Lot Essay
'Today the grid of Summer Building Site, 1952, does look fairly illustrative, but its chrome yellow diagonals and the little red figures of bricklayer and hodman looked promisingly raw at the time and already, in the impasto with which the vertical columns and the legs of the ladders that lock the centre of the painting together are rendered, there is a premonition (no more than that) of the thick surfaces to come. 'Not until the very end did I get the courage to make some things bigger and others smaller than they were, to get the expression of the whole thing ... When I had done it I recognized somehow that I had cut through my habits, I had made some shapes that seemed to conjure up a coherent plastic fact: I had done my own painting. I didn't know whether I would ever be able to do it again, but at least I knew what it felt like' (R. Hughes, loc. cit.).