Leon Kossoff

Fischer Fine Art Gallery, London

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London 

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2007

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is lighter and more vibrant in the original. The printed illustration also fails to fully convey the rich textural quality of the work. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are hairline cracks and associated losses to a few impasto peaks in isolated places. When examined under ultra violet light, a small spot fluoresces darkly approximately 3cm to the left of the bottom right hand corner.
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"A painter is engaged in a working process and the work is concerned with making the paint relate to his experience of seeing and being in the world."

Leon Kossoff, 'Nothing is ever the same' in: Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, XLVI Venice Biennale, Leon Kossoff: Recent Paintings, 1995, p. 26.

 

Railway lines circulate through London as the industrial rhythms of a city which, for Kossoff, formed an allegory for life and movement where “nothing is ever the same” (Leon Kossoff, ‘Nothing is ever the same’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, XLVI Venice Biennale, Leon Kossoff: Recent Paintings, 1995, p. 25). “The London of my memory is not the real city I live in today… though changing all the time, its particular location – the river, the hills, the proximity to the sea – seems always present, and the millions of people who have spent their lives passing through its streets and travelling along its underground veins make London, like my studio, a place of chaos, providing an opportunity for continual involvement and activity” (Ibid., p. 10). Dalston Lane (Summer) depicts a view from Kossoff’s Dalston studio in East London where he could view the train lines running past his windows between Cannonbury and Hackney. London has been Kossoff’s most enduring subject and he has returned to particular scenes throughout his career, often taking interest in the people and places from his immediate surroundings. Kossoff’s veneration of personal every-day experience is apparent in the present work, indeed, Dalston has held a particular importance for the artist as an area in which he has spent many formative years drawing. With Dalston Lane (Summer) he returns to this landscape, and in this painting reconciles memory with reality.

In this painting Kossoff’s capricious colour palette gives way to viscous eddies of impasto, forms sculpted in paint in which colours glimmer and emerge from within the packed strata of paint. This style of painting was formed alongside an ambitious group of British painters who emerged during the 1950s in London and included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and, perhaps with greatest affiliation, Frank Auerbach with whom Kossoff studied under David Bomberg at his now famous evening class at the Borough Polytechnic. As critic and curator David Sylvester describes, “There are artists such as Kossoff who persist in trying, as Bacon and as Giacometti did, to pick those threads [of European representational tradition] up, setting out to realise the immemorial ambition to re-create, directly and wholly, the sensation of looking at a head or a figure or tree” (David Sylvester, ‘Against All Odds’ in: ibid., p. 14). In doing so, rather than representing a likeness, Kossoff recreates a personal and emotional visual response to reality.

Kossoff attributes his innovations in painting most acutely to Bomberg and described his time in that class accordingly: “[Bomberg’s] deep experience of life somehow guided me... Although I had painted most of my life it was through my contact with Bomberg that I felt I might actually function as a painter. Coming to Bomberg’s class was like coming home” (Leon Kossoff quoted in: ibid., p. 17). Bomberg’s conviction that “the approach is through the feeling and touch and less by sight… Drawing is sculpturally conceived in the full, like architecture” clearly resonated with Kossoff and his clay-like painterly forms in Dalston Lane (Summer) are a remarkable example of the continuing relevance of the immediacy and tactility of his medium (David Bomberg quoted in: ibid., p. 17).

In the present painting, we are exposed to a part of London that deeply resonated with Kossoff; one that he saw every day in his Dalston studio between 1972 and 1975. Depicting his everyday urban environment with a tempestuous energy, Dalston Lane (Summer) pays homage to the surging chaos and changing nature of a growing industrial city set within the emotive bounds of history and memory.