Teachers' Resource
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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.