Mornington Crescent IV is a luminous, atmospheric evocation of a bustling North London street. A suggestion of rain fills the sky and wets the pavements. The intensely saturated non-naturalistic colour of the paintwork is fulgent and electric. In the 1960s, Frank Auerbach began to complicate the relationship between form and content: the real-life scene and the literal facts of painting are lashed together in a taut, fiercely executed image. Some aspects of the scene stand simply as paint marks, while other aspects of the painting resolve unexpectedly to form a coherent, vivid passages of representation.

Frank Auerbach began painting the junction where Mornington Crescent, Camden High Street and Crowndale Road meet in 1966. It was conveniently close to his studio in North London, a mere five minutes’ walk away, and the subject summed up Auerbach’s sense of London as ‘this raw thing […] this higgledy-piggledy mess of a city’. Auerbach had been painting London’s construction and demolition sites since the early 1950s, and his decision to begin painting this locale represented a narrowing of focus. Alongside Primrose Hill which he had painted since 1954, this area of Mornington Crescent became a central subject in his routine. Auerbach depicted it in seventeen large-scale paintings made between 1966 and 1974, of which Mornington Crescent IV is one of the earliest and most significant.

Auerbach’s depictions of Mornington Crescent were first shown in 1967. Three other works were included that year in his solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, London. Four were shown in his exhibition at Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, in 1969, where Mornington Crescent (1967) (fig. 1) was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mornington Crescent IV was acquired privately between exhibitions and, aside from its inclusion in Auerbach’s Hayward Gallery retrospective in 1978, has remained undisturbed and unseen in private hands since its first purchase. Since these two landmark exhibitions, the Mornington Crescent streetscapes have been exhibited regularly often being used to represent the best of Auerbach’s landscape work and to identify him as a leading figure in a ‘School of London’. In 2016, the Getty Museum’s exhibition London Calling included Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law (1966, Private Collection). This work, Mornington Crescent IV, is of the same size and extraordinary quality as the work exhibited at the Getty.

Mornington Crescent IV adopts a similar viewpoint to three other paintings by Auerbach: looking south towards Mornington Crescent Underground station, with a window of the sky opened up on the right-hand side where Hampstead Road runs. The three related paintings are Mornington Crescent (1965, Private Collection); Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law; and Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law III, Summer Morning (1966, Private Collection) (fig. 2). The obscure reference to ‘Sickert’s Father-in-Law’ in two of these works acknowledges the Liberal politician Richard Cobden, who was noted for his vociferous campaign to repeal the Corn Laws in the mid-nineteenth century. Cobden’s daughter Ellen was Walter Sickert’s first wife.

The presence of Cobden’s statue was not the reason for Auerbach painting the scene. Nevertheless, since the statue is not clearly discernible in these paintings, it is significant that the artist mentioned it in the title and thereby elevated it above other elements of the streetscape. The parallel between Sickert’s work and his own is not lost on Auerbach and he has long admired Sickert’s writings. The statue of Cobden is also present in Mornington Crescent IV on the left-hand side of the composition, forming another of the strong schematic verticals which variously suggest streetlamps, bollards and scaffolding.

Due to its size, its eclectic neighbourhoods, its ceaseless reconstruction and its continuous thrum of activity, London has historically proved to be a challenging subject. In the paintings of Frank Auerbach, however, specific streets and interchanges (figs. 4 and 5) resonate with the energy and clamour which define the city. Where many others have rendered London in terms of illustration or an accurate topography, Auerbach has rendered it in terms of art: the seamless interlocking of subject-matter, a sophisticated handling of the medium, and the artist’s own feeling for both.

Auerbach’s intensive working method requires that he complete a painting in a single bout of activity. Though he might spend months or years painting the same image on a single board, it is comprehensively scraped back and made anew with each session. As Isabel Carlisle has explained, this makes the large-scale streetscapes like Mornington Crescent IV so much more impressive. ‘The physical effort required to produce the large paintings is enormous. Laying the ultimate version of the composition over the scraped-off remains of so many predecessors demands six or seven hours of intense activity, much more than the figure studies.’

