Leon Kossoff met Frank Auerbach at St Martin's. In the early 50's he worked on building exteriors and on portraits of his parents and family. He reworked paintings as he did drawings. These were the two general subjects to preoccupy him for much of his life. Rail stations and swimming pools, where his son was taking lessons, also contributed, and the latter lightened his palette. His impasto rivaled, even exceeded that of our recent subject David Park. The similarities between these two groups continues to impress me.
This painting, Woman Ill in Bed, Surrounded by Family, 1965, which lives at the Tate, appears to me almost as a Russian icon, or oddly as Madeline once appeared with her fellow orphans at a table headed by Miss Clavell. The pathos of the characters, whose faces are anguished, and of the dying woman who is in agony, is Christ-like, with disciples gathered round. However you read it, it is so moving, the window open high above as a place she might eventually ascend to heaven.
A cache of 14 of his paintings that were stolen from a truck en route to Italy tormented Kossoff, and a new retrospective which will travel to LA in 2022, is meant to help possibly jog people's memories about where they might have seen these. The Mafia was suspected. In September a catalogue raisonne will also be published. Kossoff recently died in 2019.
Frank Auerbach and His Work Have Staying Power
The marvelous, indomitable Frank Auerbach is still alive and working. His recent show at Luhring Augustine showed that this member of the School of London/London Calling exhibition who was born in Berlin in 1931 has extraordinary staying power.
He was sent to England as part of the Kindertransport at age 7 and never saw his parents who were killed in the camps again.
This image of his friend and colleague Leon Kossoff from 1951 shows how thick as thieves the two were. They met at Borough Polytechnic and became each other's family.
Like Bacon, Freud and Andrews, he found favor with critics John Berger and David Sylvester (father of Cecily Brown).
Later he would come to a brighter palette as in Portrait of JYM from 1961. But in the portrait of Kossoff, the line from a painter like Walter Sickert is clearer. It's haunting.