As one of the pre-eminent figurative painters working today, with a career spanning over fifty years, Frank Auerbach together with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff, was a vital life force behind the ‘School of London’ movement. Auerbach’s practice embodies a resolute commitment to figurative painting, concentrating on intuitive and intense observations of the physical world.

The present work, Park Village East, 1994, takes its name from a street near Regent’s Park in London, close to Auerbach’s studio. Since moving to a studio in Camden in 1954, the neighbourhoods of North London provided Auerbach with some of his most critical and enduring subject matters. From 1994 until 1999, Auerbach created a series of paintings of Park Village East, capturing the street during the varying seasons. He begins a landscape by first sketching the selected location numerous times to use as a guide for the final painting which takes place in the studio. Indeed, six pencil and ink sketches for Park Village East, Winter were retained by Auerbach and are now housed in the National Gallery in London. The energy and immediacy of these initial sketches is still apparent in the final painting. As is characteristic of Auerbach, the work, rendered in heavy impasto lends an almost sculpturally carved air. A framework of thick black contour lines dominates the canvas in horizontal and vertical brushstrokes and can be interpreted as trees or architectural structures. Auerbach expresses his complete authority of colour through the varying shades of subdued blues and greens and vibrant splashes of cherry red. With assured, bold brushstrokes, Auerbach captures the essence of the scene – the raw texture of the striations of paint allow the blurred features of the street to come alive:

“If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you” (Frank Auerbach cited in: John O'Mahony, ‘Surfaces and depths’, The Guardian, 15 September 2001, online).

Alongside Francis Bacon, Auerbach tended to favour painterly intuition over carefully-studied precision – both artists viewed the process of creating art as an instrument with which to examine human sensation. Early in his career, Auerbach would paint on top of the previous day’s work, creating thick surfaces. However, since the 1960s he developed a laborious painterly process, whereby he scrapes down the whole surface before each new attempt, so that the final version of the painting is made comparatively rapidly in order to express the ever-changing nature of the city. The painting is only complete when Auerbach achieves what he calls a ‘reinvention of the physical world’ (Frank Auerbach cited in: ArtUK, National Museum Wales, National Museum Cardiff, online). The resulting works hovers between spontaneous and studied.

Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach arrived in Britain in 1939 as part of the mass emigration of Jewish children known as the Kindertransport. He enrolled in art school in 1948, first at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art until 1952, and then at the Royal College of Art until 1955. However, the clearest influence on Auerbach came from a series of additional classes he took at London’s Borough Polytechnic, where he and fellow student Leon Kossof were taught by David Bomberg. Bomberg propounded the idea of exploring ‘the spirit in the mass’, which could be achieved by delving into a subject rather than be distracted by surface qualities.

Although loosely grouped with the School of London artists, it is perhaps more apt to consider Auerbach’s technique alongside that of Willem de Kooning and Alberto Giacometti, whom he greatly admired: “If you look at a Giacometti or a Matisse or a Picasso, or de Kooning, you certainly get the sense that what they’re not doing is describing the outward experience of something but describing their involvement with it, identification with it… And if you identify yourself with something, you try it, you’ll be identifying with your whole body, not just with your eyes’ (Frank Auerbach cited in: Jay Elwes, ‘Interview: Frank Auerbach’, Prospect Magazine, 19 July 2012, online).

Auerbach has continuously pursued observation-based landscape painting, which had fallen out of favour in the post-World War II period. As part of both the modern and classical traditions of portraiture and landscape painting, he is uniquely situated in the history of art. ‘In spite of his surface wildness and the thickness of his paint (or in the case of thinner canvases paint that has been scraped off where it has previously covered the surface), there is a sense of rightness that gives each mark, each stroke, an emotionally laden meaning that strives towards a truthful representation of the subject, an aim which Walter Sickert — another of Auerbach’s English heroes — called “the interpretation of ready-made life’’ (Norman Rosenthal, ‘Auerbach and His History’, in:Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings, 1954-2001, Royal Academy of the Arts, London, 2001, p12).