The Mornington Crescent paintings of the 1960s are characterised by grid-like structures. Only sustained contemplation can transform one’s perception of these structures into coherent elements of the painting: their strangeness is intentional and was partly conceived as a way of heightening the viewer’s attentiveness. As Auerbach’s first dealer Helen Lessore wrote, the artist’s preference was to ‘present us with something relatively unfamiliar and often not immediately legible.’

Each block of colour and linear channel of paint is necessary to the finished painting, though their representational purpose is complex. Writing in 1969, Auerbach’s friend the art historian Michael Podro drew attention to the ‘strong paint marks’, ‘notation’ and ‘surface pattern’ which register so prominently in many of Auerbach’s paintings. He argued that ‘the treatment of representation and design as competing or disconnected factors cannot be maintained’; the qualities of design in a painting were rather taken as ‘analogies he can find in his paint for aspects of the subject’. Mornington Crescent IV is rich with these analogies: the roadside furniture of lamps and bollards is re-made in a sophisticated armature of verticals, horizontals and diagonals. This armature binds the painting to its subject, narrowing the gap between reality and representation as was Auerbach’s intention. It is also important to note that the area of Mornington Crescent was undergoing redevelopment at the time. Some of the uprights and horizontals indicate the scaffolding of construction work.

Auerbach himself has demurred from a detail-by-detail account of each picture’s content. In an undated letter to his art dealer Valerie Beston from the late 1960s, Auerbach provided an annotated diagram of one painting which included notes such as ‘hole’, ‘man with wheelbarrow’, ‘distant houses’, and ‘I can’t remember if that is a man or a cement mixer’. Some decades later he explained further to Catherine Lampert his attitude to identifying subjects in the cityscape paintings. ‘There are all those things [in the paintings – a vehicle, a jogger], sometimes unrecognizable to other people, but they are certainly recognizable to me. Some things are just brushstrokes and I don’t remember what they are. Courbet when questioned replied, “C’est la peinture”.’

Writing in 1990, the art critic Robert Hughes wrote of Mornington Crescent IV and singled it out as one of the most successful of Auerbach’s paintings of this subject. In this and another work of 1967, Hughes wrote, ‘One can follow Auerbach’s efforts to create a town-space that was less simply illustrational’. The artist had, he continued, ‘increased the illusion of depth with colour alone – a transparent silvery sky, a cold mild London light, which retains its impasto and is doubled in the rain-wet pavement below, while the oblong patches of red and blue that stand for railings and street-lights seem to dance within the grid.’ Hughes perceptively isolated the elements which make Auerbach’s paintings of London so vital. Even as he represents the city’s peculiar atmospheric day-time qualities (mild light, rain-wet), Auerbach at once conveys the vibrant human part of the metropolis, where even the pavements and buildings quiver and dance amidst the clamour.

More generally, Hughes noted the intelligent relationship between the colour in paintings like Mornington Crescent IV and Auerbach’s streetside subject-matter. ‘[U]nder the influence of the more variegated colour of out-of-doors – the red of traffic-lights, green of awnings and yellow of signs, no less than the vaster and more subtle effects of natural light in the park – his colour opened out in a way that it might not have done had he kept it, and himself, indoors. He was freer to imagine colour’.

Mornington Crescent IV is a remarkable painting, its size made impressive by the unctuous physicality of its churned surface and the specificity of its accumulated paint marks. These qualities of texture are inseparable from the intense saturation of colour. The work’s colour scheme of red, green and blue has a vivid strangeness which translates the familiar subject-matter of London’s streets into the world of art. Beside these literal qualities of texture and colour, Mornington Crescent IV is an historically important artwork; the depiction of London has rarely achieved such heights of visual intensity. Along with just seven other paintings of similar size and subject made by Auerbach between 1965 and 1967, this painting is a landmark in the artist’s career. Bringing together a personally significant subject with daring execution, complex composition, and intense saturation of colour, Mornington Crescent IV is one of the grandest and most extraordinary paintings in Frank Auerbach’s oeuvre of grand and extraordinary work.