Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Leon Kossoff lived in his early years in the East End of London, where his Russian Jewish immigrant parents ran a bakery. He studied in London at St Martin's School of Art (1949–53) and at the Royal College of Art (1953–6), also taking evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic under David Bomberg (1950–52). Like fellow student Frank Auerbach, he evolved a method of painting that entailed the heavy reworking of thick impasto to try to provide a truthful rendering of people and places he knew well. His drawing is given primacy as an expression of his commitment and involvement with the subject, and painting itself is conceived as a form of drawing.

Kossoff remained remarkably consistent in his methods and in his range of subject-matter, although he gradually moved away from the earth colours and thick encrusted surfaces displayed in paintings such as ‘Man in a Wheelchair’ (1959–62; London, Tate) towards a more sparing use of paint and a wider range of brighter colours. His figure paintings are often of close friends and family members; he commemorated his parents, for example, in ‘Two Seated Figures No. 2’ (1980 London, Tate), and his pictures of nudes are often of his wife, Rosalind, or of his long-standing model Fidelma.

Autobiographical content is also foremost in his pictures of London, which are generally of areas where he lived – from the East End and City to Willesden and Kilburn – peopled by family and friends identifiable in many cases from studio portraits. His favored urban subjects include railway bridges and sidings, churches and other imposing local buildings and building sites, as in ‘Demolition of the Old House’, ‘Dalston Junction, Summer 1974’ (1974; London, Tate).

Kossoff returned to favored motifs, such as the children's swimming pool in Willesden ('Children's Swimming Pool’ series from 1969, ‘Autumn Afternoon’, 1971; London, Tate) and the booking hall at Kilburn underground station (from the mid-1970’s), exploring changes not just in light but in emotion.

Kossoff's painting has always followed a very personal direction of plastic creation, independent of currents and fashions, and complete involvement in his painting. In this direction, the influence of post-war Expressionism, as well as that of Coldstream via the Slade School can be felt, namely in the controlled design and in the effort to create objective figuration. Bomberg's influence is present in the perfect mastery of drawing, in the idea of a commitment that binds the artist to his personal vision of art and in the mixture of the empirical dissection of an object in the world and of the imaginative and affective response of the artist towards that same object.

Characteristic of his art, from the 1960's onwards, are charcoal drawings made on the spot, studies for thick impasto paintings, their sculptural appearance achieved by using fingers and knives, as well as brushes. In the mid-1980’s Kossoff's palette brightened and the surface was less worked, more temperate. In 1987 he began to draw and paint Christ Church, Spitalfields. Despite having held his first one-man show in 1957 (Beaux Arts Gallery) and having had a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1972, organized by the Whitechapel Art Gallery, it was only in the eighties that his work began to gain recognition from the critics and the public.

Kossoff is now considered a leading British artist. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995, and a retrospective of his work was held at the Tate Gallery the following year.

Fidelma, no. I (1978)

oil on canvas

93.0 x 61.0 cm

£ Neg.

Landscape (I)

Oil on board

31.5 x 39.5 cm

£ 35,000.00 GBP

Landscape (II)

Oil on board

24.0 x 29.0 cm

£ 25,000.00 GBP

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