Building Site Ontologies: Post-war London in the Paintings of Auerbach and Kossoff

Abstract

This paper develops an account of post-war London from the building site paintings of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. It approaches these paintings as a visceral and embodied source of data regarding the post-World War Two landscape of bomb damaged London. It contrasts this form of knowledge with the narratives of memorialization, and order and control, which I argue characterize post-war reconstruction. In this context the paintings are read as an ontological statement about the complexity and ambiguity of the urban landscape, one which contrasts with historical and contemporary narratives of the urban built environment. The paper posits that knowledges which preserve the complexities and materialities of urban space have the potential to provide political interventions into both historical and contemporary narratives of the city.

KEYWORDS:

• Building site
• Frank Auerbach
• Leon Kossoff
• Reconstruction
• Painting
• Urban Studies
• Post-War

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Phil Pinch, Suzy Reimer, the anonymous reviewers, and Charlie Turpie for reading and providing feedback on drafts. Thank you also to the many more who have provided feedback on presentations relating to this research. Lee Hallman kindly gave me access to her excellent PhD thesis on paintings by Auerbach and Kossoff. Thank you also to estates and galleries of the artists and to other institutions who have given me permission to reproduce the figures in this article.

Notes

1 For instance: H. Casson, Bombed Churches as War Memorials (Cheam: Architectural Press, 1945).

2 R. Hornsey, ‘“Everything is Made of Atoms”: The Reprogramming of Space and Time in Post-War London’, Journal of Historical Geography, 34 (2008), 94–117.

3 R. Glass, London Aspects of Change (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964), xiii. For an extended analysis of this essay, see S. Johnson-Schlee, ‘What Would Ruth Glass Do: London: Aspects of Change as a Critique of Urban Epistemologies’, City, 23:1 (2019), 97–106.

4 See, for instance: M. Raco, N. Livingstone and D. Durrant, ‘Seeing Like an Investor: Urban Development Planning, Financialisation, and Investors’ Perceptions of London as an Investment Space’, European Planning Studies, 27:6 (2019), 1064–82.

5 D. Madden, ‘There is a Politics of Urban Knowledge Because Urban Knowledge is Political: A Rejoinder to ‘Debating urban studies in 23 steps’, City 19:2–3 (2015), 297–302.

6 H. Hawkins, ‘Geography and Art. An Expanding Field: Site, the Body and Practice’, Progress in Human Geography, 37.1 (2008), 60.

7 G. Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. (London: Sage, 2016).

8 A. Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford: OUP, 1998).

9 R. Slatter, ‘Materialities and Historical Geographies: An Introduction’, Area 51 (2019), 2.

10 Glass, London Aspects of Change, xiii.

11 Writing on the topic of the Abject Kristeva writes: ‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’, J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Samuel Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

12 The War lasted between 1939 and 1945. The Aerial bombardment of London was most intense during ‘The Blitz’ which lasted for 8 months between September 1940 and May 1941. Aerial bombardment continued until the end of the War particularly from V1 and V2 rockets but not with the same intensity in London.

13 An extended account of the Mass Observation Archive’s documentation of wartime Britain, and in particular aerial bombardment, is made by T. Harrison, Living Through the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

14 Mass Observation Archive, ‘M-O Bulletin for May 1941’, TC23 Air Raids 1938-45, SxMOA1/2/23 (1941).

15 Mass Observation Archive, ‘Bomb damage reports 12.5.41’, TC23 Air Raids 1938-45, SxMOA1/2/23 (1941).

16 A. Freud and D. Burlingham, Young Children in War-Time: A Year’s Work in a Residential War Nursery (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943), 68.

17 G. Moshenska, ‘A Hard Rain: Children’s Shrapnel Collections in the Second World War’, Journal of Material Culture 13:1 (2008), 107–25. See also, Gabriel Moshenska, Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain (London: Routledge, 2019).

18 During the Blitz as bombers flew overhead British guns fired thousands of anti-aircraft shells in response. They would explode at a pre-ordained height and create clouds of molten metal which were intended to tear through enemy aircraft, though more often than not they would fall back to the surface as shrapnel.

19 Moshenska, ‘A Hard Rain’, 112.

20 Moshenska, ‘A Hard Rain’, 113.

21 Moshenska, ‘A Hard Rain’, 112. Moshenska is drawing on Donald Winnicott. The Child, the Family and the Outside World (London: Penguin Books, 1964).

22 B. Highmore, ‘Playgrounds and Bombsites’ in Cultural Politics, 9.3 (2013), 323–36.

23 Highmore, ‘Playgrounds and Bombsites’, 332.

24 L. Glasheen, ‘Bombsites, Adventure Playgrounds and the Reconstruction of London: Playing with Urban Space in Hue and Cry’, The London Journal, 44:1 (2019), 54–74.

25 L. Ward, The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939–45 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015).

26 These photographs were published in James Pope-Hennessy, History under Fire: 52 Photographs of Air Raid Damage to London Buildings (London: B.T. Batsford, 1941).

27 M. Pohlad, ‘The Appreciation of Ruins in Blitz-Era London’, The London Journal, 30.2 (2005), 1–24; see also N. Matheson, ‘National Identity and the Melancholy of Ruins: Cecil Beaton’s Photographs of the London Blitz’, Journal of War & Cultural Studies, 1:3 (2008), 261–74.

28 Pohlad, ‘The Appreciation of Ruins’, 20.

29 L. Nead, ‘How John Piper Found Beauty in Bombed Buildings’, Art UK (2017). <https://artuk.org/discover/stories/how-john-piper-found-beauty-in-bombed-buildings> [accessed January 2020].

