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.
At one point there was talk of a Tate retrospective of Kossoff’s drawings to complement the museum’s paintings show in 1996. That has yet to happen, but into the breach has stepped Kossoff’s dealer, Annely Juda, and organised a superb exhibition of 90 drawings and 10 paintings on the theme of London. The earliest work comes from 1952, the most recent from 2012, and the selection will tour first to Paris in September, then to New York in November and on to Los Angeles in the new year. It offers a substantial survey of Kossoff’s urban subjects, many of which have never been exhibited before.
Kossoff does not overtly celebrate nor castigate, he merely states and restates, with exceptional sympathy and engagement. His pictures are about the relative positions of things — an urgent attempt to fix the look of reality before it changes.
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