Leon Kossoff

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
L. A. Louver, Inc., Venice, California
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner by 1995

Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Luxembourg, Musée National d'Histoire et d'Art; Lausanne, Le Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts; Barcelona, Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, La Pedrera, From London: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, Kitaj, 1995- 1996, no. 30, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the image fails to convey the rich painterly surface. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"I walked once again down Brick Lane toward Christchurch, Spitalfields, a building which like St Paul's has always been part of my life ... and, in the dusty sunlight of that August day, when this part of London still looks and feels like the London of Blake's Jerusalem, I find myself involved once again in making drawings and the idea for a painting begins to emerge" (Leon Kossoff, 'Nothing is ever the same' in: Exhibition Catalogue, British Pavilion, XLVI Venice Biennale, and travelling, Leon Kossoff, 1995, p. 52).

 

"In his paintings of Christchurch, Kossoff orchestrates the intensity of his childhood feelings with the look of the building now, sometimes with workmen busy on the stone plinth, or with passers-by in the street at the front, or simply with the summer heat and light bleaching the columns; the tonal gradations of the London light registered with infinite subtlety" (in: Exhibition Catalogue, British Pavilion, XLVI Venice Biennale, and travelling, Leon Kossoff, 1995, p. 10).

 

Exuding a magnificent synthesis of memory and sensual perception, Leon Kossoff's arresting Christ Church No. 1, August 1991 is a true exemplification of the artist's seminal corpus of paintings focussed on Nicholas Hawksmoor's majestic Georgian Baroque church. A landmark of Spitalfields in London's East End, Hawksmoor's architectural masterpiece serves as a resplendent and commanding locus for Kossoff's outstanding series. Initiated in 1987 these monumental paintings signify the apotheosis of Kossoff's illustrious oeuvre; a claim unassailably substantiated by the significant number from this cycle permanently residing in the collections of prestigious museums and institutions internationally. Possessing a material and compositional splendour to rival those held in the Tate, the British Council and the National Gallery of Art Australia, the present work radiates shimmering painterly dynamism, truly elevating the translation of everyday phenomena into the grand realm of epic painting. Heralding the very first time a work from Kossoff's remarkable Christ Church series has ever been offered for public sale, Christ Church No. 1 stands among the most exuberant of Kossoff's magnum opus. Widely considered the very highest achievement of the artist's mature career this work essays a bravura threshold of painterly excellence realised through an expanse of prodigious skill accumulated and mastered over a lifetime.

Kossoff has dedicated his career to translating the optical and experiential stimuli of everyday life; through an abundance of paint and flurry of viscous mark-making his depictions of London and portraiture of friends and family embody an archaeological fusion of the direct encounter channelled through the penetrating prism of memory. Indeed, memory plays a significant role in the paintings after Hawksmoor's architectural masterpiece. Typically, akin to Bacon and Auerbach, Kossoff's choice of subject is locally conversant with the people and places that routinely comprise his daily experience; however, the Christ Church paintings, as noted by David Sylvester, entail "a special case" (David Sylvester, 'Against the Odds' in: Exhibition Catalogue, British Pavilion, XLVI Venice Biennale, and travelling, Leon Kossoff, 1995, pp. 18-19). Belonging to the neighbourhood of his childhood, these works animate the reminiscent architecture of Kossoff's distant past, a feat conveyed by the low awed child-like viewpoint from which the Church towers majestically above. For these works, Kossoff made the dedicated pilgrimage half way across London to revisit his formative years as part of the local immigrant community. From a Jewish family of Ukranian descent, the imposing Christian architecture, a perfect marriage of power and proportion, represented an utterly foreign territory: for the artist to repeat intensely the impression of such a proud edifice communicates the means of assimilating an ostensibly hostile culture, "the culture whose normality made him an outsider" (Ibid., p. 19). What the Christ Church cycle accumulatively deliver is a re-territorialisation and mastery over nascent anxiety. Charting a course which started hesitantly with two unsuccessful attempts to address this subject, the following grey-scale and earth toned Christ Church paintings from 1987 evidence a subdued palette and prevalent sense of compositional vertigo; progressively, the subsequent works from the early 1990s communicate the attainment of true pictorial and structural command. Jubilantly articulated within the present work, the monumental upwards thrust of the church and exuberant formal punctuation of sky-blue, verdant green and vivid red mark this as an exultant tribute to the unwavering landscape of his youth, whilst simultaneously radiating the sheer "experience of seeing and being in the world" (Leon Kossoff, 'Nothing is ever the same' in: Exhibition Catalogue, British Pavilion, XLVI Venice Biennale, and travelling, Leon Kossoff, 1995, p. 26).

