Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff’s work can be located within a strand of 20th-century British art that might be said to exist in a populist atmosphere. Among his subjects are public swimming pools, people waiting for trains in busy stations and flower stalls. He has made much of the quotidian experience of people in London—where they live, how they travel.

That populism has been a British art tradition for umpteen painters (from Lowry and Spencer to Jeffery Camp) and inhabits the same imaginative realm as the lyrics to “Waterloo Sunset” or Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening night. As such it can seem anachronistic; in practical terms the Broadgate development encroaches onto the sightlines of Christchurch, Spitalfields (a favourite subject of the artist, and included in this show). Kossoff’s red for brickwork, a colour he often returns to, is literally overshadowed by East City Point or the nightmare of Strata SE1. Perhaps his is a nostalgic London, not the global Maybach-riddled playground of the oligarchs, but because some people have to service all this, one that persists.

Kossoff’s great and unusual project has been to pursue a humanistic attitude in painting so profoundly ambitious that its comparators are almost all historical—the work of Poussin or Degas, for example (he has made work based on pictures by both of them). The Kossoff show at LA Louver surrounds seven paintings made between 1974 and 2000 with 40 drawings, including a magnificent group of recent works, “Arnold Circus,” made between 2008 and 2012.

American writer Dan Hofstadter has described the “poetic density” of Kossoff’s paintings. It’s a quality that requires the viewer to assign significance to the repeated scraping and repainting—sometimes for years—that ends with a final heavy impasto, a process to arrive at a quintessential relationship between form and content. This practice is supported by drawing—clearly an activity in its own right—but one that seeks proximity to the subject and the knowledge from which to paint.

Kossoff’s paintings are at times frieze-like; figures and buildings painted parallel to the picture plane. This is the case with King’s Cross, March Afternoon, from 1998. But at their very best the paintings articulate a complexity of space in concert with the remarkable surfaces he achieves. At LA Louver there is Inside Kilburn Underground Station from 1983, and Outside Kilburn Underground Station, dated a year later. All of Kossoff’s struggle to remember and to find a form for that memory is here, and we see it at work against the painting problem of articulating complex space—that of the position of the ticket machine in relation to the stairs, for example. This is Kossoff at his greatest, an extraordinary actualization of the experience of making set against something communicated about his perception of a particular place.

The interrogation of looking and making is everywhere in Kossoff’s drawings. His practice has been to draw the same subject repeatedly in order to find a way to approach it as a painting. Not every drawing, not even every tranche of drawings leads to a painting, but their vitality as exploratory works and their variety of means make for deeply rewarding viewing. If the early drawings, those from the 1950s, appear closer to a tradition of European Expressionism (I was reminded of the work of Constant Permeke), later work is idiosyncratically inventive. Two larger drawings exemplify this superbly: School Building Willesden I from 1980 and Embankment Station and Hungerford Bridge from 1993–94. Kossoff draws with charcoal and pastel. The scrape and build-up that occurs in painting is replaced by a vigorous erasure that is instrumental in creating an enormously receptive surface on which the drawings can grow. There are smears and eraser pulls, there are needle-like lines, and there is a crazy speed of drawing in places. It’s all of a piece, the physicality of the persistent dark line, the monumentality of the architecture, the characteristics of gloomy northern light. In the same downstairs gallery there are four small, dense 2004 drawings, “Kings Cross, Stormy Day #1–4.” Kossoff’s gesture with the charcoal pushes the architecture forward, the street slides around and beyond it. It would, of course, be impossible to photograph such a thing; the drawings deliver an account of the experience of moving in that space with supreme articulation.

In the upstairs gallery at LA Louver are the 14 recent “Arnold Circus” drawings. The site, in the East End of London close to where Kossoff grew up, comprises a raised bandstand, a small fenced garden with a street both around it and leading away from it, like a traffic circle. The whole business is hemmed in by older red brick buildings. It is, in fact, part of the Boundary Estate, built at the beginning of the 20th century, one of the earliest social housing schemes in the world. The topography has provided Kossoff with a series of motifs from which to develop a set of drawings that deal with complex urban spaces and that seek to represent movement (frequently, rotation) in that space. The bandstand acts as a fulcrum in some drawings, in others the viewer appears to be positioned on it with both the fence and the road swinging around. These drawings are lighter, the three or four colours of pastel he applies for bricks, or grass, or sky are more present, as they are less overridden by the intensity of the charcoal. Kossoff has spoken of trying to capture the light of London quite objectively. Here it is more luminescent than in earlier work; there by less pressure with the charcoal and sometimes more erasure. The drawings are, as ever, full of the evidence of adjustments, the working through of experience as they develop. That’s how he draws, every cancellation and restatement providing the viewer with an extraordinary sense of something known and something discovered. It’s an essential historical art-making process at work. Drawing as an act of resolution and possession where all that is drawn is woven together in a new unity on the paper. ❚

“Leon Kossoff London Landscapes” was exhibited at LA Louver, Venice, California, from January 23 to March 1, 2014.

Martin Pearce makes paintings and drawings. He teaches in the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Guelph.