Ben Uri Gallery, the London Jewish Museum of Art has acquired Auerbach’s “Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II” from Marlborough Fine Art. The acquisition was supported with a £44,000 grant from The Art Fund.

Painted in 2004 and scratched into the paintwork this work stole the show at his recent exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in New York and was featured on the front page of the NY Times Art review in an article by Michael Kimmelman. There he said:

“In Mornington Crescent – Summer morning II” (2004), the choke of traffic is painted as a bustling network of brightly colored horizontals. Dates are sometimes scratched in big numerals into these pictures as if to stress their immediacy and artifice.”

William Feaver writes in the catalogue “ When Sickert lived at 36 Mornington Crescent there were gardens where now the white bulk of the Carreras building, a former cigarette factory, serves Auerbach as inner urban mountain heights. In Mornington Crescent – Summer Morning II a plane, the red-eye from New York possibly drones overhead and traffic chokes the defile.

Auerbach is conscious of treading in the footsteps of Sickert; equally he keeps in mind David Bomberg whose classes he attended in his art school years. When, as he sometimes does, Auerbach scratches the date in the paintwork, as he does 2004, with this work its not for information but for emphasis. He’s stressing that painting is an urgent business permeated with transcience and sudden apprehensions. Auerbach is persuaded that his pursuit is not simply life-long, it’s life itself. He persuades us that the picture is indeed the thing.”

David Glasser, Chairman of the Ben Uri Gallery, said: “It is remarkable that whilst Frank Auerbach first presented a work to Ben Uri over 50 years ago as a young artist, this is the first painting to be acquired by Ben Uri for its collection. It is a superb example and we are hugely proud to have safeguarded this work for the nation. Without the shared vision and determined support of The Art Fund, The V&A MLA Purchase Grant Fund and the generosity of our Patrons and supportive philanthropists we would not have been able to contemplate this [or many previous] important acquisitions. This wonderful painting will be the highlight of our next exhibition.”

The contribution to museum collecting for the nation of such institutions and so often artists and their dealers is not only under reported but in practice irreplacable as we know from our own experiences and benefit.

This wonderful painting will be the highlight of our next exhibition Recent Acquisitions 2001 – 2006 from December 6th where we will be exhibiting for the first time all the many works acquired in these five short years which have added a million pounds of value and more importantly considerable width and depth to our growing and world class collection. “

Auerbach’s friend Lucien Freud said recently “For me he’s the best painter working today”. Summer Morning II demonstrates the robustness of Freud’s opinion.