Leon Kossoff

Fischer Fine Art Ltd, London
L.A. Louver Inc., Los Angeles
Private Collection
The Susan Kasen Summer and Robert D. Summer Collection
L.A. Louver Inc., Los Angeles, where acquired by the present owner

London, Fischer Fine Art Ltd, Leon Kossoff, Paintings and Drawings 1974-1979, 1979, cat. no.26, illustrated;
Los Angeles, L.A. Louver Gallery, This Knot of Life: Current British Painting & Drawing, Part II, 1979;
Glasgow, McLellan Galleries, An American Passion: The Susan Kasen Summer and Robert D. Summer Collection of Contemporary British Painting, 16th December 1994 - 5th March 1995, un-numbered exhibition, illustrated p.48, with tour to Royal College of Art, London.

The board is sound. Very close inspection reveals three small losses: one to the calf of the figure's proper right leg, which includes a flake of repaired loss, one to the centre of the orange pigment in the upper left quadrant and one to the orange pigment to the right of the figure's proper left foot in the lower right corner. There a small crack to the white strip of impasto in the lower left quadrant. There is an area of slightly crumpling to the paint surface in the upper left corner, likely in keeping with the Artist's method. There is a layer of surface dirt along the outer edges of the board, most noticeable to the upper, and areas of light surface dirt in some of the crevices of the impasto. There a few small specks of slightly discoloured varnish in places. Subject to the above the work is in very good overall condition. Inspection ultra-violet light reveals no obvious signs of restoration or retouching. The work is floating within a painted wood tray frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to the compilers of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the Artist’s work (edited by Andrea Rose for Modern Art Press), for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

 ‘Every time the model sits everything has changed. You have changed, she has changed. The light has changed, the balance has changed. The directions you try to remember are no longer there and, whether working from the model or landscape drawings, everything has to be reconstructed daily, many many times’ (the Artist, XLVI Venice Biennale, exhibition catalogue, 1995, p.25).

This richly expressive work depicts the artist Pauline Rignall, who from the 1970s through the late 1980s was one of Kossoff’s long-standing sitters. Together with familial portraits and portrayals of the London landscape which surrounded him, the nude is a subject Kossoff has continued to return to throughout his career, and nudes of Pauline, his loyal model Fidlema, as well as his wife Rosalind, are amongst the most arresting works in his output.   

Kossoff discovered a life drawing class while a young man in East London. This chance happening fuelled his increasing interest in working from the human figure and he began producing single figure portraits in the 1950s, and later turned to painting nudes. While his chosen models are neither grand nor recognizable beyond the artist’s own personal reference, Kossoff’s family and close friends’ perhaps ordinary countenances become remarkable through the artist’s ability to push beyond conventional representation. They combine Kossoff’s evident warmth towards the sitter with the gestural excitement of creation, thereby conveying to the viewer the artist’s deep awareness of, and immediate personal response to, the individual portrayed.

Kossoff’s models each spend long hours diligently sitting for the artist in his studio, as the portrayals are rooted in close observation and in his faith to drawing from life. In almost all cases, this close studied observation results in intricately worked drawings, from which the paintings are then created. Kossoff tends to labour over his built up surfaces, scraping away the paint with a knife or dabbing the surface with bits of newspaper until there is little left on the board. He then starts over entirely from scratch. While the painting may be toiled over for several months, the final creation, the thick layers of paint with which the viewer finally becomes familiar, is applied hurriedly in a matter of hours. This rapid creation is contrasted with the prolonged engagement with the subject, and indeed following the completion of one painting, Kossoff would often produce another image from the same drawing of the same subject.

In Pauline Sitting on the Bed a divide exists between those elements which reference the figural subject, and those taffy-like drips of paint, which seem to act out of a sort of separate volition. Kossoff’s paintings constantly highlight the presence of the material. Not only is the impasto piled upon itself asserting the paint’s autonomy, but he vigorously works the surface, pulling, smearing and letting the paint splatter and fall seemingly as it may. The mobility of the surface, this uneasy balance between the motif and the nervous brushwork, becomes hypnotizing and intoxicating. The viewer’s eye is drawn away from the compositional whole and eventually seeks to examine each complex and intricate square inch of the pictorial surface. It is perhaps most especially in this balance between emotive portraiture and the expressive abstracted surface which informs it, that Kossoff’s creations find their own particular value and worth.