During his decades as an artist, British painter Leon Kossoff (1926-2019) created 510 well-known oil paintings. This can be said because they were all tracked down and published in a catalog raisonné net from Modern Art Press (London).
A catalog raisonné is an enormous effort of research, detective work, dedication and perception. This, put together over eight years by a small team led by Andrea Rose, an art historian and specialist in British painting, conveys the usual breathtaking accumulation of information: images of each painting, the exhibition history and bibliography and a list of successive owners ( called an origin). An added benefit is the vibrancy of Rose’s annotations of the paintings, which are laced with striking observations from various art historians, curators and critics, artists, the artist himself and others. One of Kossoff’s two small paintings, based on Titian’s gruesome “Apollo Flaying Marsyas,” for example, comes with an insightful appreciation of David Bowie, who once owned it.
The publication of a catalog raisonné is a momentous event and Kossoff’s is celebrated with the exhibition “Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting”, a title shared by three small, carefully thought-out surveys in the main galleries of the artist: Mitchell -Innes & Nash in New York, Annely Juda Fine Art in London and LA Louvre in Los Angeles. A collective catalog reproduces the works in all three, which is admirable. It also calls the combined shows “the largest, most comprehensive exhibition” of Kossoff’s paintings ever staged in a commercial gallery, which seems like an empty boast.
Kossoff is now one of the most accomplished painters of the late 20th and early 21st century. Thanks in part to their colorful personal lives, he was unfairly overshadowed by compatriots such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. But this can pass.
Kossoff’s greatness lies in the extreme way in which he juxtaposes the two fundamental realities of painting – the actual paint surface and the depicted image. First, there is the mind-bogglingly heavy, even unpleasant, impasto of his oil painting, which at times appears more scooped up than conventionally applied with a brush (even a large one), and which gives his surfaces an almost topographical dimension. Then there’s the reality of his images, initially awash with paint, which eventually works its way into legibility through a process that excitingly slows down and expands viewing.
The painter’s subjects fall into two main groups. There are self-portraits as well as portraits of friends and family and paintings of nude models – all taken during long sessions in his studio. Then there is everything outside, namely London and its bustling life. He recorded this in paintings of construction sites; pedestrians passing well-known buildings or entering metro stations, as well as trains racing on tracks. These started as countless drawings made on location, from which he painted in the studio.
The 13 paintings at Mitchell-Innes & Nash cover three decades and most of his subjects. They begin with the great “Seated Nude No. 1” (1963) – a Rubenesque woman sinking into a dark armchair – full of early cues of his vision. Among the other highlights is a 1992 display of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s English Baroque masterpiece, Christ Church, Spitalfields in the East End, standing protectively high above the people rushing on the sidewalk; a powerful seated portrait of his father; a swirling demolition scene; and two passing trains seen from above, through trees.
The beauty of Kossoff’s paintings is the ultimate accuracy of their depictions, in a psychological and physical sense. All of his subjects come across as complex presences, living parts of the living world – human, architectural or natural – animated by his thick, quietly vibrating surfaces. It is significant that the only still life in the entire catalog raisonné dates from the early 1950s, when Kossoff was just starting out. Even his paintings based on the old masters are mostly multi-figure compositions to which he adds his own special sense of tumult. This is illustrated in this beautiful show by the drooping bodies and brushwork in his copy of a Poussin. He had little interest in silence.
Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting
Through March 5 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, Manhattan; 212-744-7400, miandn.com.
