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拍品专文
Alive with colour and a plunging, dynamic sense of space, Primrose Hill – Early Summer (1981-1982) glistens with the promise that the season brings to this jewel of a park in North London, close to Frank Auerbach’s studio. Just as Vincent van Gogh brought unbridled joy to the harvests in the fields around Arles and modernised painting in the late nineteenth century, so Auerbach imbued the stark topography of Primrose Hill with the same dynamic energy as he took expressive painting to a whole new level before his sad passing late last year. Time and again, between 1954 and 1987, he returned to this same location which occupies a unique viewpoint over London. His sophistication and dexterity with the brush creates a new landmark in the evolution of figurative painting. One only has to look at the broad range of techniques he uses across the composition from the sky to the foreground in this painting to appreciate a master at work.
Although the painting was probably created over a very extended period, what appears on the final surface was likely achieved in one monumental sitting. The paint lives and breathes in all of its three-dimensional vitality, feeling as fresh as the day it emerged from the tube. A figure with a pushchair strolls across the foreground as a jogger emerges from the right. Two walkways carve through an impasto of yellow-green grass, punctuated by streetlamps like musical notes. The ground rises towards the distance; a tiny cyclist can be glimpsed at the foot of the hill. Reds and oranges flash at the horizon, and angular strokes capture riots of vegetation beneath a pearlescent sky. Some months previously, Auerbach completed a pendant work depicting this view of the park in a different season: Primrose Hill – Winter (1981-1982) is in the collection of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.
Discussing a Primrose Hill painting from 1971, the art historian T. J. Clark identified a special ‘double consciousness’ in Auerbach. ‘He can get away with the invocation of Constable and Hampstead Heath’, wrote Clark, ‘because his invocation of van Gogh and Crows over the Wheatfield is just as strong. The coexistence of the two saves both’ (T. J. Clark, ‘Frank Auerbach’s London’, The London Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 17, 10 September 2015). Indeed, Auerbach’s engagement with these two masters of landscape lies at the heart of the present painting. He uses figures to create perspective in a manner that recalls the sowers seen in van Gogh’s wheatfields: the hill’s swelling axis is made more momentous as the eye leaps from the walker in the foreground towards the small, distant cyclist. Drama builds in the contrast between the sky and the earth, which feature markedly different treatments of paint. The sky, dripping colour and scored with sgraffito, is polished to a glow above the more liquid, linear strokes that structure pathways and grass.
With the painting’s mercurial sweep of light and weather shifting over the anchoring ground, Auerbach also reveals his kinship with John Constable. Constable revolutionised the landscape genre in the nineteenth century with paintings that were remarkably forceful and free, capturing the living dynamics of nature as well as a profoundly emotive sense of place. He depicted locations he knew well, primarily in his native Stour Valley, charging every vista with an earthbound narrative weight. While Auerbach admired his forebear’s well-known mastery of ‘the clouds and the freshness and the light’, what most impressed him, he said, was Constable’s ‘doggedness’: a quality he identified in himself. ‘I can’t think of another painter who has invested quite so much in every single image,’ Auerbach said. ‘He seems to have walked every path, measured every distance between every tree. Everything has been worked for and made personal so you sometimes feel that Constable’s own body is somehow inside the landscapes there’ (F. Auerbach in conversation with T. Adams, ‘Frank Auerbach: Constable, Turner and me’, The Observer, 21 September 2014).
Auerbach’s presence can be felt just as keenly in his own landscapes. ‘This part of London is my world’, the artist said. ‘I’ve been wandering around these streets for so long that I have become attached to them, and as fond of them as people are of their pets’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2001, p. 15). He had escaped Germany just before his eighth birthday in 1939, and rarely left London for his entire adult life. Observing his environment devotedly in his paintings, he charted its constancy and change across seven decades of work. Auerbach’s love of the city—centred on the area around his Camden studio, Mornington Crescent, Hampstead Heath and Primrose Hill—was as uncompromising and obsessive as his approach to human subjects. He would wrestle for months with repeated compositions of the same scene, making sketches en plein air before beginning his intensive studio process.
