THE PAINT'S THE THING; Frank Auerbach's thickly textured depictions of post-war building sites turned painting into a three-dimensional art EXHIBITION OF THE WEEK.

Byline: Brian Sewell

FRANK AUERBACH: LONDON BUILDING SITES 1952-62 Courtauld, WC2

FRANK Auerbach, at 78, continues to be presented as, if not quite a "grand old man of British painting", then certainly as one who has been "a leading painter of our time". At his dealer, Marlborough, his latest selling exhibition demonstrated yet again the falling-off in power and originality that was already obvious at least a quarter of a century ago. I forebore to review it rather than do both him and them commercial damage and it is now over. At the Courtauld Gallery, however, there is now a longer-lasting exhibition, severely art historical (though larded with unremitting reverence), of the earliest urban scenes on which his fame was founded, the memory of which still colours the way we see his current etiolated offerings.

Bryan Robertson, one of the few sane and reasonable critics of that day, described these early paintings in glowing, if general, terms: "There is no hysteria in Auerbach's work, no grotesque excess, no falsification whatever of the essential integrity of the subject... [his] work is full of strong feeling, marvellously disciplined by his artistic intelligence."

I too thought I could see this then, but with much repetition. I eventually began to doubt. Eight years ago, at Auerbach's retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy -- deliberately held concurrently with a Rembrandt exhibition in the same suite of galleries so that we should see him as the Rembrandt of this new century -- it seemed to me that all that Robertson had observed had been degraded into mere habit by a painter clinging desperately to comfortable formulae. Of these, the principal mannerism has been the use of exceptionally thick paint applied layer upon layer in a synthesis of paint and painted subject that is just short of three-dimensional modelling in low relief. Put very simply, after the first short burst of near originality, Auerbach relinquished the business of painting portraits and townscapes for the easier discipline of painting Auerbachs of Auerbachs.

His Marlborough exhibition perfectly made this point, though his once confident wallowing in the depths of paint is now reduced to defiant kicking in its shallows. It was the victim of another unfortunate comparison -- this time not with Rembrandt, nor with Constable (with whom the V&A compared him in 2006), nor with Titian, Tintoretto and Van Gogh to whom so many feeble critics liken him -- but with himself as a young man. I now know exactly what Wordsworth meant in Intimations of Immortality when he argued that "Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy" (true of us all), for Auerbach's prison was of his own construction and its foundations were laid in his paintings of London's post-war building sites, now reviewed and reconsidered at the Courtauld.

Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach as a boy just short of eight found himself uprooted and in England, his Jewish parents left behind to die in Nazi concentration camps. German by birth and early education, he had to learn not only a new language, but new loyalties. Iris Origo, a distinguished writer of the day, paid for his keep and education -- a matter of pure chance -- and he was sent to a short-lived boarding school run by a Jewish Quaker on very un-English lines, co-educational and idealist yet sexually restrictive, disciplined as a self-regulating community. Auerbach was thought to have the makings of an actor.

In Shropshire throughout the war, he saw nothing of it until it was over, and then, at 16, he came to London, where assorted relatives clubbed together to give him [pounds sterling]4.50 a week -- a by no means miserly amount on which to live -- and the slow business of becoming a painter began, first at Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute, then in the Borough Polytechnic where he was taught by David Bomberg, the tutelary genius who con-tinued to be the boy's inspiration when, in September 1948, he joined St Martin's School of Art. In 1952 he transferred to the Royal College, graduating in 1955 after seven full years of training as a painter.

It was precisely at this point of transition from one school to the other that he discovered what he could do with thick paint: a quasi-naturalistic painting of a bombed site in Earl's Court Road in which rebuilding had begun had for months defeated and confused him at St Martin's, but returning to it at the end of his first day at the RCA, raging over some petty episode to do with the rationing of paint, he attacked it with angry fervour, disrupting its colour with oranges and yellows that were very much the flavour of the period and its realism with the mass of paint. With the smothering of all that had earlier been descriptive, the painting "began to operate by its own laws" -- but isn't that the alchemy of all great paintings? -- and he "felt that it was the beginning of my life as a painter".

