Kossoff's doubt - Leon Kossoff, traveling exhibition

Always the beginning of work that first innocence must be re-achieved.

Like Rilke, Leon Kossoff strives "to be a beginner." "Whether by means of scraping off or by rubbing down, it is always beginning again, making fresh images, destroying images that lie, discarding images that are dead," he has written. In each painting there is an pressure a sense of improvisation, of the like kind that one could believe that he had to learn as he went along by what means to make this image happen, to excavate or coax it from an oppressive overload of paint. Kossoff paintings are heavy--not just literally, the pigment heaped onto made of wood supports, as canvas could at no time carry his amounts of paint, on the contrary emotionally too, the palette lugubrious and autumnal. Because of the sheer, manifest effort they make corporeal the works weigh heavily upon the conscience of the viewer.

Effort is the operative word. Kossoff was included in the seminal 1984 Tate Gallery exhibition of figurative painting and statuary memorably called "The Hard Won Image." The catalogue sported a photograph of his of advanced age buddy Frank Auerbach's North London studio upon its cover: a crusty Victorian garret passed upon to Auerbach by Kossoff himself. The state of Auerbach's studio is plenteous like Kossoff s own, with waste pigment strewn on the floor, the anguished encrustations of paint rhyming with the decrepitude of the mottling walls. Kossoff has himself described his work space as "a field in a house. miry hillocks of paint-sodden newspapers overspread the floor burying scraped not on images. Derelict boards stand in all corners, remnants of new activity."

Visitors to Kossoff's studio have described it in similar terms: notably Rudi Fuch director of the Stedelok in Amsterdam, in the catalogue of Kossoff's Venice Biennale exhibition, which is to travel to Fuchs's institution nearest year. But that Kossoff himself should use the language of a bemused visitor when he is the resident and author of this squalor moves an artist with an organ of sight to his own mythology. Hard-won-ness appeals to a romantic conception of the artist as Prometheus, wresting firm, defying the the supreme beings The Kossoff/Auerbach esthetic makes a nagging insistence upon the denial and defacement that underwrite each image. the couple artists recall Cezanne, who, according to Merleau-Ponty's classic essay, "Cezanne's Doubt," "need single hundred sessions of work for single still-life, 150 sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was for him solitary a series of attempts towards the complet work." In just this way, Auerbach and Kossoff commit themselves to strenuous pursuit of the unattainable in their overthrow of the elusive image. Any effort that, upon reflection, falls short in flat a single aspect is scraped down to begin all above again at the next session.

It is in the nature of an artist like Leon Kossoff to be "untimely": to work against the grain, self-consciously within a great on the other hand marginalized tradition. Certainly at the Venice Biennale, ensconc in the British pavilion, he have the appearanceed isolated as a figure painter amidst all the hi-tech displays. He and Francesco Clemente however, shared the distinction of being the sole artists in national pavilions also included in the scan of 20th-century images of the material part and the sell, "Identity and Alterity," curated by dint of Jean Clair Isee A.i.A., generation '95]. At the Palazzo Grassi, Kossoff from the early '60 hung alongside works by dint of Bacon, Balthus and Giacometti. Kossoff's reinventions of the figure and the pressing obsessive excavation of his imagery made great faculty of perception in this context, as his balled contortions of paint were spied from one side a row of Giacometti's fiercely patterned figures.

But for all the postwar angst of his gritty depictions of the urban display it would be a mistake to read Kossoff solitary in the grim half-fight of existentialism. Indeed, what came without in the warm glow of the Adriatic day-star is the increasing sensuality of Kossoff's paint, a sensuality which sometimes borders upon joie de vivre. It is certainly genuine in the earlier work that there was an almost puritanical disdain for the actual matter being heaped onto the support. John Berger, in single of Kossoff's earliest reviews, notion that his pictures "look as if they were made of coloured, solidified engine grease as set into a grease gun." He likened the hatred of sensuous pleasure to Beckett's deep pessimism. Perceptive in its time, this is the tone of criticism which has stuck with Kossoff despite the directions in which his art has matured.

It is still authentic of course, that the hurried visitor (which is the typical Biennale visitor), unused to his mode of expression would be struck by hefty, initially inscrutable forms, by means of his sitters' typically resigned melancholy, and by means of the chilled nonchalance of his denuded models. But the longer individual stays with the works, especially the more novel ones, the brighter and more luminous they become. They are increasingly legible and yielding; brushstrokes are more descriptive, color more suggestive. There is flat a festive mood in the ambitious fresh series of (for Kossoff) large tableaux of the Embankment subterraneous Station. It is as if, in anticipation of his apotheosis in Venice, Kossoff mov away from his usual drab suburb to a public space by the agency of the river. Embankment Station and Hungerford Bridge, Winter (1993-94) is unseasonably cheery, and although the subdue is sirnilar to Outside Kilburn subterraneous (Nuclear Spring), 1987-an entrance to an subterranean station with an encroaching Victorian bridge--the smoothnes with which the stone facade is achieved, the fly opens of exuberance in the flower stalls, the almost dancing forms of commuter despite being his typical clay figurines, aU glance at a very different spirit. With the grand, classical bufldings upon the Strand crowding above the station it is abnost possible to imagine the exhibition transported from murky old London to Italy.