Painting’s Quiet Man : Leon Kossoff Is From the London School in Both His Style of Art and Reluctance to Promote Himself

To the casual observer of the American art scene, figurative painting might seem like something that was dusted off and propped up by New York’s Eric Fischl/David Salle/Francesco Clemente contingent in the early ‘80s, only to topple again along with the crashing art market of the ‘90s. Across the Atlantic, however, figurative painting has fared differently: Though it hasn’t been the Next Big Thing for a few decades now, figurative work has never lost its luster in England to the degree that it did in the United States.

A show of drawings and a small selection of paintings by Leon Kossoff opened Saturday at Venice’s L.A. Louver Gallery, presenting the work of one of the handful of British artists known as the School of London who’ve been doggedly pushing the limits of figurative painting for the past 40 years. A leading figure in the post-war generation that includes Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach, Kossoff has exhibited regularly since 1957 and is something of an institution on his home turf, where he’s even had the Saatchi Experience (British art collector/advertising magnate Charles Saatchi bought up a large body of Kossoff’s work in the mid-’80s, only to turn around and sell it again).

That Kossoff is not better known in the United States may stem from the fact that working the media, as American artists routinely do, is generally not done in England. The 67-year-old artist can count the number of interviews he’s done on one hand, and he begins our encounter with the request that he please not be quoted. “You don’t mind, do you?” he innocently inquires. His words are brought here only after a good deal of haggling.

Kossoff’s reluctance to speak on the record about art is curious, given that he’s remarkably articulate on the subject. A witty, self-effacing man who’s considerably more light-hearted than his work might lead one to expect, Kossoff has an impressive knowledge of art history and speaks of his own work with candor and insight.

Rooted in a belief in the importance of drawing from life (which makes Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes a fan), Kossoff’s art resides in that curious limbo separating Modernism from all that preceded it. Working with a small, painstakingly selected vocabulary of subjects--portraits of friends and family, the public baths, trains, markets and churches of Willesden, the neighborhood in North London where he’s lived since 1970--Kossoff has painted essentially the same things for years. Nor has he made any abrupt changes in the way he handles paint, which he lathers on in heavy layers that take on the density of clay (an effect he somehow also manages to achieve in his pastels). A tremendous sense of weight tethers Kossoff’s subjects to his canvases, comprised as they are of aborted passages, scrapings, remodelings and gougings; ultimately his work is about the struggle to record and communicate life as he experiences it, and Kossoff makes no attempt to hide that struggle.

“Nothing really begins to happen in a painting until you reach the point where conscious intention breaks up and ceases to be the thing that’s driving you,” says Kossoff of his working method. “In the process of making a painting, one’s initial intent does dissolve at a certain point and that creates a very perilous condition because it casts you into a world that’s totally unfamiliar--yet it’s only there that something worthwhile can occur. I’m after something I can’t possibly anticipate and every painting I’ve made that I consider finished has something in it that surprised or disturbed me.”

Born in London, the second in a family of seven children, Kossoff grew up in a working-class milieu where there was little time for art. “My parents emigrated from Russia and the world I grew up in was fairly medieval,” he says. “My father struggled to support us working as a baker, there wasn’t much culture in that world and artists were considered wastrels.

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“The realm of art opened up to me nonetheless when I was 9 years old and saw Rembrandt’s painting ‘Woman Bathing,’ ” he continues. “I don’t know what struck me about it because none of the other paintings in the National Gallery where I saw it interested me at all. But somehow that painting opened up a whole world to me--not a world of painting so much as a way of feeling about life that I hadn’t experienced before.”

Kossoff’s nascent creative impulses were further liberated oddly enough by the war, when he was evacuated from London and sent to live with a family in the rural town of Norfolk. “The museums there had lots of work by the East Anglicans, the school of English watercolorists that laid down the foundations for Constable and Turner, and I loved that work,” recalls Kossoff, who also cites Poussin and Cezanne as important influences.

In 1945, Kossoff enlisted in the British military and on his release in 1949 enrolled in St. Martin’s School of Art, where he befriended Frank Auerbach. It was Auerbach who took Kossoff to an evening class at Borough Polytechnic taught by David Bomberg, the artist who died in poverty in 1957 and is generally acknowledged to be the unofficial godfather of the London School. (Bomberg himself studied with Walter Sickert, who studied with James McNeill Whistler, who studied with Courbet--which makes Kossoff’s bloodlines pedigreed indeed).

“What David did for me, which was more important than any technique he could’ve taught me, was he made me feel like I could do it,” says Kossoff of the two years he studied with Bomberg. “I came to him with no belief in myself whatsoever and he treated my work with respect.”

Drawing continues to be the cornerstone of Kossoff’s work, and though it’s routinely dismissed as being of less stature than painting, Kossoff views the two disciplines as interchangeable. “The emotional content of both is absolutely the same for me, and that emotional content hasn’t really changed over the years.”

Immutable though his emotional landscape is, Kossoff does detect change in his work. “I think there’s more light in the work now and that it’s changed in character as well,” he observes. “In the early years I struggled much more with my subjects, and whereas my work used to be a kind of an assault, it now has more the feeling of an encounter.”

Asked in parting how he’s arrived at the subjects that have preoccupied him throughout his long career, he explains “initially I pick my subjects because I find them visually exciting, but after I’ve drawn and painted something for a while I often discover that it played some role in my life--take Christ Church, for instance (Christ Church is a Baroque cathedral Kossoff has painted many times). I spent my early childhood not far from Christ Church and must’ve passed it countless times when I was very young, and I’m sure my desire to paint it is related to a need to work through something to do with my childhood. Exactly what that is or why I want to address it, I don’t know.

“When I began working on this church, I thought it would take me two years, but I wound up spending seven years on it--and I still don’t feel that I know that church. One never really finishes with a subject; what happens is I’ll feel I’ve examined it sufficiently for the time being, and that feeling creates room in my mind for another subject to creep in.”