As part of the Gilbert Lloyd Lecture Series, Art historian and writer, Andrea Rose, CMG & OBE, gave a fascinating talk over Zoom on Leon Kossoff (1926-2019).
Recognised as one of Britain’s greatest painters, Leon Kossoff, together with Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and RB Kitaj, became known as one of the ‘School of London’, arguably the most telling of them all. Bomb sites and building sites, city churches, Victorian school buildings, railway stations and tube trains and the restless to-and-fro of workaday street life – mostly in Dalston, Willesden, Kilburn, and Whitechapel – are the stuff of Kossoff’s art.
His paintings chart the upheavals involved in over half a century of change and development passionately addressed. What makes Kossoff’s paintings so splendidly contemporary is their interplay between observed reality and imaginative zeal: Kossoff doesn’t just perceive and record the world around him, he generates it.
If you were unable to attend the lecture, or would like to watch it again, you can do so here.