Maples Demolition, Euston Road
On Frank Auerbach
In July 2018, activist and curator Gill Crawshaw invited six artists and writers to write an audio description of an artwork in Leeds Art Gallery’s collection, and to read it at the gallery, to an audience comprising visually impaired and sighted people.
I chose the painting ‘Maples Demolition, Euston Road’, made by Frank Auerbach in 1960. Born in 1931, Auerbach left Germany for Britain a few months before the outbreak of World War II, and became a British citizen in 1947; his first solo exhibition was in 1956, and he continued to exhibit until his death in November 2024.
Between 1952 and 1962, Auerbach created fourteen paintings in response to London’s post-war building sites; this work is one of the last in the series. The title refers to the Maples furniture store in central London, known, at one time, as ‘the largest furniture store in the world’, before it was gutted in the Blitz. Apart from the site description in the title, we are not given any textual information to help us navigate the painting.
The painting is almost square – roughly five feet by five feet – and mounted in a plain wooden frame (painted brown). There’s no glass in the frame, and this, along with the gallery’s low hang – the bottom of the frame is just two feet from the floor - invites the viewer to enter the physical field of the work. And it is physical. This is one of the earliest examples of Auerbach’s distinctive style, a no-man’s-land between Expressionism and figurative art. Typically, the picture is built up from layers of oil, thickly applied, then scraped off, the process repeated until something – an idea, an essence, a form - is distilled, and the final composition emerges. What the composition depicts, in this case, isn’t immediately clear. It’s the tones and textures that draw us in: dense, murky and viscous, as though the paint has yet to dry, the ground worked over in scores and strokes, and, in these ridges and furrows, the rawness of freshly disturbed earth. When we step back from this immediate, intimate encounter with the work, however, we find that there is detail and structure in every inch of this scene.
In the north-west of the painting, we find a squarish tract, defined, at its eastern and southern edges, by thick crimson bands, and bisected, diagonally, by a narrow, deep, yellow stripe. The area is further divided into two distinct regions of colour; a muddy ochre at the bottom, a smaller patch of desiccated olive at the top. In the upper region, flush to the vertical crimson band, we can make out the pattern of a three-tier stack, small rectilinear shapes in a double row; a framework, perhaps, or a scaffold. The bottom of this scaffold, or stack, also marks the limit of the vertical crimson band, which fades into light oranges and browns, a soft, porous border. It’s a grid within a grid, and perhaps the most ‘contained’ field in the painting. To the east of this line, the scheme is harder to read, and seems almost chaotic; we can lose our way amidst the dark churn and scuff in the north-east, and there are few discernible forms. Above the sludgy tan of the south-east, however, two parallel lines assert themselves, one the colour of maize, the other a greenish-blue; broad, straight and tilting from south-west to north-east, and at something very close to a right angle to the diagonal yellow stripe that cuts from north-west to south-east. Recrossing this boundary, from east to west, brings us into contact with another deep, dark blue-green line, slightly shorter than the other and joined to the yellow stripe at an acute angle, as if to lend it support. Moving further into the south-west, we alight on three crimson bars, vertical, parallel, unevenly spaced, terminating in banked sand at the bottom and in a T square at the top, where the central bar meets the southern edge of the north-western ‘grid’.
The composition seems to be on the edge of collapse, yet something is holding it together. Any one of these lines might be a beam, a strut, a girder. The painting, like the construction site it depicts, is both a ‘making’ and an ‘unmaking’: a foundation, and an unearthing. It’s an appropriate response to a city caught between ruin and renewal, and one that foregrounds the processes of creation and destruction, on the ground and in the studio.
July 2018 (introduction revised November 2024)
Click here to read Adventures in Ekphrasis, Emma Bolland’s account of the Leeds Art Gallery audio description event (essay commissioned by Corridor8). Gill Crawshaw’s report on the event can be found here.