It was exactly so. The paint was still thinner than it was to become in the evocations of building sites that were to follow over the next decade, the touch was still tentative, the drawing desperately uncertain, the identifiable elements unrelated to anything that could be described as command of space, height, depth, distance, light and shadow, but some of the possible impastose textures of paint were exploited and Auerbach had begun to establish his simple personal language of tension between aggressive lines and submissive inchoate form; the material of paint was about to become more than the material manipulated by the brush to represent a subject -- it was to be the drawing, the painting and the subject itself. Paint was the mud and spoil that lay about in mounds waiting to be carted off as superhuman foundations were dug deep; paint was the concrete and cement; paint was the girder, scaffolding and crane.

Auerbach was not quite alone in painting bombed sites so long after the war -- Eliot Hodgkin did so too, recording the last in King's Road, Chelsea as late as 1976. During the war many were recorded by artists or enhanced as romantic ruins, but after it -- and long after they had been made safe and tottering ruins had been demolished and carted off to make humpy hills on the old parade ground of Wimbledon Common -- Londoners had grown fond of them as open spaces where wild flowers bloomed, saplings sprang, rural birds flourished and butterflies were born. We were accustomed to them as reminders of nature and Ozymandias -- so much so that we resented their redevelopment. Where Auerbach, safely isolated from the war, saw the energy of creation in the diggers and the cranes -- for that is what he jubilantly painted -- we saw another Blitz in the work of the developers, another destruction of what we had, over a decade or so, accepted affectionately as a status quo. I, much the same age as Auerbach but in London throughout the war, felt very differently about these gaps in the teeth of the metropolis and would have left many as they were; I am glad to have seen St Paul's from the river with almost nothing to obstruct my view of that great edifice; I hated the destruction by developers of townscapes that war had made so beautiful.

On this matter of post-war planning and rebuilding the exhibition's catalogue has a remarkably lucid, factual and flannel-free essay by Margaret Garlake on the pre-fabs and the stubby skyscrapers with which London was dotted between 1945 and 1960 -- the best that I have ever read. Two other essays deal with Auerbach in these early years, with his relationships with Bomberg, Kossoff and Parisian existentialism, with the looming presences of Melanie Klein, Georges Bataille and the ubiquitous and irritating David Sylvester -- admirable, no doubt, but neither Barnaby Wright nor Paul Moorhouse seems to have looked enquiringly enough at other painters of the period in London and Paris to see if Auerbach's textures and palette were quite so original and unparalleled. My recollection of the zeitgeist is that students were encouraged to trowel paint onto canvas, to treat it almost as a clay in which to model reliefs, and that only at the Slade School under William Coldstream was this actively discouraged.

Did Wright and Moorhouse ever ask themselves if Auerbach's early work was really as perfect as Bryan Robertson proposed, or is connoisseurship irrelevant in the new history of art? Half a century on I now see only evidence of hysterical activity in the frenzied surfaces, of grotesque excess in the excrescented depths of paint, and of the essential integrity of subjects falsified for the sake, not of artistic intelligence, but of Auerbach's artistic identity, a thing to be immediately recognised in every painting since.

Visitors to the exhibition may not even see this. These paintings are hung in such a way as to make them impossible to see; under steeply raking spotlights every bristle-line of every brushstroke gleams and glisters, and from every nugget and blob of ragged paint cast shadows reach, disrupting our perception.

Rarely have I peered into so many canvases only to see far less than can be seen in the catalogue's reproductions; rarely has there been so little point in going to an exhibition. The gallery is the instrument of the Courtauld Institute, once the finest school of art history in the world (coincidentally in the very decade of these paintings), and this is the best display of paintings that its current luminaries can manage? Are the curators smug or blind?

Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62 is at the Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, WC2 (020 7848 2526, www.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/) until 17 January 2010. Daily 10am-6pm. Admission [pounds sterling]5 (concs available, free Mondays 10am-2pm).

CAPTION(S):

Men at work: Building Site Portobello Road Winter, 1954 -- labourers take centre stage

Colour code: Summer Building Site 1952, which Auerbach painted at the age of 21 -- "I felt it was the beginning of my life as a painter," he says