Bomberg - Auerbach | Daniel Katz Gallery
A small but punchy show brings teacher and pupil together. Frank Auerbach joined David Bomberg’s art class in the years following World War Two, and over the decades to come, came to be known for his lugubrious landscape paintings of London scenes, thick with layer upon layer of oil paint, built up on the canvas like accreted urban grime. He’s closely allied in my head with the similarly-gloomy Leon Kossoff, who I’ve featured separately on here before.
There’s a couple of emblemetic Auerbach landscapes, blazing on the walls of the dimly-lit gallery. (The 20 or so works on show are drawn from private collections and, according to the gallerist, are generally not for sale.) Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s father in law, Cobden, from 1966 and pictured below, recasts a London street as a spindly hellscape, grids of craggy green and black paint picking out architectural details, the road a lava-like red.
There are also a couple of charcoal sketches of Primrose Hill, in which Auerbach picks out trees and branches with similar purgatorial precision. He later worked these up into a 1972 painting, which simplifies the landscape but complicates its textures.
Pathway, hill, trees and sky are picked out in layer upon layer of impasto. The paint is so thick that individual hairs of Auerbach’s brush are visible. It’s as craggy and rough as a blustery London sky, a deeply-recognisable version of which is picked out above.
Providing context to all this are some evocative landscapes from teacher Bomberg, though these seem polite and sedate when compared to his pupil’s work. Bomberg painted more dramatic real-life landscapes - he travelled to Corsica, Ronda and Jerusalem. But Auerbach’s skill is to render familiar London places all the more exotic and strange, through his thick, craggy oil paint.
Bomberg - Auerbach is at Daniel Katz Gallery (London). 20 June - 19 July 2024