Leon Kossoff: London Landscapes
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 W. 26th St., (212) 744-7400
Through Dec. 21
When an 87-year-old artist who has been painting his beloved home city for more than 60 years is enjoying a small, traveling, museum-quality survey of his work, a review of it is bound to be more an “appreciation” than a critique. With Leon Kossoff, who has long labored in the shadows of his flashier fellow London artists Francis Bacon (born in Ireland, but who worked mostly in England) and Lucien Freud (born in Berlin), any review easily, and justly, merges with a paean to his blunt and vigorous painting style.
Mr. Kossoff’s London is darkly depicted in a painting such as “View of Hackney With Dark Day” (1974). This is the postwar city that many of us think of—Carnaby Street in the late 1960s excepted—as a gritty, industrial, unglamorous and pained metropolis. Mr. Kossoff paints clusters of drab buildings with paint that’s as thick and stringy as fondue, and draws people with bold, harsh, but psychologically sympathetic strokes of charcoal and pastel. Although his most recent work, whose subject is his childhood neighborhood of Arnold Circus, is brighter and cheerier (airy yellow-greens and pleasantly rusty reds, along with a thinner, breezier line) the dominant tone of this show leans toward the dark.
For all the roughness, there’s a good deal of painterly deftness in Mr. Kossoff’s pictures that should bring quiet joy to painting fans. He has, for instance, a subtle skill of embedding a realistic detail—the expression on a pedestrian’s face, or the angle of a passerby’s body in an Underground station—in a viscous semiabstraction. Mr. Kossoff has been working this visceral magic for a very long time; here’s hoping a lot more is still to come.
By Peter Plagens (featured in the Wall Street Journal)
Leon Kossoff: London Landscapes will travel to L.A. Louver in January 2014. Keep posted on our blog for more updates as the exhibition nears.
IMAGE: Leon Kossoff, Kings Cross, March Afternoon, 1998, oil on board, 56 x 78 in.{(147 x 198 cm)