Leon Kossoff, From Rembrandt: A Woman bathing in a Stream. Private collection © Leon Kossoff
Sara Allen drew something special from the work of Leon Kossoff at the National Gallery.
Leon Kossoff’s drawings of paintings in the National Gallery have earned a place, albeit temporarily, on the gallery’s walls in their own right. The revelatory images drawn from works by Goya, Rembrandt, Degas and Velazquez among others, can be found in the Sunley Room until July 1 2007, in the exhibition Drawing from Painting.
Revered and celebrated, Kossoff is primarily a painter of London. Born in the capital city, it is his subject and his inspiration - but this exhibition focuses on the artist’s intimate connection with the National Gallery, and the great works therein.
The relationship began in 1936 when the ten-year-old Kossoff first made his way to the gallery and glimpsed Rembrandt’s Woman in a Stream. He was amazed, entranced, and has endowed this moment with almost mythical status. Since then, he has visited the gallery many times, to draw and make prints from the collection, revisiting each work repeatedly.
Leon Kossoff, From Velázquez: Christ after the Flagellation, contemplated by the Christian Soul. Private collection © Leon Kossoff
This stunning exhibition focuses largely on these works on paper. Never intended for public consumption, they are a dizzying spectacle and allow an intimate view of the artist’s process. Indeed, they reveal how this enthralled and tenacious student taught himself how to be an artist.
As well as offering this insight, the drawings, etchings and paintings are a marvel to gaze upon. Each frame delineates a work, but cannot contain it, such is their intensity and complexity.
These works aren’t reproductions, homage, or even pastiche – these drawings show the artist, over a lifetime, inhabiting the works he draws, attempting to capture their soul.
The vigour of the images belies Kossoff’s decisive and elegant mark-making. Give attention to his delicate rendition of Degas’s Combing the Hair (La Coiffure) and you’ll notice precision easily lost amidst a cacophony of scrawl and charcoal elsewhere.
Leon Kossoff, From Degas: Combing the Hair ('La Coiffure'). Private collection © Leon Kossoff
Never intended for public display, it’s not hard to imagine the artist’s home crammed full of these drawings: packed into drawers, on top of wardrobes, under beds. Piles of paper, marked with charcoal, not even fixed, never intended for permanence.
The success of the curator, Colin Wiggins, has been not to stifle the raw energy of these pictures. Instead, standing in the centre of the vast elegant room, the sense is of being spun around.
This is a demanding collection too. They compel the audience to go back to the original works with which we are casually familiar as postcards and reproductions, and see them afresh. The curator acknowledges this, detailing the location of the original work next to each drawing.
Christchurch, Spitalfields.
As a counterpoint, the large oil painting Christchurch, Spitalfields is the most spectacular and incredible work in the show. It faces the audience, seducing them, as they enter the main room. The insight the audience gains into the way this artist not only works, but learns, gets its payoff in this painting.
Kossoff’s world is brilliantly realised here – he treats London as Lucien Freud treats the body, sticky and seductive. The pallet of greys speaks directly to the Londoner all too familiar with the city’s murky skies. The scale and perspective of the church place the audience in the child’s shoes, so amazed by Rembrandt, and by the building that housed the work. And this depiction of Christchurch, something like Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, tells a story of a London changed immeasurably over Kossoff’s lifetime.
Next to the painting hangs the drawing From Poussin: Cephalus and Aurora. The curator seems to be drawing a line between the two works, directing the viewer to an association between the figures of homeless folk on the steps of the stairs, and the figures in From Poussain. One cannot fail to see connection.
This is a seductive and compelling exhibition which serves not only to give insight to an artist’s process, but more, to compel the viewer to revisit works with which they assume familiarity. It is, if you will, a diary or an archive, and an important one at that.
