Head of Chaim is a portrait of the artist’s brother brimming with texture and agitation. Bald and bespectacled the sitter’s head fills the sheet which is loaded with dark charcoal pigment to its very edges. Chaim’s lips are pursed, and his eyes follow the incline of his head, off towards the left of the picture. Strong energetic diagonal dashes articulate his ageing neck, leading to loose-necked shirt and bust which are dwarfed by the enlarged cranium. Lines scored by an eraser add lighter accents to his forehead and cheeks, counter balancing unadulterated deposits of heavy charcoal on his glasses and shirt. In his portraits, Kossoff’s subject matter is always of a personal nature, creating intimate portraits of a small circle of friends, relatives and models. Chaim became one of his most prominent subjects after the passing of his father in 1982 and brought about a series of substantial portraits in oil and charcoal, another example of which is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In contrast to the congested energy of his early portraits, the series of portraits of Chaim possess a startling clarity with a relaxed and new-found grandeur that distinguishes them as some of Kossoff’s most powerful paintings.

Born in 1926 in Islington, London, Leon Kossoff was formally trained at St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art from 1949-1956. However, it was through his attendance of classes at Borough Polytechnic, alongside good friend and artist Frank Auerbach, that he was exposed to the highly influential teachings of David Bomberg. Bomberg’s now legendary classes became a hub for artistic inspiration during the 1940s and 1950s, imparting to his students his fervent belief in the prominence of drawing, partiualrly in charcoal. These philosophies are evident in Kossoff’s practice, who views drawing as an essential activity, both in its own right and as an indispensable prerequisite to the execution of a painting. When speaking of drawing, Bomberg stated that, “drawing… reveals the unknown things… style is ephemeral – form is eternal” (David Bomberg quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Leon Kossoff: Recent Paintings: XlVI Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, 1995, p. 17). The latter half of this statement aptly summarises Kossoff’s ability to maintain his own unique style, eschewing those momentary fads within painting, which have passed over the decades, in favour of those steeped in art historical traditions.

Kossoff’s style departed from that of Bomberg, developing a heavy impasto technique within his paintings actively conversant with the work of Nicolas de Staël and Willem de Kooning. However, these innovations consistently grew from the foundational techniques he learned at Bomberg’s classes. Separate, vigorous and energetic drawing would continue in parallel to his completion of a work in oil and would occasionally manifest in lines carved through his heavily layered oil paint. Unusually, in the present work Kossoff found himself overflowing the upper edge of the paper and so attached an extra strip to extend his drawing. The result is a monumental drawing, larger than life-size. As is typical of Kossoff’s best work, the torpid energy of its material execution establishes tension against the attitude of quiet forbearance captured in its sitter. This abivalence facilitates a fusion between an honest warmth of feeling with a direct impression of the thrill experienced by the artist in the act of creation. Recounting this experience, Kossoff told of how “Every time the model sits everything has changed. […]The light has changed, the balance has changed. The directions you try to remember are no longer there and, whether working from the model or landscape drawings, everything has to be reconstructed daily, many many times. 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, ‘Everything is Ever the Same’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Leon Kossoff: Recent Paintings: XlVI Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, 1995, p. 25).