Leon Kossoff (1926-2019)
Two Seated Figures No.1 (My Parents), 1980
Oil on board
Courtesy of the Leonid and Tatiana Nevzlin Collection
Must Know
Leon Kossoff was a key figure of modern British painting. Contrary to his regular practice, this painting was completed in just a few hours. The strand-like traces are a result of the brush dripping onto the painting horizontally. Kossoff often painted his parents, who had emigrated from Russia to england as children at the beginning of the 20th century.
One of Britain’s most acclaimed painters of modern times, Kossoff is recognised for his highly worked and gestural impasto paintings and his striking and expressive drawings in charcoal, pastel, and graphite. Kossoff grew up in London’s East end and the post-war destruction of the City and neighbourhoods so familiar to him became a focus for his work. His sombre pallette of greys and browns and heavy mark making depicting the desolation and devastation of the local community and industrial landscape.
Throughout his life he continued to turn to his family and friends as subjects, These figurative works are classical in genre yet distinctly personal in style and approach, revealing the artist’s affection and intimacy with his sitters. Executed in 1980, Two seated Figures no.1 (My Parents) is a intimate and poignant portrait of Leon Kossoff’s aging parents, who were Jewish immigrants from Russia who arrived in england as children in the 1900s. Portraits of family and friends make up a large part of Leon Kossoff’s artistic output. The artist painted numerous portraits of his parents, individually and together. This portrait is a meditation on its subject, carefully but expressively worked in the thickly applied paint which is a common feature of the artist’s work.
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Kossoff’s brushwork and application of medium have always stood as defining characteristics of his work, and here his typically thick impasto lends the painting an impressive physical immediacy. Drawing is an essential, an obsessive and indispensable aspect of his practice. Kossoff always begins his paintings with an exploration of the subject through life-drawing. This initial impression is the only method of truly conveying what he sees, feels and perceives from his sitters. Maintaining the same reality of feeling that is reflected in his drawing or sketches, Kossoff’s paintings have the same immediacy as his preparatory works on paper. His achievements in drawing translate elegantly into the paintings Kossoff made of his family, illustrating the heartfelt familial relation between sitters and artist. However, upon further scrutiny the viewer begins to understand that while this is a depiction of the artist’s parents, Kossoff’s depiction of them informs the viewer more generally about Kossoff’s understanding of the effects of time, love and age than it does about the individual natures of his parents.
“The fabric of my work through the last forty years has been dependent on those people who have so patiently sat for me, each one uniquely transforming my space by their presence.” Leon Kossoff
This painting is a stunning example of the poignancy and beauty that is inherent to the work of Leon Kossoff. The earth-bound mortality of his parents is manifested throughout the swirling arcs of paint, and the skeins of tonality that envelope the composition.
