© The estate of Arnold Auerbach

During the 1920s Auerbach was commissioned as an architectural sculptor to decorate the interiors of a number of Art Deco buildings including the News Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue (destroyed during the Second World War) and a series of reliefs for the Nawab of Rampur’s palace in India in 1927. His admiration of Ancient Egyptian sculpture was also reflected in the simplicity and monumentality of his forms. He took up etching in the early 1920s during a noted boom in this practice and continued to produce plates intermittently throughout this decade into the early 1930s. The images often relate to his drawings, paintings or sculpture and include London and Liverpool street scenes and studies of heads and figures. The earliest plates are tonal and often in drypoint, worked directly into the plate without the use of ground or acid. The stylised, slender figure of his Christ is reminiscent of the work of Eric Gill, who carved over 50 crucifixions in the course of his career. This version of the work is from a posthumous re-strike by David Ayres in May 1999. The Collection also includes a second iteration of this print and the original etching plate.