Fidelma in a Red Chair is one of Leon Kossoff’s largest figure paintings of the nineteen-seventies and -eighties. The work was executed in a period of burgeoning self-confidence during which the artist developed a personally distinctive mode of painting the human body. The nude subject was a hallmark of ‘School of London’ painting and Fidelma in a Red Chair epitomises the energetic execution and psychological intensity which earned Kossoff a place as one of the pre-eminent painters of his generation.
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Throughout his career, Kossoff painted sitters from life in the confines of his home studio. As with all other such paintings made after 1966, Fidelma in a Red Chair was executed in Chatsworth Road, Willesden Green, where Kossoff lived. The intimacy of this arrangement was a significant aspect of his practice, helping to charge his figure paintings with immediacy and tension. The figure in this work dominates the picture, a massive presence barely contained by the parameters of the support. By overburdening the painted space around the figure, Kossoff eschewed conventions of pictorial composition and hinted to the physical enclosure of his studio.
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The contours of the figure are clearly defined in bold, singular strokes of the brush; the sitter’s mood is ambiguous, the gestures and facial expression evoking a complex mixture of anguish and boredom; and the flesh tones are a subtle compound, grey tempered with pink, developed from Kossoff’s earlier clay-like idiom of earth colours.
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Fidelma in a Red Chair is exceptional in Kossoff’s oeuvre. Most of his pictures were realised over long periods of sustained sittings, with the sitter holding the same pose as the artist endlessly painted, scraped away and re-painted. Although the artist’s deep familiarity with the sitter undoubtedly made possible Fidelma in a Red Chair, Kavanagh has recalled that this work
‘is the only painting I know of that was completed in one sitting. It was never scraped off like the rest, and I never took that “pose” again.’
Despite his frequent protests about the struggles and difficulty of painting, Kossoff emerges from Fidelma in a Red Chair as a painter with both daring fluency and forceful invention.
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