Art Wednesday

Words by Stephen Harwood.

Leon Kossoff is a London painter; his art is concerned with the East End of his childhood, and certain North London territories, too. Like Frank Auerbach, his contemporary and artistic twin, he does not travel, preferring to paint these familiar stomping grounds again and again, so that the work seems like some obsessive investigation carried out in the hope that something new and unexpected might reveal itself. Kossoff is drawn to the underbelly rather than the grand-view: the railway tracks and arches, the beaten back-roads, places of demolition and dilapidation. His landscapes of Kings Cross or Dalston Junction suffocate under leaden skies, or seem filled with darkness and rain; London weather described in paint. And for Kossoff, as for Auerbach, the paint is the thing. Lashings and scrapings of it, the thicker the better, so that each picture becomes something of a battleground. Portraits and landscapes are taken almost to the edge of recognition as he works and reworks; the subject almost lost in the sheer stuff of paint, the impasto seeping out over the edges of the boards (mere canvas couldn’t stand such brutality). Each work seems more an excavation of the city than a mere painting of it.

At 83, he is something of an elder statesman of British painting – he is also a solitary individual who, despite a career spanning some fifty years, remains little known to the general public. Like Auerbach, and the third gang-member Lucien Freud, he has never courted attention, or even, especially, an audience, but even so there have been a number of quiet fanfares for a current rare event: a show of brand new work in London, his first in almost ten years.

The first thing that surprises is Kossoff’s palette, which has given way to a new lightness and delicacy of colour. His earlier darknesses (painterly densities) have been dispelled, so that Willesden now seems filled with light greens and fawns, and the leaden greys are lighter. But Kossoff’s new work hangs with a heavy heart, and a new motif, in the shape of a lone, dying cherry tree in Kossoff’s garden. We are shown the tree from varying vantage points, and in differing lights and seasons; once lean and strong, it is now propped-up by stakes like a flayed man. With the exception of the occasional context of a passing tube glimpsed on the tracks beyond, or a young girl skipping past, the tree is seemingly isolated, alone in its blizzard of paint. The colours may have bleached into a new delicacy, but the paint itself remains thickly tangled; Kossoff paints not only the tree itself but also, seemingly, the very air around it. There are also a number of energetic charcoal studies, shown in a separate side-room away from the paintings. They are frenzied, jagged, impatient. I imagine these drawings were carried out in the garden itself before being translated into paint. They are filled with markers, and signs, the result of an intense scrutiny of something already familiar; information gathered for the main event.

There is a sadness too, or at least a tenderness, in a group of faces of old friends and models. These recent portraits are far removed from Kossoff’s great Soutine-like portraits of the eighties where features were described in heavy black outlines and filled with outpourings of gushing paint. These are gentle likenesses, filled with a soft light not unlike the creamy glow of Pierro Della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ. Kossoff’s models have remained constant over decades, and these are perhaps the final kindnesses; tributes to old friends.

The tree and surrounding friends are accompanied by three monumental studies of the familiar Chirstchurch in Spitalfields, which lurches into the air like some sort of mystical rocket. Christchurch has been something of a totem of Kossoff’s art since the mid-80′s and a building he knew well as a boy growing up in the Jewish East End. These are the earliest works in the show (painted 1999/2000) and in them we see the beginning of the palette-change (there is something thrilling in a senior artist adjusting his palette so radically at the height of his powers), and these works seem to bridge the gap between Kossoff’s earlier London paintings and the quiet, emotive cherry tree.

Kossoff may be entering a period of fragility but he still seems to be labouring under an artistic urgency, or some private calling. It is entirely in keeping that Kossoff, should release one short statement “These paintings are about one tree…”, and carry out no interviews, for nothing is allowed to interfere with the daily task of painting, or visits to the National Gallery which still excites, and where there is always the pleasure and the joy of looking and the potential of discovering a picture anew. After all, observation is the underpinning of Kossoff’s art and as if to remind the viewer of the steady and constant observation carried out by the artist, the viewer must also invest. These therefore are pictures to linger over… New colours, new depths emerge in Kossoff’s pictures the longer they are looked at. It is clear these late works are Kossoff’s most personally reflective, and the more time spent with them, the richer they become.

This exhibition runs at Annely Juda Fine Art until December the 17th, 2010.

Annely Juda Fine Art (Click Here)