Leon kossoff biography
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Kossoff was a proud Londoner (he was in fact the only member of the group to be born and bred in London) who's cityscapes focused predominantly on the blitzed post-war city and its dusty construction sites. In this charcoal drawing, to which he added its layered effect using an eraser, and the heel of his hand, the flattened roofs are outlined in white while the light creeping up on the horizon suggests that this scene is set at dawn, as the city starts to come to life, perhaps.
As Andrea Rose, former director of visual arts at the British Council, observed, "There is a sense of struggling with this huge weight of lead paint [...] in quantities I think nobody had used before, and I think the struggle for him was trying to make this viscous material response to what he was feeling about what he was seeing".
Mature Period
In 1976, Kitaj curated the now famous "Human Clay" exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery.
1654) at the National Gallery. Critic Franklin Einspruch even likened Kossoff's relationship to Christchurch to a "sustained intensity that recalls Monet's serial meditations on the facade of Rouen Cathedral".
Oil on board - Annely Juda Fine Art, London, England
2015
Cherry Tree in Spring
Some of Kossoff's last paintings were a series that showed a cherry tree growing in a garden viewable from his home.
The trick is to have it at fifty.' So what's the trick? Says Glover, "These early portraits seem to be in love with an inner darkness, at one with it. Now moving into his twilight years, Kossoff's palette became softer and his work more in tune with nature and his own mortality. Kossoff recalled, "there wasn't much culture [in my family] and artists were considered wastrels".
In Cherry Tree in Spring is noticeable that the stakes (or crutches) that had held the tree's leaning weight (and which are evident in earlier paintings from the series) are absent. Moving into the 1990s, his outlook on life was no less subjective, but perhaps more spiritual as he turned towards a lighter color palette. This shift is most evident in a series of paintings focused on a single, and ailing, cherry tree.
Frank Auerbach was a Jewish war orphan (his parents having perished in the death camps) and was given a job at the Kossoff family bakery on Calvert Avenue (Auerbach served on the bread counter; Kossoff on the cakes counter). As time passed it seemed as if the stakes had always been there. Then there is the reality of his images, initially swamped in paint, that ultimately battles its way to legibility through a process that thrillingly slows and extends the act of looking".
In his final year, he was given an exhibition at Helen Lessore's Beaux Arts gallery, which was perhaps one of the most important commercial outlets for British artists in the post war decades. As with many of his cityscapes, such as City Rooftops, he focuses on architectural features.
Ben Uri Research Unit
Born:1926 London, England
Died:2019 London, England
Year of Migration to the UK:1900
Biography
Painter and draughtsman Leon Kossoff was born to Ukranian-Jewish refugee parents in Islington, London, England on 10 December 1926 and raised in the East End, where his parents, ran a bakery.
On an individual level, Kossoff is today recognized as one of Britain's preeminent figurative painters. He later recalled, ‘Once he drew on the board for a moment. In the same year Kossoff enrolled at the Royal College of Art, where he remained until 1956. Kossoff himself stated that his painting was merely "space and light, occupied by human presences" and that this work was "all about space and movement and light [...] every time you look you see something different, you experience something different," he said.
Reflecting on his career, Kossoff insisted that his life's work had "been an experiment in self-education" and that even in the later stages of his life he still did not "seem able to do a drawing".
Kossoff was a private figure, declining to give interviews, or even have his face shown in publicity materials.