Leon Kossoff B. 1926

Beaux Arts Gallery, London

London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Leon Kossoff, 1957, details untraced (as City Landscape);
Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, John Moores Exhibition, 1961, details untraced;
London, Royal College of Art, Towards Art, 1962, details untraced (as 'Building Site with St Paul's);
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Leon Kossoff , April 1968 (as 'Building Site with St. Paul's');
London, Theo Waddington, Helen Lessore Artist and Art Dealer, 1994;
Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny - Musée Maillol, L’Ecole de Londres: de Bacon á Bevan, 10th October 1998 - 20th January 1999, and toured to Santiago de Compostela, Auditorio de Galicia and Vienna, Kunsthaus.

The present work is one of the largest and most important of Kossoff’s paintings from the late 1950s to appear at auction in many years. 

The building sites of the City and around St.Paul’s Cathedral were an important early subject explored by both Kossoff and Auerbach, and his first paintings of this type date to around 1953-4. Whilst a number of writers have seen a link with the City paintings of David Bomberg, Kossoff was at this point not aware of Bomberg’s treatment of the subject, and in subsequent paintings on this theme, such as the present work, the whole sense is very different from the panoramic images of the elder painter.

The rich and intricately constructed paint surfaces of Kossoff’s paintings of the 1950s seem to be at odds with the relatively limited palette that he was using, but by limiting the range of colours he is able to concentrate the viewer on the construction of the image, and the use of warm creams imbues the sky above the cathedral with an almost internal glow of light. 

Building Site With St.Paul's was acquired by the present owner directly from the Beaux Arts Gallery, which was one of the most influential of the the smaller commercial galleries in London in the 1950s. Run by Helen Lessore, the gallery was key to the development and promotion of realist painting during that decade and gave Kossoff six one-man shows between 1957 and 1964.

A slightly smaller version of the present painting, dating from 1959, was sold in these rooms on 10^th December 1999, lot 216.