Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff Synopsis

In the second half of the twentieth century, Leon Kossoff was at the forefront of figurative painting in Britain. His pictures of family and friends and of London are among the period's greatest portraits of people and of urban life. Full of feeling, his paintings of people capture the vitality and soul of his sitters, and those of London, the immense, relentless energy of the city in which he was born and lived his entire life. Like most of his contemporaries, his art was deeply indebted to the European tradition; a tradition he studied with the eye of a painter and then modernised. Classical bathers were replaced by the riotous life of public swimming pools; Piranesi's fantastical prisons by ticket halls; portraits of the powerful by those of his own circle of humble acquaintances; and perhaps most memorably, the idealised or romantic landscape by an urban one of trains, cars, buildings and pedestrians, all invested with an astonishing visual vibrancy by expressive distortion and the thick, glittering surfaces of his paintings.

Drawing on an unprecedented level of access to Kossoff, his archive and his studios, this catalogue raisonné brings together all of Kossoff's oil paintings and sets them out in chronological order with accompanying commentaries bring new insight to the works, as well as quoting significant published criticism. Beyond these entries, the book comprises an introduction by Andrea Rose, an essay on Kossoff's relationship with the Old Masters by Dr Barnaby Wright (Deputy Head of the Courtauld Gallery), an extensive chronology and a further short essay by Rose on Kossoff's materials and his extraordinary technique. The backmatter includes a list of works in public collections, a comprehensive list of solo and group exhibitions, an extensive selected bibliography, an appendix of destroyed works, an index of titles and a general index.