One of the “true heroes of modern British art”
Leon Kossoff, who has died aged 92, was a leading member of that group of figurative artists collectively known as the School of London, along with Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. “London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream,” he once said, and his work was certainly rooted in the city, said The Guardian
– “in Dalston, Willesden, the Embankment, Mornington Crescent, Spitalfields and Bethnal
Green, in the London roads and railway lines, the Tube stations and street life, in the public swimming baths”. Cleaving to his own path, Kossoff was not always fashionable. Indeed, when he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995, one critic dismissed him as irrelevant. But he “had trained for the marathon, not the sprint”, and in 2018, when Tate Britain put together a survey of modern figurative painting, he was rightly placed at its heart, alongside Auerbach, Paula Rego, Bacon and Freud. “Whatever it is that makes art profound, they have it,” wrote The Guardian’s critic Jonathan Jones. “They are the true heroes of modern British art.”
Born in London in 1926, the son of Russian Jewish parents, Kossoff was brought up in the East End, where his father worked as a baker. He developed an interest in painting aged nine, when he saw Rembrandt’s at the National Gallery; in his teens, he was encouraged to paint by the family in Norfolk who took him as an evacuee. Called up for military service in 1945, he spent three years with the Jewish brigade of the Royal Fusiliers. On his return to London, he
A Woman Bathing in a Stream
enrolled at St Martin’s – but owing to deficiencies in his drawing technique, failed one of the key exams. It was his friend Auerbach who rescued the situation, by signing them both up to an evening course run by the artistic outcast David Bomberg at the Borough School of Art. Bomberg’s belief that artists should aim first and foremost for an intense engagement with their subject would prove a huge influence on their careers.
From his studio in a city still pockmarked by bombsites, Kossoff recreated “not the bawdy, vital London of Hogarth”, said The Daily Telegraph, “but the London of pale light, dirt, traffic and noise. His cityscapes overwhelmed their teeming populace. Backs bowed, unseeing, his commuters, swimmers, even his revellers, were pervaded with a sense of human isolation.” He worked slowly, building up layers of pigment, which he’d scrape off and reapply, “until it gained the thick density of clay”. His palette was muted, but enlivened by flashes of “dirty yellow or suffering red”. He held his first solo exhibition in 1957. His reviews back then were mixed. His work was too austere; “the painter’s struggle and his passionate involvement in his work were all too apparent in that ironic, reflexive age”. Yet he continued in his single-minded journey (while also gaining a reputation as an inspirational teacher) and “gradually, layer by layer” – like one of his own paintings – “critical appreciation began to emerge”. When asked why he painted, he replied, in one of his rare public utterances, that it was “because the world is so beautiful, and people so moving”. Kossoff had married his wife Rosalind (Peggy) in 1953. They had two children.