 IT IS ABSOLUTELY never be quite sure of what is there.’ 3 in a raw purity. In taking expression to It is an art that haunts the imagination its limit, music too is structurally pushed UNTRUE THAT ART in plane, form, and mood rather than to the boundary. A further example definable structure. In this it is akin to of this is the work of Paul Hindemith, ASPIRES TO THE what Auerbach most admired in Samson whose desire to unite the physical and CONDITION OF MUSIC. and Delilah: ‘psychological undertones emotional demands of playing often of love and death and violence and places near impossible demands on PAINTING NEVER mutilation, every possible thing’. These both instrument and player. Auerbach’s WANTS TO BE LIKE qualities echo in the structural themes of painterly technique shares with these Ligeti’s post-war opera. Just as Auerbach works a process of dissembling MUSIC. IT IS BEST WHEN formulated his paintings to have ‘no conventional structure to reveal a greater syntax’,4 Ligeti re-structured tonality. emotional connection. On recalling the IT IS LEAST LIKE MUSIC: For whilst it was that arch-modernist making of Summer Building Site I: ‘there FIXED, CONCRETE, Arnold Schönberg who decisively broke was suddenly the image underneath it [. the constitution of Western music with . .] I’d destroyed all the reminders (that IMMEDIATE, AND dodecaphony, the twelve tones of is, of painting) to get a unique thing [. . RESISTANT TO TIME. his new scale remained chromatically .] It began to operate by its own laws.’ arranged in series, i.e. according to an As Barnaby Wright has written, ‘painting - FRANK AUERBACH older logic. Ligeti’s response was a ‘scale beyond the limits of artistic convention,’ of emotions’ in which music was to be Auerbach ‘amassed an archaeology of organised according to ‘expressive’ paint buried in successive layers beneath qualities. Divided into five groups, the the peaks and valleys of its heavily first spectrum consists of irony, mockery, worked surface.’ derision and abnegation; the second of melancholy, the third of humour, The idea of surface brings me to the the fourth of frustrated desire and fundamental role of tactility in the eroticism and the fifth of fear. There is perception of foreign forms. Unlike ” no logic, and no end to the potential the mechanically smooth finish of configurations of these structures. Ligeti’s modernist works, which sought to intent is not to describe, but to manifest subsume human input, the process of in sound what words can no longer creation is to be read in Auerbach’s convey adequately. Communication has canvases with all its multiple strands to struggle through a texture, novel and of development. Architectural forms unpredictable to its audience. are seldom perpendicular, more often ‘vertiginous’ – a word favoured by For Aventures (1962), Ligeti ‘invented Auerbach for the experience of 1950s language’ to sit next to actual language London. One could almost say that this as a ‘shell to a kernel’. This invented treatment of architecture amounts to language equally held a symbiotic a redefining of the modernist grid: far relation to the music it was for: reliant from futuristic ordered ambition, these on music for its expression, the overall canvases animate the messiness of the goal was not for the violation of musical present, where sites were only gradually narrative, but for the retention of, in transformed from bomb to building. the words of Ligeti, ‘an emotionally It is a postmodernist limbo in which, defined work’. The seven scenes of Boris to quote Doris Lessing, ‘the place had Blacher’s Abstrakte Oper Nr 1 (1953) also been neither cleared, nor left,’ with chart a cyclic process through a range slabs neatly stacked beside lacerated of emotional experience: fear, love, buildings. In their physical existence, pain, negotiation, panic, love and fear. these sites both bodily commemorated Furthermore, finding words unsuitable the event of their destruction, and for his means, librettist Walter Egk freely evoked the obliteration of the incidental amalgamated sounds to convey emotion fabric of life by which they could be

3 Colin Wiggins, ibid remembered. Auerbach did not seek to 4 Auerbach in Hughes record his environment from the external

Right: Frank Auerbach Summer Building Site 1952 Oil on board Private collection

