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Dimensions: 147.4 by 122cm.
58 by 48in.
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Provenance: Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Jacob B. Schulman, New York
Sotheby's, London, Post War and Contemporary Art, 30 June 1988, lot 641
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale
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Exhibited: Venice, British Pavillion, XLII Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte, (Frank Auerbach, Paintings and Drawings), 1986, no. 15, illustrated in colour
Hamburg, Kunstverein; Essen, Museum Folkwang, Frank Auerbach, 1986-87, p. 61, no. 28, illustrated in colour
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Literature: Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 212, no. 221, illustrated
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Notes: Frank Auerbach's dramatic landscapes depicting the area around his North London home and studio provide emotional and physical insight into the powerful impact of the urban environment on his work. Throughout his long career, Auerbach has chosen to paint only a select few landscapes around his home, none more important or psychologically revealing than his beloved Primrose Hill. Dotted with paths and small trees, this small hump of land lying next to Regent's Park was first painted by Auerbach in 1960 and has served for many of his paintings from nature ever since. Its sweeping panoramic views over London have served to invigorate and nurture Auerbach's palette with a sense of colour, vitality and scale from which to disengage with the dark, narrow confines of his claustrophobic Camden studio.
The volume of paint in the composition and its viscosity combined with Auerbach's uninhibited treatment of it, means that painting outdoors would prove impossible. Instead he works from a combination of charcoal sketches - with usually at least one made earlier that day - memory and experience are thus fused together in spontaneous material unity.
Without intending to be a series painter like Monet, Auerbach's 'portraits' of his beloved Primrose Hill revel in the beauty and drama of the changing seasons. More than any of his urban architectural landscapes, these pictures afford an exquisite documentary of the changing light and mood in London and their effects on his own state of mind and palette. Primrose Hill, Autumn powerfully evokes the experience of Autumn, its warm pastel colours and bold abstract contours infused with the pink glow of Autumn light as it falls upon the evening landscape. The zig-zagging energy of the clouds as they drift across the sky guides our gaze up and down the composition with drama lurking in the junctions of light and dark as one plane gives way to another in the constant play of matter and space. The rhythmic unity between earth and sky fluctuates between grand events like the bulging lobe of the horizon enveloped within the sweeping panorama, and smaller fleeting episodes like a running child, dazzling rays of light, and a woman with a pushchair.
The passion and intensity of Auerbach's gestures here engage the viewer with a dialogue of familiarity and admiration between the artist and his subject. Exhibited in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1986, Primrose Hill has a deeply mediated poetic grandeur that locates it within the British landscape tradition of Constable and Turner.
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