So powerful is his attachment as a born-again Londoner that, not only does he hardly ever leave the capital, but for years he has restricted his painting to portraits of his wife and a handful of other sitters he knows well, and his landscapes to an area around his studio, a small triangle of north London framed by Camden Town, Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill.
Mr Auerbach's landscapes are rarer than his portraits. By coincidence, two of his finest, both the same size, and both painted in the same year, come up for sale next week―one at Sotheby’s and the other at Christie’s.
He creates the landscapes in his studio. “My first consideration on getting up in the morning, every day of my life, has always been about painting,” he has said. But he begins outside, making extensive drawings and studies as a prelude, less as an aide-memoire and more as a way of conducting an archaeology that is at once urban and physical as well as emotional.
In a 1986 Venice Biennale catalogue he said that embarking on a large painting “simply to make a record of … a decayed memory isn't sufficient. There has to be a conflict between what one wants and what actually exists.”
The process of putting down this conflict in paint can take many months. There is a constant cycle of scraping away and building up oils. The painting has to remain liquid to the end, which means repainting it entirely every session.
The London focus of Mr Auerbach's work meant that, for a long time, he had a reputation for being a British painter bought mainly by British collectors. In fact, his paintings were bought by more than 20 public collections as far afield as Mexico, America and Israel, as well as by countless private buyers. But his prices remained well below those of artists of similar stature but with more international reputations, such as Gerhard Richter, a fellow German.
The past year has seen a considerable change. In February 2006 Christie’s sold a collection of contemporary paintings belonging to Valerie Beston. “Miss Beston”, as she was always known, worked all her life for Marlborough Fine Art, a London gallery, where she befriended a number of leading post-war artists including Francis Bacon and Mr Auerbach, and even delivered fresh paints to their studios when they couldn’t afford to buy them. Her “Tree on Primrose Hill”, a small landscape barely 40 centimetres square, sold for £400,000, a world record for an Auerbach by a large factor.
That outcome persuaded another pair of collectors to sell. Two Americans approached Christie’s and Sotheby’s with “To The Studios II”, a large landscape painted in 1977-78, which their father had bought from Marlborough Fine Art in 1981. The two auction houses proposed remarkably similar marketing campaigns: a slot in a prestigious evening sale during the February high season; reproduction in the inside back cover of the auction catalogue; a tour of the painting to New York during the November 2006 sales season and later to Palm Beach; and advertising in Art & Auction magazine.
It was the financing that decided the contest in the end. Christie’s won the mandate by putting an estimate of £800,000-£1.2m on the painting, and offering the vendors a guarantee reportedly of £1m whether the picture sold or not.
Sotheby’s felt it could not compete. Then, quite by coincidence, a European collector living in London, a Sotheby’s client of long standing, offered the auction house another large Auerbach landscape from the same period, “Camden Theatre in the Rain” (shown left). Sotheby’s agreed a far more conservative estimate of £500,000-£700,000, with no guarantee.
In the catalogue, the two pictures look very similar in quality. But on the wall they are quite different. In “To The Studios II”, the viewer’s eye concentrates entirely on the left side of the painting, where a figure, visibly female, though made so with only three or four brushstrokes, is walking down some steps. The sky above is thin, and the right side of the painting hasn’t the same visual draw at all.
Of the two, “Camden Theatre in the Rain”, which will be sold first, is the masterpiece. The Ionic columns of the theatre and its large copper dome, filling the left side, are finely balanced by the crimson circle of the Tube sign on the right. Across the intervening sky Mr Auerbach has painted sheets of diagonal rain, the winter kind that hits you right on the ankle, fills your shoes and makes you long, unlike this artist, to flee the city in search of sun.
Mr Auerbach is likely to see another world record struck next week for his work. But even a price of £1m will one day seem a bargain.
The past year has seen a considerable change. In February 2006 Christie’s sold a collection of contemporary paintings belonging to Valerie Beston. “Miss Beston”, as she was always known, worked all her life for Marlborough Fine Art, a London gallery, where she befriended a number of leading post-war artists including Francis Bacon and Mr Auerbach, and even delivered fresh paints to their studios when they couldn’t afford to buy them. Her “Tree on Primrose Hill”, a small landscape barely 40 centimetres square, sold for £400,000, a world record for an Auerbach by a large factor.
That outcome persuaded another pair of collectors to sell. Two Americans approached Christie’s and Sotheby’s with “To The Studios II”, a large landscape painted in 1977-78, which their father had bought from Marlborough Fine Art in 1981. The two auction houses proposed remarkably similar marketing campaigns: a slot in a prestigious evening sale during the February high season; reproduction in the inside back cover of the auction catalogue; a tour of the painting to New York during the November 2006 sales season and later to Palm Beach; and advertising in Art & Auction magazine.
It was the financing that decided the contest in the end. Christie’s won the mandate by putting an estimate of £800,000-£1.2m on the painting, and offering the vendors a guarantee reportedly of £1m whether the picture sold or not.
Sotheby’s felt it could not compete. Then, quite by coincidence, a European collector living in London, a Sotheby’s client of long standing, offered the auction house another large Auerbach landscape from the same period, “Camden Theatre in the Rain” (shown left). Sotheby’s agreed a far more conservative estimate of £500,000-£700,000, with no guarantee.
In the catalogue, the two pictures look very similar in quality. But on the wall they are quite different. In “To The Studios II”, the viewer’s eye concentrates entirely on the left side of the painting, where a figure, visibly female, though made so with only three or four brushstrokes, is walking down some steps. The sky above is thin, and the right side of the painting hasn’t the same visual draw at all.
Of the two, “Camden Theatre in the Rain”, which will be sold first, is the masterpiece. The Ionic columns of the theatre and its large copper dome, filling the left side, are finely balanced by the crimson circle of the Tube sign on the right. Across the intervening sky Mr Auerbach has painted sheets of diagonal rain, the winter kind that hits you right on the ankle, fills your shoes and makes you long, unlike this artist, to flee the city in search of sun.
Mr Auerbach is likely to see another world record struck next week for his work. But even a price of £1m will one day seem a bargain.
“Camden Theatre in the Rain” will be auctioned in Sotheby’s contemporary art sale in London on February 7th; “To The Studios II” is in Christie’s sale the following evening.
Art.view Auerbach’s hour Economist.com
Art.view Auerbach’s hour Economist.com
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