A SECRET GEOMETRY Written by Dr Charlotte de Mille, visiting lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

CURRICULUM LINKS: KS5+ Music, Art and Design, History, Art History and Philosophy. appearances. Rather, following his tutor enter a temporal dialogue, both in the Bomberg, his concern was for the ‘spirit reiteration and erasure within each of matter’, from whence a ‘full sense image, and the recurrence of models of “reality could be unpacked – the and subject matter in a series of works. structure, weight, density, malleability ‘Newness rises from repetition’ he and resistance to the object.”’ Bomberg proffers, ‘to have done something both contended that the eye was a ‘stupid unforeseen and true to a specific fact organ’ which needed other senses to seems to me to be very exciting.’7 The make sense of the world. It is no surprise unforeseen yet reassuringly familiar then that David Sylvester’s 1961 article structures are, to follow Sylvester, on Auerbach, “Nameless Structures” ‘“nameless” because they are reality should emphasise that ‘these structures re-made rather than representations of seem to be known from the inside, as pre-existing named objects.’ Akin to if the painter had become each object, Blacher’s wordless language, conjured had become the space, had become the from childhood travels across Russia to light, and had painted them from the China, and including a period of study “inside out.”’5 as an architecture student in Berlin, here reality is reconfigured from a multiplicity The immanence of this technique of experiences. understandably required trial and error, numerous sketches, and improvisation. Life in post-war London was, ‘We elucidate sight from the memory of by Auerbach’s own admission, touch, and out of our understanding of ‘improvisatory.’ Many writers recalled that architecture we then make an image the disconcerting fragility of what 6 Above: out of lines and other marks.’ Drawing had until then been regarded as an Frank Auerbach for Auerbach is literally constructive; ineradicable history of the city. Yet as Study for Oxford Street Building Site hewing what is barely understood from one contemporary wrote, war drove its c. 1957–59 the deepening charcoals, which smudge inhabitants back to the ‘blank spaces Pencil on paper (squared up in red pastel) Private collection substance from the void of paper. The of our origins.’8 For Auerbach, these Oxford Street Building Site (1957-59) origins consisted of a Jewish upbringing works include deft pencil sketches and in Berlin, coddled against the constant three oil sketches in addition to the final fears perpetrated by the rise of Fascism. paintings. Allowing Auerbach to work Writing of this period, Hughes invokes out formal structure and test elements a German popular culture of ‘folksong in shifting configurations, the sketches and beerhall, the incantatory screaming often led to a return to the main painting of loudspeakers and the crunch of boots with fresh inspiration. This method of the on broken glass.’9 By 1942, the short multiple, repeated, deconstructed and postcards he had received as a refugee finally the recast finds its analogy in the in Britain had ceased. With this abrupt fluid, reactive assertion and reassertion silencing, it is hardly surprising that the of themes in musical improvisation in capacity for sonic memory should not be which new structures are wrought. It retained. may be thought that jazz improvisation is the archetype of temporal music Auerbach is known for his ‘passionate that Auerbach fails to understand, yet, Englishness,’ having a ‘profound jazz technique is deeply reliant on a gratitude’ for his adoptive country. firm grasp of musical structure, and it His painting is shot with the peculiarly is precisely from this that new forms or English light learnt from Gainsborough, soundscapes arise. Arguably jazz, and Constable, and Turner – a light and all music, is as spatial as it is temporal. texture contemporaneously exploited Correspondingly, Auerbach animates by British composers such as Benjamin that very process that he wishes to Britten in bleak works such as the halt. Despite his exoneration of the War Requiem, Our Hunting Fathers, ‘fixed, the concrete […], the resistant Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain, Who are Above: Frank Auerbach to time’ – the secure - , his paintings these Children?, or more abstractly in Study for Oxford Street Building Site Sketch I 5 David Sylvester “Nameless Structures, Beaux Arts Gallery, 7 Auerbach in Hughes c. 1959–60 1961 8 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) in Wright Oil on board 6 Auerbach on Bomberg in Hughes 9 Hughes, from Auerbach’s recollections Private collection BIOGRAPHIES AND IT IS TRUE THAT AS THE FURTHER LISTENING: 1950’S PROGRESSED, LUCIANO BERIO (1925 - 2003). Italian born, AUERBACH’S PALETTE Berio escaped the Italian army to fight against the Nazis. He moved to the United States in BECAME LIGHTER... 