Leon Kossoff: A Great Painter Who Made London His Calling

During his lifetime as an artist, Leon Kossoff was deeply respected but not nearly well enough known. Though lionized within the art world — he represented Britain at the 1995 Biennale and was given a major retrospective at the Tate the next year — he was nonetheless overshadowed by the larger, more garrulous, members of the post-war London School. Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and his close friend Frank Auerbach drew far more attention. Part of this was due Kossoff’s painful modesty and reclusiveness, coupled with his obsessively intense approach. He was forever tinkering and dissatisfied, even when the consensus surrounding his greatness had reached its peak.This is slowly being remedied by his reappearance at art fairs and galleries. Currently the Chelsea outpost of Luhring Augustine is hosting a survey of his work. It is a rare and substantive look at one of the greatest British painters to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century.Kossoff would make frequent nighttime visits to the National Gallery, where he would obsessively study and draw from masterworks, most frequently from Poussin or Constable. His rigorous and devotional approach, drawing and then drawing again, gave way to a painting to that was heavy on gestural, dynamic line, but also giving way to a rough-hewn and dense painterly surface. At first glance it can almost seem confrontationally, impossibly dense, as if pulling focus on an unfamiliar scene. But every Kossoff painting rewards patience, giving forth its secrets in dense nuggets of visual impetus with an almost visceral satisfaction. To look at a Kossoff painting is to be drawn in to a uniquely compelling world of gestural and rhythmic relationships, of an eye and hand relentlessly devoted to seeing.Though he is best known for his outdoor depictions of London, a great many of his portraits are also featured. There are the earlier self-portraits, some nudes, a forbidding portrait of his father and his brother Phillip. In them we already see Kossoff grappling with painting as a cumulative, sedimentary process, struggling not only with likeness but rather reconciling the inner states of his subjects with their outer appearances. Oftentimes the figure comes into focus gradually, as if finally registering a presence inside a darkened room. A roiling materiality drives the work, a thick impasto that kneads dark matter together with its glistening twin — light. The effect is dense, turgid, and ultimately riveting. Kossoff’s figures, sometimes barely legible, nevertheless radiate an strong individual presence.‘Outside Kilburn Underground Station, November 1984,’ by Leon Kossoff. Courtesy of the Leon Kossoff Estate and Luhring Augustine, New YorkThis is Kossoff’s lifelong dogged mantra of ‘begin again’ coming into being, a motto he carried until the end of his career. Noting the shifting light and positionality in his sitting models, he would scrape the canvas and start over, so much so that it became a part of his technique, until the variations of light and position became ingrained in the thick surfaces of the painting itself. This later became a signature part of his drawings and London landscapes. The scraping, scouring and slathering were all part of the process. There is a sense that Kossoff wanted not merely to represent but to encompass — to get at the vital essence of a person or place as they are carried through time.Kossof painted family and friends often, later becoming more drawn to painting life in London. He worked steadily for six decades, and it is hard to think of a more quintessentially London painter. His Ukrainian Jewish parents emigrated there in 1926, where he was born, and he never strayed far from North and East areas of the city such as Willesden, Kilburn, Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. Landmarks and building sites from this area form his main subject matter — a London emergent from the blackened ruins of the Blitz, sombre but also fervid with bustling energy and renewal. Christ Church in Spitalfields served as a continuous motif for him. “Christ Church, Summer Afternoon” is included in the exhibition, here along with two remarkable paintings of Kilburn Underground station, as well as the flower stalls outside of Embankment station. They are the opposite of prettified tourist paintings; rather they are raw tranches of the city itself, thick and oozing with life.‘Demolition of YMCA Building No. 2, Spring, 1971,’ by Leon Kossoff. Courtesy of the Leon Kossoff Estate and Luhring Augustine, New York This includes the painting that first introduced me to Kossoff a few years ago: “Demolition of the YMCA building No. 2: Spring 1971.” This oddly exhilirating painting is thankfully included in the show, a commanding masterpiece of such depth, movement and originality as to be palpable. Kossoff captures the city as a seething maw of regeneration, the brick red of the tractor rearing itself against the clay-colored heap of detritus and dust, demolished buildings rising in the background, figures striding about. The elements are twisted and offset to the edge of legibility, the whirl of the city reduced to slathered squiggles that nonetheless take shape at a distance. Step closer and you are lost in the swirling textures, step back and it all comes alive.This is the odd genius of Kossoff’s paintings, his ability to take his obsessive drawing and redrawing and somehow transmute them into a palpable whole. He seems, always, to be striving towards some type of profound visual gestalt, and though at times he nearly drowns in the effort, a unified and tangled field always emerges. It is, in the final sense, a work of muscular visual transmutation.To stand in front of Kossoff’s painting is to be alive to the workings of a great painterly temperament. It is also to be given a window into a weltanschauung, a whole world and city encapsulated in art. One imagines that Kossoff was singularly driven to resolve and encompass this view as best he could, working doggedly through his chosen medium, until he was no longer able. Now we are simply fortunate to bear witness. As Kossoff once remarked, “painting is the most marvelous, elaborate, and complete way of making up my mind”.

Leon Kossoff: A Great Painter Who Made London His Calling

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