The Brooklyn Rail

Rarely does one encounter impasto so thick that paint chafes at its own limitations, bursting at its seams in a frenetic reach for a third dimension, but that is precisely what paint in the hands of Leon Kossoff does. Kossoff, a part of the London School along with Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud, among others in the postwar period, was clearly in love with the city he described as “in [his] bloodstream,” but perhaps not quite so much as he was in love with paint—not only in and of itself but in the ways it might transcend itself. Close to home, John Constable’s landscapes proved a formative example of thick handling, but Kossoff journeyed imaginatively to the continent as well—to Rembrandt, whose A Woman bathing in a Stream (1654) transformed him (much as Bathsheba transformed the biblical David) and Titian, from whose thick, miry The Flaying of Marsyas (1575) Kossoff sketched.

Committed to paint and its excesses, Kossoff resisted, as the exhibition at Luhring Augustine highlights, “the dominant interests during that period in minimalism, conceptualism, performance and installation art,” choosing figuration over and over in his cityscapes and portraits. Naïve, one might think of the artist, imagining that painting might still do, given the encroachment of new media and forms, but Kossoff shows an essential truthfulness in forms both abstracted and clearly figurative. Luhring Augustine’s show is a reverent testament not just to the truth of Kossoff’s work but also to its continuing vitality, despite its occasional and faulty critical dismissal.

Part of that truthfulness comes through in Kossoff’s manner of showing the city as a living, growing, decaying, and regenerating organism. By virtue of light, you might get several very different cities. For example, two paintings depicting the outside of the Kilburn underground station give us two Londons, and a rendering of The Flower Stall, Embankment Station, Stormy Spring (1994) gives us another. We might have Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: 

London … Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth … Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty city).

And in a luminous work such as Christ Church, Summer Afternoon (1994), a kind of East-End Virginia Woolf:

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

I bring in these two novels not only to reveal the many Londons that make up the British canon, literary and visual, of which Kossoff is a part, but also to show that in British fiction, London is so often thought of as character as much as setting. Cities change as characters do. The German Hospital in Kossoff’s View of Hackney with the German Hospital (1972) is gone as is the nineteenth-century German population for whom it was built. Kossoff gives us the Demolition of the YMCA Building No. 2, Spring (1971). Critics have attended to the substantial ruin of London that would have characterized Kossoff’s young adulthood in the years after the Blitz. Without diminishing the tangible destruction of the postwar years, Kossoff’s work also testifies to how the city ebbs and flows, stands strong and gives way. A pessimist might say Kossoff is like the famous New Zealander looking out over the ruins of London in Gustave Doré’s and Blanchard Jerrold’s 1872 London: A Pilgrimage. But Kossoff does not seem to be a pessimist; something will rise from the ruins yet, to be sketched, to be painted.

Following the logic that ascribes character to London, one can understand Kossoff’s portraits and cityscapes as contiguous with one another. And yet, the portraits seem to give us a more anguished view of humanity. In the works of a Jewish artist painting his family and friends after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, thick impasto is redolent of melting flesh. Kossoff employs heavy black outlines, much like the German Expressionist Max Beckmann, in many of his portraits, and yet I can’t help but feel the paint, the flesh, cannot be held. The lines hold most successfully in Kossoff’s portrait of his father, a baker who had no patience with his son’s artistic pursuits. But in many of the pictures, the structuring force of the lines is gone. This is nowhere truer than in Portrait of Philip (1962) where the figure seems almost held up by his hair, nearly detaching his forehead from his face.

At the risk of contradicting myself, I’ll venture that painting was in fact secondary to Kossoff’s process, which began with drawing—drawing in the galleries, drawing en plein air, or wherever he could. He might return again and again to draw the same place, the same face. Should the painting derived from drawing fail, he would scrape the board and begin again. The exhibition at Luhring Augustine includes a room where a few works hang—early paintings, and drawings. The early paintings are of a different tone than the others in the show, and the drawings are something else altogether. Former National Gallery educator Colin Wiggins, who would watch Kossoff sketching in the galleries, says that Kossoff, “always talks about his paintings … as if he was always trying to learn how to draw.”¹ To return once more to the canon of English literature, one might think of Philip Wakem, the hunchbacked amateur artist in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, who tells his schoolmate, “You’ve only to look well at things, and draw them over and over again. What you do wrong once, you can alter the next time.” Luhring Augustine has given us the glorious results of Kossoff’s practices of trying and failing and trying again until he has built a three-dimensional monument not only to the city, to his kin, but to the process of artmaking itself.