1951, where his interests included serialism CORRESPONDINGLY and electronic music. Laborintus II, text by Edoardo Sanguineti EUROPEAN MUSIC from Dante, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound (1963); MOVED FROM THE Sinfonia (1967-69); Sequenza (1958 - 2004) EMOTIVE TOWARDS BORIS BLACHER (1903-1975). Arguably the father of post-war German music, Blacher EXPERIMENTAL first studied architecture in Berlin before becoming Director of its Music Academy in ELEKTRONISCHE MUSIK. 1945. Like Hindemith, his music was listed as ‘degenerate’ during Nazism: Abstrakte Oper Nr 1, text by Walter Egk (1953); Works for Solo Piano

BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-76). British the Cello Sonatas, written for Mtislav should be read.12 It is certainly true that composer, whose pacifist convictions forced Rostropovich. Further comparisons as the 1950’s progressed, Auerbach’s him to spend the war in the United States: could be drawn with the unexpected, palette became lighter, his forms less Requiem, W. Owen (1962); Our Hunting fragmented sounds and dense harmonic tenuous. Correspondingly European Fathers, W. H. Auden (1936); Canticle III: ” Still Fall the Rain: The Raids 1940. Night textures of Michael Tippet’s A Child of music moved from the emotive towards and Dawn, E. Sitwell (1954); Who are these Our Time, and his String Quartets, or, experimental Elektronische Musik. To Children? W. Soutar (1969); Cello Suites (1962- with more biographical accuracy, to the an extent, the avant-garde and popular 63) deeply English Polish émigré Andrzej culture reached an uneasy alliance, Panufnik. However, although at school in which Luciano Berio appeared on PAUL HINDEMITH (1895-). German composer, in Shropshire, many of Auerbach’s the cover of the Beatles Sergeant who despite commissions from the NSDAP fellow pupils and teachers were German Pepper album. Cutting up the past was denounced by Goebbels as an ‘atonal émigrés. Arguably it is in a Germanic and restructuring the fabric of creative noisemaker’ at the Nazi Degernerate Music or Eastern European experience of possibility was undoubtedly liberating. exhibition of 1938. Fled with Jewish wife to culture under duress that one finds Bomberg’s emphasis on spirituality might Switzerland, then USA in 1940: Cello Sonata an intensity and urgency of sentiment sit uneasily with the godless French Op 25 No 3, (1922); Kammermusik (1922- akin to Auerbach’s own. For amid existentialism, but beyond difference 1927); Matthias the Painter (opera), (1932- English light is a darker obscurity of was a shared excitement, courage and 1935) composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich freedom to conjure from the thin post- or Hindemith, and the sharp mockery war air a new ‘coherent plastic fact’; GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923-2006). Hungarian of human resourcefulness of Kürt Weill. to reconstruct, in Wright’s words, from Jewish composer brought up in Romania, who On first arriving in London, Auerbach that ‘liminal period between death and fled to Germany in 1956:Aventures, Nouvelles designed sets for the Unity theatre in resurrection.’ Aventures (1962;1966); Cello Sonata No I (Adagio, rubato, cantabile 1948; perpetuum South Kensington, and shared a flat with 12 Sylvester “Towards a New Realism”, lecture to RCA 1951 mobile second (Presto con slancio) 1953); musician Rainer Schuelein. He caught Musica Ricercata (1951-53); Glissandi the very end of the music hall tradition, (electronic) (1957); Atmosphères (1961) seeing figures such as George Robey, who he admired for the ‘subtlety, the ANDRZEJ PANUFNIK (1914-1991). Polish- 10 risk’ in his art. Beyond entertainment, born, emigrated to Britain in 1954 after the music hall served as a safety-valve, increasing demands from the Polish containing cultural discontent whilst Communist