Leon Kossoff Bücher

Leon Kossoff is a distinctive British artist known for his profound connection to London's urban landscape. Born in Islington in 1926, he has spent most of his life there, with the city's transformation serving as a major theme in his art. In the 1950s, his dramatic paintings and drawings of bomb sites captured the aftermath of war, leading to panoramic railway landscapes in the following decade that depicted the city's regeneration. Kossoff's focus on London's railways, from King's Cross to Kilburn Underground station, highlights the lifeblood of the city. His works, including depictions of swimming pools, street scenes, markets, and buildings, create a vivid portrait of modern metropolitan life. Alongside his fascination with London, Kossoff has a deep concern for people, making the figure a central theme in his work. His subjects include family, friends, and models with whom he has developed close relationships. His portraits and intimate nude studies evoke powerful and moving representations of the human presence. This catalogue accompanies a major retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, showcasing Kossoff's career from the 1950s to the present. It features color reproductions of every work in the exhibition, an illustrated essay by curator Paul Moorhouse exploring Kossoff's artistic development, a biographical chronology with archival photographs, and an extensive bibliography.

Known for his expressive portraits and London landscapes, draftsman, printmaker, and painter Leon Kossoff (b. 1926) is one of the most significant British artists of the past fifty years. A member of the School of London––a group of loosely representational painters including Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud––Kossoff views drawing as fundamental to the artistic process and has turned to art history for inspiration throughout his career.This handsome book features a selection of drawings and prints made over thirty years after paintings by such artists as Poussin, Rubens, Velázquez, Degas, Cézanne, and Goya. Absorbing essays discuss how Kossoff has used this body of drawings to inform his original paintings and analyze how the particular influence of Old Masters has been incorporated into his work.