Braving Oxford Street for Frank Auerbach

I avoid Oxford Street whenever possible. Especially at this time of year. Last week I made an exception. I needed a break from the office so I walked over to see the late Frank Auerbach’s landscapes at Offer Waterman & Francis Outred (Auerbach died aged 93 on 11th November. I started the year with his Charcoal Heads and I’m ending the year with his landscapes). The two galleries are in one premises for one show: three floors of a Georgian townhouse just off Hanover Square, guarded by a pair of doormen who open the door for you as you arrive. I wondered whether they were there for the paintings or just for show. Who knows. But you’d have to be a discerning criminal to go for any of these works.

Auerbach was better known as a portrait painter (his lifelong friend Leon Kossoff was the landscape guy, together their works are almost, almost indistinguishable), but actually around a quarter of Auerbach’s works were landscapes. This show is a miniature survey, a collection of works made across six decades, 1959 to 2019, almost exclusively scenes of North London, from tight-cropped close ups of the post-war reconstruction of Oxford Street to vistas of the city as seen from Primrose Hill.

If you’re quick, you can probably still catch the show, it closes on the 7th of December, and I recommend you do, even though you probably won’t have the experience I had: I walked into the gallery just as one of the directors began showing her elderly parents around. Each of the rooms was so small that there was no polite way of leaving them to it. So, I ended up getting a kind of private tour along with the father who had the character of an army colonel and who still remembered playing in bomb sites, the mother in black converse who loved the word marvellous, and their small dachshund.

On the ground floor were the early works, from the thick layered browns and greys of Oxford Street Building Site Sketch (1960) to The Original of the Great Bear (1967-8), his neon yellow and navy take on Titian’s painting of Diana and Callisto. Moving to (more) colour in the mid ‘60s must have been a breath of fresh air after a decade choking on black paint fumes and charcoal dust. I stood in front of Oxford Street Building Site I (1959-60) while the director talked about how this canvas was so large and so thick with paint that it took six people to lift it into place. I doubted that the paint on his canvases had even dried by the time those buildings had been first thrown up and then torn down.

The tour continued downstairs to his middling middle age works and then upstairs to his lesser, later works. As the years passed, Auerbach’s world contracted from the edges of the city to the streets around his Camden flat. I broke off from the tour when we reached the top floor and Auerbach’s 21st century works. I knew I’d outstayed my welcome. Besides, the scraped-back canvases of works like Park Village – East Summer II just didn’t do it for me. It felt like I’d been given the diet option when I specifically requested full fat.

I passed the doormen on my way out. Surprisingly, I hadn’t managed to take any of the six foot canvases, even if I wanted to, and I stood on the street for a moment collecting my thoughts. On the other side of the road a building was covered in scaffolding. To the left of that was the empty shell of Vogue House. I turned around and above me, the same. I walked through Hanover Square and along Oxford Street, doing my best to dodge the dogs and tourists and tried to see the street how Auerbach saw it.

It was a good break from the office. I mean that it left me with more questions than answers. Answers are easy to come by: you type a few words into your computer, or you look in a book, or you somehow convince yourself that your first instincts were correct. You have to actually get up and out if you want to find questions, like, what was it that Frank Auerbach actually saw in the city?

It’s difficult to say. Each work seems to contradict the last. He wasn’t just a simple recorder of scenes and ruins. Auerbach painted mud holes and ruins but he also painted gods and mythology. He was an artist after all, give him some credit. We’ve known since Magritte that just because an artist paints something and calls it ‘Oxford Street Building’ doesn’t mean it’s actually a building on Oxford Street. Many writers like to say he saw his trauma in its post-war ruins (Auerbach was an orphan of the Holocaust) but he always dismissed this psychological interpretation. I think we might have to agree to disagree on this point.

Another question: did he even like the city? It’s kind of assumed that because he lived here and because he depicted it so often, that he did. But depiction isn’t endorsement. I’ve lived in London for a long time and I’d understand if Auerbach felt conflicted. London is difficult to love. Just when you think you have it figured out, it changes. Just when you think you’ve settled down, you’re thrown about again. You’re enjoying a brisk autumn morning to yourself, and then you’re snapped back to reality after a close encoutner with a rickshaw rider blasting Luis Fonsi’s Despacito ft. Daddy Yankee. The grand department stores of Oxford Street are almost all gone, now the street offers little more than phone snatching opportunities, money laundering sweet shops and dubious art galleries. Maybe Auerbach did come to love it later in life when he was old and sentimental, but I think if you scrape back a layer or two of paint you’ll find something much darker underneath.