regime. Briefly conductor of airing popular fears. It was music with the CBSO: Symphony Elegiaca (1957; 1966); a purpose - Gebrauchsmusik to borrow Nocturne (1947; 1955); Four Underground Hindemith’s term for his own endeavour Resistance Songs, for voice or unison voices to bring music to bear on his cultural and piano (1943-44, Polish text by Stanislaw environment. Ryszard Dobrowolski); Reflections, for piano (1968) Post-war culture was distinctive on two counts: for remarkable resilience, even in This essay is accompanied by three live DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVITCH (1906-1975). the exiled; and a desire to comprehend performances in The Courtauld Gallery: Pre-eminent Russian composer who fell from fully mankind’s responsibility and favour in 1936. During his disgrace, composed accountability for atrocity. To the new THURSDAY 22ND OCT 2009 7-8PM avant garde chamber music to counter the philosophy of Existentialism the world Pianist Ivo Neame and Saxophonist necessity for the more conservative music the State demanded. His works were temporarily could only be what mankind made of James Allsop improvise on themes suggested by Auerbach’s paintings. banned in 1948.: Piano Trio (1923); The it, could only be described subjectively, Battlship Potemkin (Eisentsein film, 1925); according to experience. Art then String Quartets (1937-1974); From Jewish Folk became the fundamental mediator THURSDAY 19TH NOV 7-8PM Mahogany Opera: Towards a New Poetry (song cylcle, 1948); Symphony No 10 between man and world. There was (1953); My Testimony (autobiography, 1974) a real urgency to create, to shore up Movement. The company will preview humanity against it own self-destruction. works by Berio intended for a gallery MICHAEL TIPPETT (1905-1998). British Auerbach recalled Bomberg’s need space. composer who following a brief spell as a to affirm the spiritual‘ significance and Communist, became a committed pacifist, individuality’ of man: an end that only art SUNDAY 10TH JANUARY 2010 3-4PM spending three months in Wormword Scrubs could achieve.11 It is in this context that Cellist Morwenna del Mar performing for refusing to enlist: A Child of Our Time his own definition of ‘newness’ as ‘vitality’ extracts from Hindemith and Ligetti (1939-41); Four Songs of the British Isles should be understood, in this context (1956); String Quartets (1934-1991) too that writing on the ‘New Realism’ 10 Hughes For further details please contact: 11 Auerbach in Hughes [email protected] 6: REGARDE! RECONSTRUIRE LE QUOTIDIEN : LA POÉSIE D’APRÈS-GUERRE EN FRANCE JACQUES PRÉVERT

De 1940 à 1945, la France est soumise à Voici ci-dessous quatre poèmes, extraits DÉJEUNER DU MATIN de considérables bombardements de la de Paroles, dont Barbara – peut-être le Il a mis le café part de l’aviation alliée. Avec près de 550 poème le plus connu de Prévert - qui fait Dans la tasse 000 tonnes de bombes déversées sur référence aux 165 bombardements de Il a mis le lait son territoire, elle est, après l’Allemagne la ville de Brest entre 1940 et 1944. Le Dans la tasse de café nazie, le pays à avoir le plus souffert des cancre, encore souvent étudié à l’école Il a mis le sucre attaques aériennes anglo-américaines. primaire, est quant à lui, une illustration Dans le café au lait En cinq années de guerre, environ 75 000 de la reconstruction et de l’espoir du Avec la petite cuiller français périssent du fait de ces raids, renouveau et du bonheur dans les Il a tourné des dizaines de milliers d’autres sont années d’après-guerre tout comme Il a bu le café au lait blessés ou traumatisés et des centaines l’est Pour faire le portrait d’un oiseau. Et il a reposé la tasse de milliers d’habitations ou d’immeubles Déjeuner du matin, met en scène la Sans me parler sont rasés ou endommagés. Des villes rupture amoureuse dans tout ce qu’elle Il a allumé comme Brest, Orléans, St-Nazaire ou a de plus simple, de banal mais aussi de Une cigarette encore Rennes sont largement détruites. douloureux. Tous utilisent un langage Il a fait des ronds Comme dans le reste de monde, la poétique simple (sans ponctuation par Avec la fumée France met longtemps à se redresser de exemple) pour mettre en scène la poésie Il a mis les cendres la guerre, tant sur le plan économique, du quotidien. Dans le cendrier social, qu’humain et idéologique. Sans me parler Les années d’après-guerre sont pourtant