MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ABROAD

LONDON - Some of the brass outside the clubs on Pall Mall needs a little buffing these days, a minor sign of something maybe, but London is still prosperous.

This makes imagining what the city looked like after World War II next to impossible. German bombs destroyed some 80,000 buildings and damaged 700,000 here.

Today early postwar London has gone the way of medieval London. It has mostly disappeared. Now an exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s paintings of the rebuilding of the city, from the 1950s and early ‘60s, helps conjure it back up. A pitch-perfect affair, tucked into the attic at the Courtauld Gallery, it presents the city and artist both emerging from the shambles.

Born in Berlin in 1931 to Jewish parents, he spent the war years in English boarding schools, where his parents had sent him, at 7, to escape the Nazis. Orphaned after they died in a concentration camp, he settled into a life in London, studying at different art schools, moving in 1954 to a studio in Camden Town, where he still works.

His subjects are the neighborhood and models who will sit for him for months on end. Famously, he almost never leaves town, laboring over pictures for years, painting and repainting them , a process he refined on the scenes of a postwar London under construction that are in the show.

Even while the bombs were still falling , British city planners and architects dreamed of how to replace the old city. Grand designs to remake London into a coherent whole, a la Paris, were all too complex and time consuming. Instead a haphazard boom in construction occurred in the 1950s and early ‘60s .

The transformation caught Mr. Auerbach’s eye - not the new buildings and bridges, but the city on the cusp. “A city fully functional is to me a somewhat formally boring collection of cubic rectilinear shapes, but London after the war was a marvelous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags, full of drama,” he recalled in an essay in the exhibition’s catalog.

The pictures are virtually abstract at a glance. What holds them in place, their architecture, is the grid, the most basic modernist scaffolding. It’s there in the heavy planks of paint, vortices making rough geometry out of muddy, metallic scenes.

Colors tend toward ochre, matt greens, grays and dried-blood red, an economy of palette to match straitened scenes. Charred, molten surfaces, greasy, or like fields of raked dirt or sand, make a natural corollary to the grime, silt and soot they depict, although Mr. Auerbach never meant to be so literal.

One painting, “Shell Building Site From the Thames,” encapsulates the series. Cranes and cables inspired Mr. Auerbach to erect a kite-shaped network of lines, dark against light. Rembrandt is the explicit source. The image derives from a small masterpiece in the National Gallery here, a darkling “Lamentation” in which light emanates from the dead body of Jesus at the base of the cross .

The virtue of these paintings is to capture both the gravity and lightness of an era, when everything was changing. Londoners salvaged beauty from chaos as they moved the city toward recovery.

It was the young Mr. Auerbach’s task, day after day, in the studio.


MARLBOROUGH FINE ART; HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES, VIA COURTAULD GALLERY; FRANK AUERBACH / MARLBOROUGH FINE ART


A 1958 sketch by Frank Auerbach of tower cranes, top left, inspired by a photograph. Top right, “Rebuilding the Empire Cinema,” at Leicester Square, and “Shell Building Site From the Thames” (1959) at the Courtauld Gallery. / MUSEO THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA, MADRID