HEAD OF HEINZ III, 1998
LEON KOSSOFF
oil on board
63.5 x 51.0 cm
bears inscription verso: LK0030
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (label attached verso)
Annely Juda Fine Art, London (label attached verso)
Gene and Brian Sherman Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2000
Leon Kossoff, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, 13 April – 20 May 2000, cat. 28
Leon Kossoff, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 1 June – 22 July 2000
Leon Kossoff, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, 2000, cat. 28, pp. 28, 29 (illus., front cover and p.8)
Leon Kossoff attended his first life drawing classes at Toynbee Hall and St Martin’s School of Art in London at the age of seventeen. His use of the figure as motif has been an important aspect of the artist’s oeuvre for more than sixty years and the products of his commitment to this fundamental practice are objects of profound strength.
Living and working in his home town of London for his entire life, Leon Kossoff’s images are of those people and places with which he has built up familiarity over many years. The decision to limit his range of imagery is consistent with the working methods of other ‘School of London’ artists, Frank Auerbach and the late Lucian Freud, who are both known to prefer working with close friends and family, or on landscapes close to their studios. All three artists are also well known for the commitment their sitters must make, in some cases to weekly sessions over decades.
But the artist’s familiarity does not equate in any way to a formulaic reproduction of his subjects. Rather, in accord with his own existential views, they are products of his changing and developing observations of the familiar, each made afresh: ‘Every time the model sits, everything has changed. You have changed, (he) 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.’1.
The sheer impact of Kossoff’s physical, material objects is striking. In the case of the work on offer, Head of Heinz III, 1998, the sitter, Heinz Propper, was the subject of numerous portraits by Kossoff, executed as rugged and heavily worked charcoal on paper, as well as a series in oil on board. In this work, the painting takes on the form not unlike a heavy ceramic tablet, as layer upon layer of oil paint, applied over many sittings, culminate in the final, resolved object. At each sitting, the artist will have worked on the painting for just a couple of hours, but at the conclusion of each session the image is virtually obliterated in an act, not so much of destruction, but of absorption, leaving the base and the artist’s memory of the works below the surface as the starting point for the next attempt. Not only is this process part of a continual struggle between the artist and the image, but its aim is to strike that mysterious balance between the power of the image represented with the presence of the object itself.
Over the last two decades or so, Leon Kossoff has held numerous notable international exhibitions such as, Leon Kossoff, XLVI Venice Biennale British Pavilion in 1995; Leon Kossoff Retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London in 1996; Drawn to Painting: Leon Kossoff Drawings and Prints after Nicholas Poussin at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2001 and touring to the National Gallery of Australia in 2002 and Leon Kossoff: Drawing from Painting at the National Gallery, London, in 2007. He remains one of the most significant and influential painters of our time.
1. Kossoff, L., quoted in Gregory, B., Leon Kossoff, Annandale Galleries, Sydney, 2001, p. 9
DAMIAN HACKETT
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