Sans me regarder marquées en France par une grande DESTRUCTION ET RECONSTRUCTION Il s'est levé créativité dans tous les domaines DANS L’ŒUVRE DE JACQUES Il a mis artistiques. PRÉVERT, EXTRAITS DE PAROLES, Son chapeau sur sa tête PUBLIÉ EN 1946. Il a mis L’incompréhension, la destruction, Son manteau de pluie le chaos, l’atrocité ne sont aussi pas LE CANCRE Parce qu'il pleuvait toujours au cœur de ce renouveau Il dit non avec la tête Et il est parti créatif. Dans les années 1950, en Mais il dit oui avec le cœur Sous la pluie littérature, une poésie du quotidien Il dit oui à ce qu'il aime Sans une parole se développe en France. L’ordinaire, Il dit non au professeur Et moi j'ai pris l’habituel, le concret deviennent source Il est debout Ma tête dans ma main d’inspiration ; renouer le contact avec On le questionne Et j'ai pleuré. le monde, pour retrouver un sens au Et tous les problèmes sont posés réel est primordial. Pour Yves Bonnefoy, Soudain le fou rire le prend Francis Ponge ou encore René Char, il Et il efface tout s’agit de retourner à la réalité la plus Les chiffres et les mots simple, la plus juste, loin des rêves, des Les dates et les noms visions enchantées et irréelles (et parfois Les phrases et les pièges surréalistes) des années d’avant-guerre. Et malgré les menaces du maître Chez Jacques Prévert et Raymond Sous les huées des enfants prodiges Queneau, une poésie légère, populaire, Avec des craies de toutes les couleurs parfois ludique qui commente sur ‘les Sur le tableau noir du malheur petites choses de la vie’ naît dès 1946. Il dessine le visage du bonheur.

Jacques Prévert (1900 – 1977), déjà connu du grand public pour avoir écrit les scenarios de films tels que Drôle de Drame, Quai des brumes, Les Enfants du paradis entre 1935 et 1945, connaît un succès incomparable en 1946 lors de la publication de son recueil Paroles. Il publiera près de 20 recueils de poésie entre 1946 et les années 1970. En sortant de l'école, Les enfants qui s'aiment, Les feuilles mortes, Sanguine ou encore Barbara seront aussi mis en musique. BARBARA POUR FAIRE LE PORTRAIT D'UN Rappelle-toi Barbara OISEAU Il pleuvait sans cesse sur Brest ce jour-là Peindre d'abord une cage Et tu marchais souriante avec une porte ouverte Épanouie ravie ruisselante peindre ensuite Sous la pluie quelque chose de joli Rappelle-toi Barbara quelque chose de simple Il pleuvait sans cesse sur Brest quelque chose de beau Et je t'ai croisée rue de Siam quelque chose d'utile Tu souriais pour l'oiseau Et moi je souriais de même placer ensuite la toile contre un arbre Rappelle-toi Barbara dans un jardin Toi que je ne connaissais pas dans un bois Toi qui ne me connaissais pas ou dans une forêt Rappelle-toi se cacher derrière l'arbre Rappelle-toi quand même ce jour-là sans rien dire N'oublie pas sans bouger ... Un homme sous un porche s'abritait Parfois l'oiseau arrive vite Et il a crié ton nom mais il peut aussi bien mettre de longues Barbara années Et tu as couru vers lui sous la pluie avant de se décider Ruisselante ravie épanouie Ne pas se décourager Et tu t'es jetée dans ses bras attendre Rappelle-toi cela Barbara attendre s'il le faut pendant des années Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie la vitesse ou la lenteur de l'arrivée de Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime l'oiseau Même si je ne les ai vus qu'une seule fois n'ayant aucun rapport Je dis tu à tous ceux qui s'aiment avec la réussite du tableau Même si je ne les connais pas Quand l'oiseau arrive Rappelle-toi Barbara s'il arrive N'oublie pas observer le plus profond silence Cette pluie sage et heureuse attendre que l'oiseau entre dans la cage Sur ton visage heureux et quand il est entré Sur cette ville heureuse fermer doucement la porte avec le Cette pluie sur la mer pinceau Sur l'arsenal puis Sur le bateau d'Ouessant effacer un à un tous les barreaux IL A MIS LE CAFÉ Oh Barbara en ayant soin de ne toucher aucune des DANS LA TASSE Quelle connerie la guerre plumes de l'oiseau Qu'es-tu devenue maintenant Faire ensuite le portrait de l'arbre “IL A MIS LE LAIT Sous cette pluie de fer en choisissant la plus belle de ses De feu d'acier de sang branches DANS LA TASSE DE Et celui qui te serrait dans ses bras pour l'oiseau CAFÉ Amoureusement peindre aussi le vert feuillage et la Est-il mort disparu ou bien encore vivant fraîcheur du vent Oh Barbara la poussière du soleil Il pleut sans cesse