In paintings of London, his life-long home, Leon Kossoff used hard won observation and the people in his thoughts to create ambitious artworks that defy distinctions of genre.
InSight No. 189
Leon Kossoff, King's Cross, Summer, 1998
Leon Kossoff’s (1926–2019) paintings of London register the changing light, seasons and atmosphere. Depending on the time of year, the air is often heavy with dust, damp or pollen. In 1974, he described how the city ‘lingers in my mind’, partly for ‘the strange ever changing light’. He returned to his chosen sites repeatedly and studied them over the course of many drawings, and from these he made paintings in the studio. His titles frequently reference the month, season or time of day to distinguish one picture from the next: winter, summer, spring afternoon, stormy day, Friday evening, March afternoon. It was a convenient distinction, but it also revealed something that interested the artist. King’s Cross, Summer is bright with tarnished daylight. Sunshine rakes through humid air. The sky shimmers with broken cloud. As he described it, his subject was partly ‘the shuddering feel of the sprawling city’, of which atmospheric conditions were a crucial aspect.
Since Kossoff made charcoal drawings directly from life, it was convenient to have a studio space near the place where he worked. Much of his work of the fifties and sixties was orientated around the location of his studio, first in Mornington Crescent where he painted the railway lines that run into Euston, then in Willesden Junction and, from 1966, a room in his home at Willesden Green, which became the centre of his life and practice. In later years he occasionally took a studio elsewhere in London for the purpose of working from nearby sites and scenes. Between 1972 and 1975 he had a second studio in Dalston Lane, East London.
In the nineties, perhaps spurred by invitations to hold a retrospective at the Tate Gallery and to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, Kossoff sought new subjects in different areas of London. He also continued to draw and paint Christ Church, Spitalfields, of which his first painting was completed in 1987. Between 1993 and 1995, Kossoff had a studio on the second storey of an office building across from the entrance to Embankment Underground Station in Villiers Street. During that period he made five large paintings of the subject, three of which concluded his exhibition at the British Pavilion at Venice in 1995. The first shows a bustling foreground and a grand architectural setting beyond. A crowd of figures passes through and the elevated perspective diminishes their presence among the railway bridge to the right and looming buildings at the horizon. The other four paintings adopt a view from street level, in which the artist and the viewer take their place face-to-face with so many passing strangers. Such encounters define the modern metropolis, and this experience is unchanged since Ezra Pound wrote about another city in his short poem of 1913, In a Station of the Metro:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Kossoff’s paintings at Embankment established the pattern for those he made of King’s Cross Station in 1998–99. He set up a makeshift studio in the disused Midland Grand Hotel, which was then between its former use as a British Rail office and its present reimagining (open since 2011) as a luxury hotel. He continued to make drawings there until 2005, but his seven large paintings of the subject were all completed in 1997 and 1998. All seven depict a view from street level. In these paintings, passing people and traffic are an imminent manifestation of a much greater dynamic energy that reaches outwards from this scene to encompass the entire city. Kossoff’s flickering painted image suggests a cacophony of trains rattling over points, children’s voices, the boom of jet engines in the sky, rubber on tarmac, diesel motors idling at traffic lights, the rustle of cigarette butts and tree blossom in a gutter. The observable world of Kossoff’s city paintings reveals only a corner of the experience which they contain.
A woman in a red dress appears as the central figure in two paintings of King’s Cross, including King’s Cross, Summer. As Andrea Rose writes in her catalogue raisonné of Kossoff’s paintings, the woman is based on his friend the painter Anne Norman, whose studio was in King’s Cross and whose mother Rosemary Peto was a contemporary of Kossoff’s at the Royal College of Art in the fifties. Related charcoal drawings, which Kossoff made on the spot, show a throng of anonymous commuters and passersby. In 1987, Kossoff described the unexpected transformation of the throng into real acquaintances of his. With reference to his ‘crowd’ paintings, he wrote: ‘at the final moment each person becomes someone particular that I know. It is as though, apart from the obvious subject matter, these pictures are about the people in my head.’
After a long period of work, of drawing and re-drawing, painting and re-painting, this remarkable conclusion suggests the openness that Kossoff maintained throughout the making of a work, and the extent to which his paintings were the result of both great physical and psychological effort. His large paintings of London such as King’s Cross, Summer hold together so many competing, qualitative variables that each finished work must be weighed as an extraordinary achievement.
Images:
King’s Cross Station, London, 1977
The Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station, London, 1987
Leon Kossoff, View of King's Cross and Pentonville Road I, 1997, pastel and charcoal on paper, 59.5 x 84 cm, Private Collection © Leon Kossoff Estate
Leon Kossoff, King’s Cross, Summer (detail)
