Leon Kossoff: Looking at Life with a Brush Full


During his decades as an artist, British painter Leon Kossoff (1926-2019) produced 510 known oil paintings. This can be said because it was viewed and published in a catalog raisonné, all fresh from Modern Art Press (London).

A catalog raisonné is a herculean effort of research, detective work, dedication and perception. Put together over eight years by a small team led by Andrea Rose, an art historian and British painting expert, this painting conveys the usual breathtaking know-how: images of each painting, its exhibition history and bibliography, and a list of subsequent owners. (called origin). An added benefit is the liveliness of Rose’s descriptions of the paintings, adorned with striking observations by various art historians, curators and critics, artists, the artist herself, and others. One of Kossoff’s two small paintings, for example, based on Titian’s gruesome “Apollo Flaying Marsyas,” comes with an insightful appreciation of David Bowie, who once owned it.

The publication of a catalog raisonné is a momentous occasion, and Kossoff’s event is celebrated with the exhibition “Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting,” a title shared by three small, carefully thought-out surveys in the artist’s main galleries: Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York , Annely Juda Fine Art in London and LA Louver in Los Angeles. A collective catalog reproduces the works of all three, which is admirable. Group exhibitions, also called “the largest most comprehensive exhibition” of Kossoff’s paintings on display at a commercial gallery, seem like an empty boast.

So far, Kossoff ranks among the most successful painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was unfairly eclipsed by his English friends, such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, in part thanks to their colorful personal lives. But this may pass.

Kossoff’s greatness lies in the fact that he contrasts the two fundamental realities of painting – the actual paint surface and the image depicted. First, there is the impasto of oil paint, which is surprisingly heavy, even repulsive, sometimes more like a scoop than traditionally applied with a brush (or even a large brush), giving its surfaces an almost topographical dimension. Then there’s the reality of his images fighting their way to legibility through a process that is initially soaked in paint and ultimately slows and widens the act of staring in an exciting way.

The subjects of the painter are divided into two main groups. There are self-portraits as well as portraits of friends and family and pictures of nude models – all done during long sessions in his studio. Then there is everything outside, namely London and its pulsating life. He captured this in pictures of construction sites; pedestrians passing through well-known buildings or entering subway stations, and trains racing along the tracks. These started out as multiple drawings done where he drew in the studio.

The 13 paintings in Mitchell-Innes & Nash span thirty years and most of their subjects. Big “Sitting Naked No. They begin with 1” (1963) – a Rubenesque woman slumped into a dark armchair – filled with the early signals of her vision. Other highlights include a 1992 rendition of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s British Baroque masterpiece, Christ Church, Spitalfields in the East End, that rises protectively above the people rushing by on the pavement; a strong seated portrait of his father; a scene of violent destruction; and two trains passing through the trees when viewed from above.

The beauty of Kossoff’s paintings is the ultimate psychic and physical accuracy of his depictions. All of their subjects appear as living parts of the living world – human, architectural or natural – as complex beings, animated by their thick, silently vibrating surfaces. The fact that the only still life in the entire raisonné catalog is from the early 1950s, when Kossoff was just beginning, speaks volumes. Even his paintings, based on the old masters, are often multi-figure compositions to which he adds his own special sense of turmoil. This is exemplified in this gorgeous show with the lungs and brushwork on a Poussin replica. It had little to do with tranquility.

Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting

through March 5 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, Manhattan; 212-744-7400, miandn.com.



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