sur Brest et le bruit des bêtes de l'herbe dans la Comme il pleuvait avant chaleur de l'été Mais ce n'est plus pareil et tout est et puis attendre que l'oiseau se décide à abimé chanter C'est une pluie de deuil terrible et Si l'oiseau ne chante pas désolée c'est mauvais signe Ce n'est même plus l'orage signe que le tableau est mauvais De fer d'acier de sang mais s'il chante c'est bon signe Tout simplement des nuages signe que vous pouvez signer Qui crèvent comme des chiens Alors vous arrachez tout doucement Des chiens qui disparaissent une des plumes de l'oiseau Au fil de l'eau sur Brest et vous écrivez votre nom dans un coin Et vont pourrir au loin du tableau Au loin très loin de Brest Dont il ne reste rien.

Far left: and top: Figure studies for Oxford Street Building Site Left: Study for Shell Building Site: Workmen under Hungerford Bridge Frank Auerbach c. 1958-59 Pencil on paper Private collection

RECONSTRUIRE LE QUOTIDIEN: LA POÉSIE D’APRÈS-GUERRE EN FRANCE JACQUES PRÉVERT Written and translated by Alice Odin (for a full English translation see overleaf)

CURRICULUM LINKS: KS3+ MFL French. Destruction and Reconstruction in Jacques Even if I don’t know them REGARDE! Prévert’s works, extracts from Paroles, Remember Barbara REBUILDING DAILY LIFE: POETRY published in 1946. Don’t forget IN POST-WAR FRANCE JACQUES All translations, Alice Odin, 2009. For more That wise and happy rain PRÉVERT - A TRANSLATION. literary or poetic translations, please refer to On your happy face the English publications of Paroles. On this happy town CURRICULUM LINKS: KS3+ This rain on the sea MFL French. Can also be used for English THE DUNCE On the arsenal Literature, Art and Design, Art History and He says no with his head On the boat from Ouessant History But he says yes with his heart Oh Barbara He says yes to what he loves What a fuck-up war is He says no to the teacher What have you become now He is standing In this rain of iron He is questioned Of fire of steel of blood And all the problems are set And the one who held you tight in his arms Suddenly fits of giggle seize him Lovingly And he erases all Is he dead vanished or still alive The words and figures Oh Barbara Names and dates It is raining incessantly on Brest Sentences and tricks As it used to rain And despite the teacher’s threats But it is not the same and everything is ruined To the boos of child geniuses It is a rain of mourning terrible and desolate With chalks of every colour It is not even the storm On the blackboard of misfortune Of iron of steel of blood anymore Between 1940 and 1945, France is regularly He draws the face of happiness. Simply clouds destroyed by allied bombings. With almost That choke like dogs 550 000 tons of bombs dropped on its MORNING BREAKFAST Dogs that disappear territory, it is, after Germany, the country He put the coffee Along the water in Brest which suffered the most from anglo-american Into the cup And go to rot far away bombings. During the war, 75000 French He put the milk Far far away from Brest people die during these raids, and thousands Into the cup of coffee Where there is nothing left. more are injured. Hundreds of thousands He put the sugar of houses and buildings are wiped out or Into the café au lait TO PAINT A BIRD’S PORTRAIT damaged, and cities such as Brest, Orléans, With the little spoon First of all, paint a cage St-Nazaire or Rennes are vastly destroyed. He stirred with an opened door As in the rest of the world, France takes a long He drank the café au lait then paint time to rebuild itself after the war, not only And he replaced the cup something pretty socially or economically, but also on a human Without talking to me something simple and ideological level. He lit something beautiful A cigarette something useful Post war France sees however a very He made rings for the bird prosperous and creative activity in the arts, With the smoke then place the picture against a tree often removed from the chaos, atrocity and He put the ashes in a garden destruction emanating from the conflict. Into the ashtray in a wood In the 1950s, in literature, a certain type of Without talking to me or in a forest poetry, scrutinizing daily life and its ordinary Without looking at me hide behind the tree beauty develops. Poets draw their inspiration He stood up without speaking from the ordinary, the routine of daily life and He put without