‘I think my sitters would tell you that I’m usually fairly abandoned when they’re there,’ Auerbach observed, ‘but there’s a further degree of abandon when I’m doing the landscapes because I’m absolutely on my own.’ The landscapes, he said, required a ‘tremendous physical effort’ due to their size and his working methods. Auerbach would scrape back a painting’s entire surface at the end of a session before beginning afresh the next day, ultimately completing the image in a single sitting: ‘putting up a whole image, and dismantling it and putting up another whole image … I don’t think I’ve ever finished a landscape without a six of seven hour bout of work. Whereas, a person or a head is a single form and it can come about in a shorter period of time’ (F. Auerbach quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 2000, p. 170).
Over a period of three decades Auerbach made some forty pictures of Primrose Hill. Thirteen of them are now held in museum collections, including Tate, London; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the National Galleries of Scotland; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. They can be seen to track the evolution of his practice across the years. The park first appears in a painting of 1954, whose earth-coloured, thickly encrusted surface corresponds to the ruins and building sites Auerbach depicted in the same period. His methods were informed by his teacher David Bomberg, who advocated an ardent, intimate approach, seeking to capture what he called ‘the spirit in the mass’ through repeated encounters with a subject. Auerbach’s treatment of the landscape later became brighter, looser and more rapturous. A new palette and handling began to creep in with Primrose Hill, Spring Sunshine (1961-1962 / 1964, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh). During the later 1960s, with works such as Primrose Hill (1967-1968, Tate, London), it was the site of some of his most daring forays into abstracted, zigzagging colour and form as he radically reimagined the English pastoral.
Auerbach’s demanding, layered process is especially visible in the sky of Primrose Hill – Early Summer, where countless applications and elisions have compacted into a luminous, marbled density of blue, white and yellow. Each element below locks into a perfectly composed scheme, at once conveying the park’s spatial architecture and flooding its structures with light and movement. The twin diagonals of the distant paths, the verdant profusion of the trees, the rhyming verticals of streetlamps, pedestrian and cyclist: the picture sings with van Gogh’s chromatic, vertiginous energy and Constable’s atmospheric alertness. It is in this fusion of keen geometry and alive, animated existence that Auerbach’s work finds its own unique power, and Primrose Hill takes its place among the great landscapes of art history.
Although the painting was probably created over a very extended period, what appears on the final surface was likely achieved in one monumental sitting. The paint lives and breathes in all of its three-dimensional vitality, feeling as fresh as the day it emerged from the tube. A figure with a pushchair strolls across the foreground as a jogger emerges from the right. Two walkways carve through an impasto of yellow-green grass, punctuated by streetlamps like musical notes. The ground rises towards the distance; a tiny cyclist can be glimpsed at the foot of the hill. Reds and oranges flash at the horizon, and angular strokes capture riots of vegetation beneath a pearlescent sky. Some months previously, Auerbach completed a pendant work depicting this view of the park in a different season: Primrose Hill – Winter (1981-1982) is in the collection of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.
Discussing a Primrose Hill painting from 1971, the art historian T. J. Clark identified a special ‘double consciousness’ in Auerbach. ‘He can get away with the invocation of Constable and Hampstead Heath’, wrote Clark, ‘because his invocation of van Gogh and Crows over the Wheatfield is just as strong. The coexistence of the two saves both’ (T. J. Clark, ‘Frank Auerbach’s London’, The London Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 17, 10 September 2015). Indeed, Auerbach’s engagement with these two masters of landscape lies at the heart of the present painting. He uses figures to create perspective in a manner that recalls the sowers seen in van Gogh’s wheatfields: the hill’s swelling axis is made more momentous as the eye leaps from the walker in the foreground towards the small, distant cyclist. Drama builds in the contrast between the sky and the earth, which feature markedly different treatments of paint. The sky, dripping colour and scored with sgraffito, is polished to a glow above the more liquid, linear strokes that structure pathways and grass.
