‘Demolition of YMCA Building No. 2, Spring, 1971,’ by Leon Kossoff. Courtesy of the Leon Kossoff Estate and Luhring Augustine, New York
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.
Read full article at nysun.com
