"This Part of London Is My World" - Frank Auerbach's Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent

Why It Matters

The painting’s auction debut signals strong market demand for Auerbach’s deeply personal urban visions, cementing his legacy as a chronicler of London’s cultural memory.

Key Takeaways

• Auerbach painted Mornington Crescent for over half a century.
• "Christmas Tree" showcases vibrant, layered urban landscape in bold strokes.
• Auerbach reworked canvases for months, finalizing in one sitting.
• Painting is the most significant Auerbach work at auction in a decade.
• Work reflects his belief in revisiting intimate, memory‑laden subjects.

Summary

The video spotlights Frank Auerbach’s “Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent,” a massive canvas that captures the North London street he painted repeatedly for more than fifty years.

Auerbach built the work through months of scraping, re‑painting and layering, employing his signature palette of golds, oranges, reds and cyan to turn a mundane urban scene into a luminous, almost abstract terrain. The piece, notable for its commanding scale, became the most monumental Auerbach work to appear at auction in over a decade.

The narrator cites Auerbach’s own words—“London is a raw, extraordinary, marvelously unpainted city”—and notes his 1954 Camden studio where he labored daily until his death in 2024, underscoring the personal attachment that fuels the painting’s emotional charge.

For collectors, the sale reaffirms Auerbach’s market strength and highlights the enduring appeal of works rooted in personal geography, while the painting itself serves as a visual archive of post‑war London’s evolving identity.

Original Description

Perceiving that post-war London had ‘not been properly painted’, Frank Auerbach set out to put that right, and his painstaking process resulted in dynamic works such as this — Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent, 2004-05 - one of his largest, most vibrant depictions of the neighbourhood he called home for 70 years.

Frank Auerbach’s powerful painting Christmas Tree at Mornington Cresent (2004-05) captures a corner of London that was much more to him than an artistic motif. Situated close to his Camden Town studio, it formed part of the small constellation of north London sites to which he returned obsessively over the decades, anchoring his practice in a landscape shaped as much by memory as by observation. There is something of the faded boarding house about the area. The streets of Regency terraces have long since passed into the hands of the better off, yet the buses still rattle by, there is the odd tatty corner shop, and the stucco has a propensity towards the drab.

Auerbach moved here in 1954, after Leon Kossoff suggested he take over his studio — a cramped building behind a Victorian villa on Albert Street. For the next 70 years, this neighbourhood — situated between the cigarette factory and the Tube station — would shape Auerbach’s art. The radial streets became the subject of his radical visions, the area’s buildings appearing repeatedly in shifting forms.

In those days, there was an unsettled, ramshackle busyness to post-war London. Amid the boarded-up churches, and sites where traders operated between the bomb craters, were the beginnings of the welfare state, of which the tower block was the most visible manifestation — ascending out of an Aral Sea of Victorian brick and stained concrete. As London struggled to rebuild itself, Auerbach realised that this half-formed landscape had ‘not been properly painted’, not in the way Paris or New York had been. He resolved to become its Boswell — a chronicler of its uneven terrain in dense, sinewy strokes of paint.

‘London is not a planned city,’ he once observed. ‘As soon as anybody tries to set one style or set one architectural scheme in motion, they run out of steam and somebody puts something entirely incongruous next to it.’ This confusion fascinated the artist: with each incoherent shift in the city’s character, Auerbach recorded its wounds in slippages of paint.

Find out more: https://www.christies.com/en/stories/frank-auerbach-christmas-tree-at-mornington-crescent