The British painter Leon Kossoff, known for his lightning impasto paintings of London after the Blitz, had an epiphany at the age of nine.
During a visit to London’s National Gallery, his eye was caught by Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in a Stream. “I don’t know what struck me about it -- but somehow that painting opened up a whole world to me — a way of feeling about life that I hadn’t experienced before.”
Kossoff, who has died aged 92, painted his homage to Rembrandt’s 17th Century masterpiece in 1982, and despite rendering it in the School of London style, of which he, Frank Auerbach and Lucien Freud were prominent exponents, it has something of the light and concentration for which the Dutch master is so celebrated.
Kossoff was an artist of his time, who saw in the post-war urbanisation of his local East End a human urgency that expressed the very fabric of the city. He painted Dalston, Willesden Green, Bethnal Green and Spitalfields – the tube station and the swimming pool alike – roughly and intensely, blending humanity into his cityscapes. People and building sites were one and the same. ”London,” he said, “seems to be in my bloodstream.” Although driven to paint the same people and places – the work was always being recreated, as he strove ‘to establish a relationship between his paint and his sensory experience.
Kossoff has been called both an expressionist and a figurative painter, and the lines are often blurred. With masterful and magical strokes he reveals the immediacy of the image, its intensity and its vigour. And they have history; the redevelopment of London after the Blitz proves the view of his London gallery, Annely Juda Fine Art that -- “He saw beauty in everything and in everybody.”
Yet Leon Kossoff persevered through years of being ignored by the art world. As recently as 1995, representing Britain in a one man show at the 100th anniversary Venice Biennale, his work was dismissed as irrelevant by one Sunday newspaper.
But as the contemporary art world moved through its various incarnations, Kossoff stayed true to his vision. It paid off with a successful retrospective at the Tate in 1996 and an exhibition at the National Gallery in 2007. But it took over 20 years to see him featured alongside Auerbach, Paula Rego, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud in an exhibition of modern figurative painting at Tate Britain, “All Too Human,” in 2018, when these artists were praised by the Guardian as “the true heroes of modern British art.”
Leon Kossoff was the second of seven children born to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Wolf, and Rachel, who had fled persecution in Ukraine 20 years earlier, and who struggled to support their family. His father, a baker, had no time for artists, considering them wastrels,” according to the Los Angeles Times in 1993.
He was educated at the Hackney Downs School in London in 1938, before being evacuated in 1939 with the school to King’s Lynn, Norfolk, where his hosting family, Mr and Mrs R.C. Bishop, encouraged him to paint. Returning to London in 1943, he studied commercial art at Saint Martin’s School of Art, at his practical father’s behest, and evening life drawing classes at Toynbee Hall. However, at Saint Martin’s School of Art an early exam failure triggered an insecurity which would haunt him all his life. His friend Auerbach suggested he study art in evening classes at Borough Polytechnic with David Bomberg, whose influence proved pivotal to Kossoff’s career. Bomberg’s approach was to “seek the spirit in the mass” and this immediately resonated with Kossoff.
After three years of military service with the Royal Fusiliers, attached to the 2nd Battalion Jewish Brigade, in Italy, Holland, Belgium and Germany. he returned to St Martin’s in 1949, influenced by fellow student Auerbach, whose style, and even subject matter, resonated with his own. Both scraped thick colour on the canvas. Both painted the construction sites that would lift London out of the terror of the Blitz and into today’s modern city.
Kossoff went on to study at the Royal College of Art until 1956. His studio moved from Mornington Crescent, to Bethnal Green, where he lived until 1961. By now he had joined Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in Bruton Place and taught in various London art schools, as well as exhibiting alongside Lucian Freud and Keith Critchlow.
Introverted, shy and reclusive in nature, Kossoff declined an appointment as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In April of this year an exhibition of his vision of London from 1954 onwards took place at London’s Piano Nobile Gallery. A recent show at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum included a portrait of his parents, forced to leave Russia because of antisemitism.
He is survived by his wife Peggy, whom he married in 1953, their son David, four grandchildren, Alex, Abigail, Aaron and Natasha, and two great grandchildren, Samuel and Safiya.
GLORIA TESSLER
Leon Kossoff: born December 10, 1926. Died July 4, 2019