With the painting’s mercurial sweep of light and weather shifting over the anchoring ground, Auerbach also reveals his kinship with John Constable. Constable revolutionised the landscape genre in the nineteenth century with paintings that were remarkably forceful and free, capturing the living dynamics of nature as well as a profoundly emotive sense of place. He depicted locations he knew well, primarily in his native Stour Valley, charging every vista with an earthbound narrative weight. While Auerbach admired his forebear’s well-known mastery of ‘the clouds and the freshness and the light’, what most impressed him, he said, was Constable’s ‘doggedness’: a quality he identified in himself. ‘I can’t think of another painter who has invested quite so much in every single image,’ Auerbach said. ‘He seems to have walked every path, measured every distance between every tree. Everything has been worked for and made personal so you sometimes feel that Constable’s own body is somehow inside the landscapes there’ (F. Auerbach in conversation with T. Adams, ‘Frank Auerbach: Constable, Turner and me’, The Observer, 21 September 2014).
Auerbach’s presence can be felt just as keenly in his own landscapes. ‘This part of London is my world’, the artist said. ‘I’ve been wandering around these streets for so long that I have become attached to them, and as fond of them as people are of their pets’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2001, p. 15). He had escaped Germany just before his eighth birthday in 1939, and rarely left London for his entire adult life. Observing his environment devotedly in his paintings, he charted its constancy and change across seven decades of work. Auerbach’s love of the city—centred on the area around his Camden studio, Mornington Crescent, Hampstead Heath and Primrose Hill—was as uncompromising and obsessive as his approach to human subjects. He would wrestle for months with repeated compositions of the same scene, making sketches en plein air before beginning his intensive studio process.
‘I think my sitters would tell you that I’m usually fairly abandoned when they’re there,’ Auerbach observed, ‘but there’s a further degree of abandon when I’m doing the landscapes because I’m absolutely on my own.’ The landscapes, he said, required a ‘tremendous physical effort’ due to their size and his working methods. Auerbach would scrape back a painting’s entire surface at the end of a session before beginning afresh the next day, ultimately completing the image in a single sitting: ‘putting up a whole image, and dismantling it and putting up another whole image … I don’t think I’ve ever finished a landscape without a six of seven hour bout of work. Whereas, a person or a head is a single form and it can come about in a shorter period of time’ (F. Auerbach quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 2000, p. 170).
Over a period of three decades Auerbach made some forty pictures of Primrose Hill. Thirteen of them are now held in museum collections, including Tate, London; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the National Galleries of Scotland; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. They can be seen to track the evolution of his practice across the years. The park first appears in a painting of 1954, whose earth-coloured, thickly encrusted surface corresponds to the ruins and building sites Auerbach depicted in the same period. His methods were informed by his teacher David Bomberg, who advocated an ardent, intimate approach, seeking to capture what he called ‘the spirit in the mass’ through repeated encounters with a subject. Auerbach’s treatment of the landscape later became brighter, looser and more rapturous. A new palette and handling began to creep in with Primrose Hill, Spring Sunshine (1961-1962 / 1964, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh). During the later 1960s, with works such as Primrose Hill (1967-1968, Tate, London), it was the site of some of his most daring forays into abstracted, zigzagging colour and form as he radically reimagined the English pastoral.
Auerbach’s demanding, layered process is especially visible in the sky of Primrose Hill – Early Summer, where countless applications and elisions have compacted into a luminous, marbled density of blue, white and yellow. Each element below locks into a perfectly composed scheme, at once conveying the park’s spatial architecture and flooding its structures with light and movement. The twin diagonals of the distant paths, the verdant profusion of the trees, the rhyming verticals of streetlamps, pedestrian and cyclist: the picture sings with van Gogh’s chromatic, vertiginous energy and Constable’s atmospheric alertness. It is in this fusion of keen geometry and alive, animated existence that Auerbach’s work finds its own unique power, and Primrose Hill takes its place among the great landscapes of art history.