moving... recreate a strong bond with the exterior world His hat on his head Sometimes the bird arrives quickly by giving a new and vital meaning to reality. He put but sometimes it can also take years For poets such as Yves Bonnefoy, Francis His raincoat on before it decides to come Ponge or René Char, the aim is to return Because it was raining Don’t be discouraged to the most basic, simple form of reality, to And he left wait escape the pre war aesthetic ideals of dreams, In the rain wait for years if necessary spells, and surrealism. Jacques Prévert and Without a word the rapidity or the slowness of the arrival Raymond Queneau, two other French poets, And me I placed not having any link fashion a new type of poetry, also anchored in My head in my hand with the success of the picture the observation of daily life, yet more popular, And I cried. When the bird comes down to earth, sometimes funny which if it comes comments on the ‘little things of life’. BARBARA keep the deepest silence Jacques Prévert (1900 – 1977), who is Remember Barbara wait until the bird enters the cage already well-known for having written the It was raining incessantly on Brest that day and when entered in film scenarios for Drôle de Drame, Quai des And you walked smiling close the door softly with the brush brumes, Les Enfants du paradis between Beaming delighted dripping wet then 1935 and 1945, publishes in 1946 a collection In the rain erase all the bars one by the one of poems, Parole, which becomes an instant Remember Barbara being careful not to touch any feathers of the success. Until 1970, he publishes more than 20 It was raining incessantly on Brest bird collections of poems. His most famous works, And our paths met rue de Siam Then draw the portrait of the tree En sortant de l’école, Les enfants qui s’aiment, You were smiling choosing the most beautiful branch Les feuilles mortes, Sanguine and Barbara, are And I was smiling too for the bird also put to music and have become part of Remember Barbara paint also the green foliage and the coolness the French musical repertoire. You whom I did not know of the wind You who did not know me the sun’s dust Below are four of his most famous poems Remember and the sound of the grass beasts in the (all from Paroles). Barbara (possibly his best Remember that day all the same summer’s heat known poem) is a bleak comment on the 165 Don’t forget and then wait for the bird to start singing bombings which took place in Brest between A man was sheltering under a porch If the bird doesn’t sing 1940 and 1944. The Dunce, which is still And he called your name it’s a bad sign studied in primary school, and To paint a bird’s Barbara it means that the picture is wrong portrait illustrate the post war reconstruction And you ran towards him in the rain but if it sings it’s a good sign effort, and the glimmer of hope and Beaming delighted dripping wet it means that you can sign happiness the end of the war brought. Finally, And you threw yourself into his arms so you tear with sweetness Morning Breakfast, stages the painful, yet Remember that Barbara a feather from the bird banal reality of daily life and routine motions. And don’t be angry if I talk to you familiarly and write your name in a corner of the All poems use a simple poetic language I talk familiarly to all those I love painting. (which, among other specifics, barely uses Even if I’ve only seen them once any punctuation marks) and stylistic lay out to I talk familiarly to all those who love depict daily life. LEARNING RESOURCE CD

TEACHERS’ RESOURCE HOW TO USE THIS CD FRANK AUERBACH: You will need a web browser such as LONDON BUILDING SITES 1952–62 Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari to access Included in the Teachers Resource is a the contents of this CD. Most computers CD of images from the exhibition and have such software already installed. related works. This disc has been specially formatted to be easy to use. Images can Insert the CD into a computer and double be copied and downloaded as long as they click on the click here to start icon. This will are used for educational purposes only. A open the folder using your web browser. copyright statement is printed at the end of this section which outlines authorised and Image list pages include a thumbnail restricted usage. This should be read by (small image) and a full description of each