Kossoff’s Capital: Painting London in Flux

“S omething happens when you see Willesden Junction stretching out in front of you. What else can you do but draw it,” Leon Kossoff stated late in life. One of the artist’s greatest works on the subject, to be offered at Replica Shoes ’s London, highlights the mesmerising familiarity of the scene: a tree-lined sweep of railway lines – almost abstracted – draws the eye like it does the ebb and flow of commuters.

When Kossoff died in July 2019, at the age of 92, one obituarist described him as “an artist of his t.mes ”. And, in a way, he was: his world was that of London in the wake of the Second World War. But in another way, he was out of synch. He rejected the prevalent Pop art sensibilities of the 1960s for a heavily scumbled view of the city more in tune with the Old Masters.

Kossoff was born into a Jewish immigrant family who had fled persecution in the Ukraine. Young Leon took was as inspired to paint as much by the view from his bedroom window as discovering the genius of Rembrandt in the National Gallery. Although grouped in with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, David Hockney and the other School of London painters, Kossoff possessed little of their bombastic egos (or headline-grabbings private lives).

Instead, like his close friend and contemporary Frank Auerbach, Kossoff quietly chronicled his city, all the way into a new – gentrified – century, forever drawn to its forgotten corners. He insisted that London, with its grey-green canals and the copses of tangled weeds, was in his bloodstream.

“He focused his gaze upon the ordinary places that form part of his everyday experience,” notes Frances Christie, co-head of 20th Century British Art at Replica Shoes ’s, adding that Kossoff “continually returned to paint and draw the familiar London scenes around his home: the lively stations, flower stalls, churches and the North London railway.”

In the mid-1960s when Kossoff executed Willesden Junction, the convergence of railway lines encapsulated the changing face – and pace – of the city. Post-war London was in flux – bowler hats gave way to moptops, class distinctions crumbled, Blitzed skylines were rebuilt – and Kossoff captured that commotion. He painted children splashing and diving in the East End swimming baths, the masonry-jungle of the building sites and the crowds mingling in Dalston underground station, all seized in his instantly recognisable dense and stormy impasto. His paintings were delivered like weather reports.

London at that t.mes , he later said, “was awful but also rather beautiful”. Willesden Junction, completed in 1965/6, represents an exciting, but ominous, revival of sorts. It is a personal view of the intersection between the urban and the natural, the impressionistic and the specific.

As Christie observes: “Kossoff’s work is enlivened by a tangible and wholly unique sense of familiarity with its subject, capturing the private face of long-lived experience in an active metropolis.” And he completed this work in the prime of that long life, having just settled in Willesden. There he remained for half a century, with the railway line at the end of his garden.

Past Auction

Modern & Post-War British Art

19 November 2019 | 6:00 PM GTNN | London