"Leon Kossoff" by Daniel Culpan

A key figure of the London School, Leon Kossoff (1926–2019) captures the life force of the British capital—his birthplace and lifelong muse—in all its dolorous splendor. Never has a palette perhaps best described as “shades of gloom” (the dried-blood reds and rusts of postwar Victorian tenements, the gray-brown murk of the Thames) seemed so vigorous.

Surveying six decades of production and organized together with Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York and L.A. Louver in Los Angeles, “A Life in Painting” opens with a series of Kossoff’s portraits. The pigment is built up in dense, sludgy layers, daubed and scoured so that its subjects almost feel excavated from within the thickly slathered boards. In Seated Figure No. 2, 1959, one struggles to discern the hard grimacing features of the sitter—N. M. Seedo, a writer and distant relative—from the dark flow of encrusted paint the color of cooled lava. Similarly, the subject of Seated Woman, 1957, is both remote and palpably close. As in much of Kossoff’s work, the woman—hands clasped, mouth mournful—comes into focus slowly, as if one’s eyes were adjusting to a pitch-dark room (the trick is echoed in the ghostly materialization of Woman Ill in Bed, from the same year).

Read full article at artforum.com.