Oxford Street Building Site (Study)

"(Auerbach) was not only a 'born-again Englishman', as he put it, but a born-again Londoner, who acquired all his cultural baggage in the city and would not leave it. 'I hate leaving my studio, I hate leaving (Camden Town), I hate leaving London...' 'I have a strong sense that London has not been properly painted. New York has been - think Stella's Brooklyn Bridge, or O'Keefe's Shelton with Sunspots. Paris has been painted to the last details. But London? Monet on the Thames, Derain at the docks, bits and pieces, rather spottily, by Whistler and Sickert. But it has cried out to be painted, and has not been. The things Rimbaud and Verlaine felt about it! They cried out to be recorded and preserved against time!'...in the 50s he mainly painted holes in the ground. Sites in the centre of London, bombed flat, were then being dug out and rebuilt. The excavations, chasms of mud and shored-up earth, overhung by cranes and crossed by scaffolding and catwalks, fascinated him..." (R. Hughes, 'Frank Auerbach', London, 1990, pp.83, 84).