Annely Juda Fine Art presents Leon Kossoff: Trains and Stations, an exhibition of paintings and drawings devoted to the stations, trains and railways in the North and East End of London where he lived and worked all his life.
Kossoff drew his first station, Liverpool Street, in 1943 as a teenage evacuee, and he went on to return to train and tube stations as key subjects in his oeuvre for the rest of his life. King’s Cross, Euston, Kilburn, Dalston, Embankment and Willesden Junction all became subjects he revisited across the decades. The 23 works here, made between 1952 and 2006, range from early charcoal drawings to late paintings and drawings of King’s Cross. As the writer Iain Sinclair has observed, ‘the railway was his muse and he was its most potent recorder and supplicant.’
These were all places local to Kossoff, and he saw them as testament to a post-war city under rapid renewal, with the railways, the tube lines and a growing population all reshaping it. Kossoff scraped back and rebuilt his surfaces, so the paintings seem to share in the demolition and rebuilding of the city itself. For him they were not just landmarks and infrastructure but places where past and present constantly interplay, and he painted and sketched them in all weathers and seasons. ‘London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my blood stream,’ he said. ‘It’s always moving – the skies, the streets, the buildings, the people who walk past me when I draw have become part of my life.’
In the early 1960s Kossoff moved from Bethnal Green to Willesden Green, where his studio was an old shed close to the rails near Willesden Junction. The sprawling site, nicknamed ‘Wilderness Junction’, was a tangle of tracks, bridges and sidings, and Kossoff seems to have relished that wildness . He first painted it in 1961, a turning point that brought a lighter palette and longer, more fluid brushstrokes. By the mid-1960s he had moved his studio into his house in Willesden Green and would walk to Kilburn Underground to take the tube into central London, often to Embankment and the National Gallery. Andrea Rose notes in Kossoff’s Catalogue Raisonné that ‘At Kilburn and also Embankment underground stations, and in the later paintings of King’s Cross, the faces of family and friends often appear among the crowds, emphasising Kossoff’s attachment to his subject, as if he too were among the crowd, involved in their experiences, participating in the daily commute.’
The view from the bottom of his Willesden Green garden, where the Jubilee, Metropolitan and Chiltern lines run side by side, became one of his most sustained subjects. Eighteen paintings of the trains followed between 1987 and 1993, the first named for his young grandson’s cry of ‘Here comes the diesel!’. Returning to the same view through the year, from the spring light of Between Kilburn and Willesden Green, Spring Afternoon (1991) to the darkening winter of Winter Evening, Kossoff made the seasons, and the hours of the day, part of the subject. Robert Hughes likened the diesel paintings to late Constable, praising their ‘palpable joy in light’, and Kossoff’s response to the changing colour and light echoes Monet, who likewise returned to familiar subjects across the times of day and year.
Kossoff first drew King’s Cross in 1967 and returned thirty years later, as the area lay at the centre of London’s rebuilding. In King’s Cross, Spring No. 1 (1998), commuters pour in and out of the underground entrance in what the scholar Lee Hallman has called a ‘microcosm of the ordered chaos of the commute’. By King’s Cross Building Site, Early Morning (2006), his last painting of the station, the crowd has given way to workmen and the forecourt to earthworks piled against the brickwork. Kossoff placed himself, as Iain Sinclair has written, in ‘areas of demolition and reconstruction’, and from his first station drawing as a teenage evacuee to this last painting of King’s Cross, the works in the exhibition record the London he lived through.
Leon Kossoff began his training at St Martin’s School of Art in 1943 and, after military service, returned there in 1949 before attending David Bomberg’s classes at Borough Polytechnic from 1950 to 1952, where he was inspired by Bomberg’s call to find ‘the spirit in the mass’. He went on to the Royal College of Art from 1953 to 1956. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and was the subject of a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1996. He died on 4 July 2019, aged 92. A catalogue raisonné of his work was published in 2021 and was celebrated with a major touring retrospective, Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting, at Annely Juda Fine Art, London (2021), Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2022) and L.A. Louver, Los Angeles (2022). His work is held in major public and private collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate, London.