30 S. Wasson, Urban Gothic of the Second World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

31 L. Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke: Visual Culture in Britain c.1945-1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 63.

32 Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke, 63.

33 Clark in his role in the War Artists Advisory Comittee had been commissioned Piper and Moore among other war artists to document the bomb damage to Britain’s built environment during the war.

34 H. Casson, Bombed Churches as War Memorials (Cheam: Architectural Press, 1945).

35 P. Abercrombie and J.H. Forshaw, The County of London Plan (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1943); P. Abercrombie, The Greater London Plan (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1945).

36 R. Hornsey, ‘“Everything is Made of Atoms”: The Reprogramming of Space and Time in Post-war London’, Journal of Historical Geography, 34 (2008), 94–117.

37 Hornsey, ‘Everything is Made of Atoms’, 97.

38 Hornsey, ‘Everything is Made of Atoms’, 101.

39 Hornsey, ‘Everything is Made of Atoms’, 116.

40 Moshenska, ‘A Hard Rain’.

41 C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach Speaking and Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 55.

42 B. Wright, Frank Auerbach London Building Sites 1952-62 (London: Courtauld Gallery, 2009), 15.

43 D. Bomberg, Evening in the City of London (Museum of London, 1944).

44 L. Hallman, ‘On London Ground The Landscape Paintings of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff’ (Unpublished thesis, New York: CUNY, 2017), 84.

45 Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke; Pohlad, ‘The Appreciation of Ruins’.

46 E. Crippa, ‘Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff’, in Elena Crippa (ed.), All too Human (London: Tate, 2018), 131.

47 H. Hawkins, ‘Geography and Art. An Expanding Field: Site, the Body and Practice’, Progress in Human Geography 37.1 (2008), 60.

48 Hallman, On London Ground, 28.

49 See Gell, Art and Agency. For an account of the way in which art objects have agency in the world, and the value of ethnographic research methods in engaging with this sense of agency.

50 Tate Britain, All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life. 28 February – 27 August 2018.

51 Wright, Frank Auerbach London Building Sites, 19.

52 See Johnson-Schlee, ‘What Would Ruth Glass Do’.

53 H. Hawkins, ‘Dialogues and Doings: Sketching the Relationships Between Geography and Art’, Geography Compass, 5:7 (2011), 464–78.

54 Including: L. Kossoff, Shell Building Site, 1962. Private Collection; F. Auerbach, c.1958–61 Shell Building Site: Workmen under Hungerford Bridge; Frank Auerbach, 1959, Shell Building Site from the Festival Hall, 1959. Gray Art Gallery and Museum, Hartlepool; Frank Auerbach, Shell Building Site from the Thames, 1959. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

55 N. Cochrane, ‘Eleanor Coade, John Soane, and the Coade Caryatid’, in A. Leis and K. Wills (eds.), Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Routledge, 2020). There seems to be some disagreement about Eleanor Coade’s career: the 1951 published Survey of London stating that first Eleanor Coade senior, and then her daughter ran the factory. Today the consensus appears to be that Coade junior was the Eleanor at the helm of the factory from 1769 until 1821. ‘Coade’s Artificial Stone Works’, in Howard Roberts and Walter H Godfrey (eds.), Survey of London: Volume 23, Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall (London, 1951), 58–61. This entry in the London Survey also reproduces a diagram from 1804 of the wharves and other businesses owned by Jesus College Oxford along this part of the river bank.

56 Visible in the 1828 map by C. and J. Greenwood Map of London, from an actual survey made in the years 1824, 1825 & 1826 (British Library, 1828).

57 I. Cox, The South Bank Exhibition: A Guide to the Story it Tells, London, 1951 p.8 cited in Hornsey, ‘Everything is Made of Atoms’, 103.

58 Hornsey, ‘Everything is Made of Atoms’, 103.

59 H. Atkinson, ‘“The First Modern Townscape”? The Festival of Britain, Townscape and the Picturesque’, in Pendlebury, Erten, and Larkham (eds.), Alternate Visions of Post-War Reconstruction, Creating the Modern (London: Routledge, 2014).

60 M. Raco, E. Street and S. Freire Trigo, ‘The New Localism Anti-political Development Machines, and the Role of Planning Consultants: Lessons from London’s South Bank’ Territory, Politics, Governance, 4:2 (2015), 9.

61 Wright, Frank Auerbach London Building Sites, 94.

62 Ibid.

63 Wright, Frank Auerbach London Building Sites, 100. Citing Rembrandt, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ c. 1635. The National Gallery, London. Auerbach also painted a study in oil after this painting: Frank Auerbach, Study after The Deposition by Rembrandt II, 1961, Private Collection.

64 Wright, Frank Auerbach London Building Sites, 102.

65 Ibid.

66 Raco, Street and Freire Trigo, ‘The New Localism’, 20.

67 Ibid.

68 Raco, Livingston and Durant, ‘Seeing Like an Investor’.

69 Casson, Bombed Churches as War Memorials.

70 Raco, Street and Freire Trigo, ‘The New Localism’, 20.

71 Hornsey, ‘Everything is Made of Atoms’, 101.

72 Glasheen, ‘Bombsites, Adventure Playgrounds and the Reconstruction of London’ and Highmore, ‘Playgrounds and Bombsites’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sam Johnson-Schlee

Sam Johnson-Schlee is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Planning at London South Bank University.