Leon Kossoff, The Flower Stall, Embankment Station, Stormy Spring, 1994. Oil on board, 52 ¾ × 56 inches. © Leon Kossoff Estate. Courtesy the Leon Kossoff Estate and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo: Anthony d’Offay.
Rarely does one encounter impasto so thick that paint chafes at its own limitations, bursting at its seams in a frenetic reach for a third dimension, but that is precisely what paint in the hands of Leon Kossoff does. Kossoff, a part of the London School along with Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud, among others in the postwar period, was clearly in love with the city he described as “in [his] bloodstream,” but perhaps not quite so much as he was in love with paint—not only in and of itself but in the ways it might transcend itself. Close to home, John Constable’s landscapes proved a formative example of thick handling, but Kossoff journeyed imaginatively to the continent as well—to Rembrandt, whose A Woman bathing in a Stream (1654) transformed him (much as Bathsheba transformed the biblical David) and Titian, from whose thick, miry The Flaying of Marsyas (1575) Kossoff sketched.
Committed to paint and its excesses, Kossoff resisted, as the exhibition at Luhring Augustine highlights, “the dominant interests during that period in minimalism, conceptualism, performance and installation art,” choosing figuration over and over in his cityscapes and portraits. Naïve, one might think of the artist, imagining that painting might still do, given the encroachment of new media and forms, but Kossoff shows an essential truthfulness in forms both abstracted and clearly figurative. Luhring Augustine’s show is a reverent testament not just to the truth of Kossoff’s work but also to its continuing vitality, despite its occasional and faulty critical dismissal.
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