 

In Christ Church No.1 the vivid profusion of chaotic visual stimuli and formal vibrancy reflect a freshness of encounter and absolute delight in seeing akin to childlike wonder. Indeed, within an age where the mediation of all images is purveyed by the omnipotence of the camera, Kossoff's art aims to recapitulate within the two-dimensional picture plane the flux of fleeting sensory impressions and remembered experience. "I walked once again down Brick Lane toward Christchurch, Spitalfields, a building which like St Paul's has always been part of my life" recalls Kossoff, "and, in the dusty sunlight of that August day, when this part of London still looks and feels like the London of Blake's Jerusalem, I find myself involved once again in making drawings and the idea for a painting begins to emerge. The urgency that drives me to work with the pressures of the accumulation of memories and the unique quality of the subject on this particular day but also with the awareness that time is short, that soon the mass of this building will be dwarfed by more looming office blocks and overshadowed, the characters of the building will be lost forever, for it is by its monumental flight into unimpeded space that we remember this building" (Leon Kossoff, 'Nothing is ever the same' Op. Cit., p. 52).

 

Literary influences abound in the production of this series: alongside the allusion to London evoked in William Blake's paradigmatic epic poem Jerusalem, Kossoff was directly impelled to revisit his childhood locale after reading Peter Ackroyd's acclaimed novel Hawksmoor. Within both and aligned to Kossoff's practice, the city of London represents the locus and backdrop for all drama. Indeed, parallel to Kossoff's painterly treatment of London, Ackroyd's novel expounds the ever-changing yet stubbornly consistent nature of the city. In Christ Church No. 1, the culmination of observed detail realised in the documentary act of preparatory drawing majestically orchestrates a unique and colossal translation of architecture, atmosphere, and experience of the city as channelled through the artist's own faculty of memory. This sense of grandeur and pronounced vitality is in part derived from the honesty and directness of Kossoff's methodology; thickly applied paint is repeatedly scraped off and robustly reworked until the painterly surface consummately manifests itself. At once fluctuating with the traffic of people yet constantly immobile, Christ Church No. 1 embodies a momentous contribution to Kossoff's lifelong artistic engagement with the inner-city urban landscape of London: "London, like the paint I use seems to be in my blood stream. It's always moving - the skies, the streets, the buildings, the people who walk past me when I draw have become part of my life" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Leon Kossoff, 1996, p. 36).

 

Contrasted against the ever-evolving yet simultaneously static arena that comprises Kossoff's London, it is the transience of atmospheric and seasonal affects, alongside the movement of the human figure that comprises the momentum from which Hawksmoor's monument is propelled heavenwards. Exhibiting an enlivened flurry in the lower half of the composition, vigorous trails of thick and viscous oil paint demarcate an impression of the everyday hustle-bustle of an anonymous crowd. The artist's expedient brushwork navigates our eye in a way that enhances the movement of people in the landscape whilst simultaneously providing a confessional network of the picture's somatic creation. Here, Kossoff demonstrates the sustained and significant influence of his earliest teacher, David Bomberg, in continuing to apprehend and arrest the "spirit in the mass" (Ibid., p. 12). Luminously capturing the seasonal warmth of a summer's day in August, Christ Church No.1 is the sheer affirmation of the power of paint to illuminate the remarkable faculty of sight – the quintessential motivation of Kossoff's oeuvre. Wielded to magnificent effect, paint is incessantly layered, erased and manipulated in dense swathes of material gesture to impart a cutaneous projection of pure sensory perception. The product of an intensely fertile period initiated in the late 1980s, this outstanding work unassailably constitutes the zenith of Kossoff's artistic achievement. All at once, permanence and transience are majestically aligned within the monumental and supremely exuberant painterly strata that comprises Christ Church No.1, August 1991.