Leon Kossoff
Leon Kossoff, “Portrait of Mother Asleep” (1963), oil on board, 160 x 122 cm. Private Collection (© The Artist’s Estate. Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, and LA Louver, Los Angeles)
LONDON — I was in the grip of despair. I had arrived to interview the artist Leon Kossoff at his home in Willesden, North London, for the Independent on Sunday, but when I arrived, after toiling long and hard uphill by bicycle, I found him to be profoundly unenthusiastic about the prospect. I explained to him that he had already agreed to talk to me, and that I had come all the way from South London. Finally, grudgingly, he let me slip, side-on, into the rather under-lit front hall — but only into the hall.
Yes, he would do it, he said in the end, still havering, but he had never anticipated such consequences of having his work shown at the Tate and the Venice Biennale …. I soon discovered that this gentle, wary, vulnerable man of 75 possessed a will of steel.
So we entered the studio, which was the small front room of his house, overlooking the street. What a battleground of a vista it was! Paint-encrusted walls and floors. Wallpaper lapping down from the ceiling. Two dangling, naked light bulbs. Various pairs of independent-spirited, paint-spattered old shoes.
He sat me in a chair beside the door, took a seat beside me, and then told me, in reply to a series of tentative questions, all the things that he would not be willing to talk about, and all the things he would not allow me to do: no tape recording of our conversation; no personal matters of any kind; no talk about modern art or any of his contemporaries. Yes, I might refer to a particular model by name (that was Fidelma), but not the city she was from. There was a ziggurat of teetering books at his elbow: Blake, Kundera, and others ...
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