Leon Kossoff was born to Ukrainian-Jewish refugee parents who had moved to London at the start of the century having fled religious persecution in the Ukraine. He was born in Islington, London, England in 1926 and studied at St Martin’s School of Art, and under David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic (1950–52) before attending the Royal College of Art (1953-56). Following his first solo exhibition in 1956, he exhibited widely achieving an international reputation. London, which he painted repeatedly, was his main inspiration and he focused on places of intense human activity, such as the underground, the railway, parks and swimming pools, particularly in Shoreditch, Hackney and Kilburn.
Painter and draughtsman Leon Kossoff was born to Ukranian-Jewish refugee parents in Islington, London, England on 10 December 1926 and raised in the East End, where his parents, ran a bakery. His father, Wolf, and his mother, Rachel, had moved to London at the start of the century having fled religious persecution in the Ukraine. From an early age he was drawn to the National Gallery, admitting 'At first, the pictures were frightening for me – the first rooms were hung with religious paintings whose subjects were unfamiliar to me' (cited Higgins, 2013), however a seminal encounter, aged nine, with Rembrandt’s 'Woman Bathing in a Stream' (1634), set him upon his future path as a painter. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Kossoff was evacuated in September 1939 to King’s Lynn in Norfolk, where his host family encouraged his passion for drawing, including from ‘photographs of blitz-shattered London’ (Cork 2006, p. 3) and the city, like the Old Masters, became an enduring source of inspiration. After his return to London in 1943, Kossoff attended life classes at Toynbee Hall adult education centre, and Saturday classes at St Martin’s School of Art, where he also completed a one-year Commercial Art Course. Then, following service in Europe with the Royal Fusiliers Jewish Brigade (1945–48), he resumed his studies at St Martin’s, meeting fellow student Frank Auerbach in 1949, with whom he balso attended David Bomberg’s liberating Borough Polytechnic evening classes (1950–52), later recalling, ‘Once he drew on the board for a moment. I watched him and realised that in drawing what you are seeing and experiencing you keep your freedom. This is what Bomberg taught me’ (letter in Ben Uri Archives, September 2017).
In 1953 Kossoff married Rosalind (known as Peggy), who became one of his frequent models - others later included his parents, his wife, and regular sitters Fidelma, Pilmar, Cathy, the writer N M Seedo and painter John Lessore - and enrolled at the Royal College of Art until 1956. In this year he participated in The Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists at Ben Uri Gallery (where his work was frequently exhibited from then on including in a group show with Sandra Blow, Henry Inlander, Helena Markson and Archibald Zeigler in 1968). He had the first of five solo exhibitions organised by Helen Lessore at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London in 1957. Critic John Berger was impressed by Kossoff’s 'shockingly thick' paint and his 'equally heavily worked and very black’ drawings, observing that his ‘brooding hunched up figures […] fit as tensely in their panels as medieval figures in their niches' (Berger 1959, p. 352); by 1963 both the Arts Council and Tate had acquired Kossoff’s work. He was a member of the London Group (1962–64). In 1966 he vacated his Mornington Crescent studio (taken on by Auerbach) for Willesden, where he remained for the rest of his life. He supplemented his income with teaching at various London art schools including the Regent Street Polytechnic, Chelsea School of Art, and Saint Martin's School of Art and continued to exhibit widely, holding 30 further solo exhibitions, hosted by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1981), the Venice Biennale (1995), Tate (1996), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2000) and the National Gallery (2007). In 1976, Kossoff was labelled by R. B. Kitaj in the Hayward Gallery exhibition, The Human Clay, alongside Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Kitaj himself, as one of the ‘School of London’ painters (a controversial term never adopted by its so-called ‘members’). Kossoff first exhibited with Annely Juda Fine Art in 2000, and the gallery continued to represent him and, subsequently, his estate.
London remained Kossoff's major inspiration: 'London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream', he observed (cited Kold 2004, p. 12). His work was rooted in Dalston, Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Kilburn, Willesden and Embankment and centred on places of intense human activity, such as the underground, train stations, parks and swimming pools. As Andrea Rose, author of Kossoff's Catalogue Raisonné has noted, 'We see in them the interplay between external reality and internal perception freshly achieved' (Rose, Annely Juda website). Kossoff drew daily from life, mostly with charcoal and an eraser, in situ at different times of the day and in all weathers. In the late 1980s he returned to scenes from his childhood including Arnold Circus, the former site of Rochelle Primary School (which he had attended as a boy), and Spitalfields, producing an important series of paintings and etchings based on Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church, a subject revisited in 2012 and exhibited two years later, in London, Paris and New York. He held his final exhibition at Piano Nobile gallery in London in 2019.
Leon Kossoff died in London, England on 4 July 2019, aged 92. His work is represented in numerous UK collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal College of Art and Tate, as well as many collections abroad including MoMA. A catalogue raisonné of his oil paintings, edited by Andrea Rose, was published by Modern Art Press in 2021, coinciding with a retrospective at Annely Juda Fine Art, curated by Andrea Rose, which toured to L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA, and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Leon Kossoff in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Leon Kossoff]
Publications related to [Leon Kossoff] in the Ben Uri Library