every user before using this resource. image. Click on the thumbnail to see the image full size. The image can then be 1: AUERBACH IMAGES AND PODCASTS copied or downloaded: All images are exhibited in The Courtauld Gallery exhibtion, Frank Auerbach: London PC users: right-click on the image and Building Sites 1952-62, from 16 October select ‘Save Target As…’ Then choose the 2009 - 17 January 2010. All images location to which you want to save the copyright of The Artist. image. This also includes the audio recordings of Dr Barnaby Wrights interview with Frank Mac users: control-click on the image and Auerbach. (see section 3) select ‘Save Image As…’ Then choose the location at which you want to save the 2: RECONSTRUCTING LONDON image. This series of photographs show various buildings which were built after the second If your web browser is unable to open the world war. The architecture, typical of the folder you can open the data folder, inside 1950s and 1960s, symbolises the need which you will find all of the images saved to reconstruct but also (re-)develop the as j-peg files. originally bombed areas of London. More information on some of these new Please visit our following pages for more buildings can be found on the BBC Britain information on: from Above website: • Public Programmes: www.courtauld. www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove ac.uk/publicprogrammes, where you can All images © The Courtauld Institute of Art, download more educational resources, Conway Library organise a school visit and keep up to date with all our exciting educational activities at 3: 1950-60 BRITISH ART the Courtauld Institute. The images below illustrate contemporary • The Courtauld Gallery: www.courtauld. works of art to Frank Auerbach’s London ac.uk/gallery, where you can learn more Building Sites series. They help situate about our collection, exhibitions and Auerbach’s work in the midst of Britain’s events. 1950s and 1960s art world. All images © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London/the estate of the artist

To download a pdf of this teachers resource please visit www.courtauld.ac.uk/ publicprogrammes/onlinelearning CURRICULUM LINKS: KS2+ Art and Design, History, Art History, Geography and PSE. WITH THANKS

WELCOME IMAGE COPYRIGHT STATEMENT Henritta Hine 1. The images contained on the Exhibition Resource are for educational purposes only. 1: INTRODUCTION They should never be used for commercial TO THE EXHIBITION or publishing purposes, be sold or Dr Barnaby Wright otherwise disposed of, reproduced or exhibited in any form or manner (including 2: REBUILDING LONDON any exhibition by means of a television Viktorya Vilk broadcast or on the World Wide Web [Internet]) without the express permission 3: FRANK AUERBACH: of the copyright holder, AN INTERVIEW The Courtauld Gallery, London. Dr Barnaby Wright 2. Images should not be manipulated, cropped, altered. 4: AUERBACH AND 3. The copyright in all works of art used THE WOUNDED CITY in this resource remains vested with The Ayla Lepine Courtauld Gallery, London. All rights and permissions granted by The Courtauld 5: A SECRET GEOMETRY Gallery and The Courtauld Institute of Art Dr Charlotte de Mille are non-transferable to third parties unless contractually agreed beforehand. Please 6: REGARDE! caption all our images with Alice Odin ‘© The Courtauld Gallery, London’. 4. Staff and students are welcome to 7: IMAGE RESOURCE CD download and print out images, in order Courtauld Gallery Public Programmes to illustrate research and coursework (such as essays and presentations). Digital images may be stored on academic intranet databases (private/internal computer system). TEACHERS’ RESOURCE 5. As a matter of courtesy, please always FRANK AUERBACH: contact relevant lenders/artists for images LONDON BUILDING SITES 1952–62 to be reproduced in the public domain. First Edition For a broader use of our images (internal short run publications or brochures for Joff Whitten example), you will need to contact The Education Programmes Coordinator Courtauld Gallery for permission. Please Courtauld Institute of Art contact us at: Courtauld Images, The Somerset House, Strand Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, LONDON, WC2R 0RN Strand, London WC2R 0RN. images@ courtauld.ac.uk, Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2879. 0207 848 2705 [email protected]