Andrew Lambirth

Exhibitions: Leon Kossoff, The Bay Area School

issue 08 June 2013

Paint is but coloured mud, pace scientists and conservators, and it can be said that the human animal comes from mud and goes back to it. Thus are the activities of painting and being human linked at a fundamental level, which can be raised by consciousness to impressive heights. As the philosopher T.E. Hulme wrote, ‘All the mud, endless, except where bound together by the spectator.’ This is an apt description of an exhibition by Leon Kossoff (born 1926). Kossoff paints thickly with much piling up of the mud of paint, which is trenched and seamed and dribbled across the surface of board supports. He is a pupil of David Bomberg, who preached a slightly mystical doctrine of ‘the spirit in the mass’, rooted in a sensory perception of the world expressed through the structural application of paint. What we see is inextricable from our emotional experience of seeing it: the objective becomes subjective, and sight becomes insight.

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