.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘Every time the model sits everything has changed. You have changed, she has changed. The light has changed, the balance has changed. The directions you try to remember are no longer there and, whether working from the model or landscape drawings, everything has to be reconstructed daily, many many times. It’s my way of keeping the drawing in the painting alive, of being prepared to respond to the unexpected way. As time goes by the subject seem to take over my inner life. I begin to make extra associations and the need to finish becomes more urgent. A painter is engaged in a working process and the work is concerned with making the paint relate to his experience of seeing and being in the world’
(L. Kossoff, quoted in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., XLVI Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, Venice, 1995, pp. 25-26).
Instilled with a sense of a constant metamorphosis, this work, Small Head of Rosalind II is an exquisitely rendered portrait of Kossoff’s wife, Rosalind (also known as Peggy), whom he married in 1953, and is one of his most important and regular models. Painting for Kossoff is an intellectual process that requires an incessant reworking. Depicting his sitters from life, the artist would often take months, or even years to complete a work of art. Kossoff had a deep interest and understanding of the variations that occurred to his sitter through a change of space and time: whether it was a difference in attitude, a revelation of character, or viewing the sitter from a new angle. Kossoff endeavoured to capture these different facets through the continual return to his painting – scraping back the paint and occasionally pressing wet newspaper against the painting to leave a residue of the image on the work. The artist alluded ‘I never know when a painting is finished. I stop when I can’t go on or when the painting begins to look like the drawing made on that day or when the image opens up a dialogue with the possibility of starting another version’ (L. Kossoff, quoted in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., Annandale Galleries, New York, 2002, p. 2).
The expressiveness of the physicality of the paint acts as a form of emotional release. For Kossoff painting becomes, a cathartic act: the mounds and ridges representative of fluctuating feelings, an almost personal confession of the artist, holding some sort of special truth, presence, and passion spent.
In the present work, Small Head of Rosalind II, Kossoff has laboured over the painting to such an extent that the paint has become a thick impasto, heavily laden with swathes of luxurious paint, the mass of layers of oil creating a depth and texture. The expression and features of Rosalind’s face are rendered through wedges; the result is as much sculpted as it is painted. The highly dexterous and vigorous brushstrokes brings the viewer into almost direct contact with the sitter portrayed, instilling an intimacy between the viewer and her. Rosalind’s head, so closely framed, is rendered through the impassioned, deliberate brushstrokes that suggest a familiarity and tenderness one bestows only upon a cherished relation. One finds that the focused inquiry on the face is all that is necessary ,to understand the sitter, the head becomes symbolic of her entirety, the mind, the body and the soul.
For Kossoff, whose paintings derive directly from the present physicality before him, it is the unique way in which the body occupies space that ultimately generates the spontaneous result; ‘I’m always working to make [the painting] more like the sitter…to make the structure more real, more intense - but in the end, at the final minute, something else happens, something overtakes…in the presence of whoever I’m painting...I stop thinking for better or worse.’ (L. Kossoff in Conversation with A. G. Dixon in The Independent, 16 September 1988, p. 16). Here, within Small Head of Rosalind II, one sees an unquestionable interaction and empathy that the artist has shared with his model. Klaus Kertess suggests ‘There is a sense that both painter and painted seem to struggle together for identity. The modest format of the portrait paintings is nevertheless densely packed with drawing incident; every millimeter of the surface is pulled into action. The heavier the impasto of the face filling the space, the more modulations of light suffuse and transform the face in the portrait. These works radiate a somber grace and earthiness that can be related to Cézanne’s mid-1860s portraits of his uncle and also to Van Gogh’s early paintings of peasants, both groups of works that are highly regarded by Kossoff’ (K. Kertess, Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., Annely Juda Fine Art and Mitchell-Inness & Nash, New York, 2000, p. 10).
Through the intuitive magic of the artist’s spontaneous response to the figure in front of him, and the ability capture something of this life, combined with the artist’s response to the material quality of paint simultaneously crescendo within the present work to produce something extraordinary.
(L. Kossoff, quoted in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., XLVI Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, Venice, 1995, pp. 25-26).
Instilled with a sense of a constant metamorphosis, this work, Small Head of Rosalind II is an exquisitely rendered portrait of Kossoff’s wife, Rosalind (also known as Peggy), whom he married in 1953, and is one of his most important and regular models. Painting for Kossoff is an intellectual process that requires an incessant reworking. Depicting his sitters from life, the artist would often take months, or even years to complete a work of art. Kossoff had a deep interest and understanding of the variations that occurred to his sitter through a change of space and time: whether it was a difference in attitude, a revelation of character, or viewing the sitter from a new angle. Kossoff endeavoured to capture these different facets through the continual return to his painting – scraping back the paint and occasionally pressing wet newspaper against the painting to leave a residue of the image on the work. The artist alluded ‘I never know when a painting is finished. I stop when I can’t go on or when the painting begins to look like the drawing made on that day or when the image opens up a dialogue with the possibility of starting another version’ (L. Kossoff, quoted in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., Annandale Galleries, New York, 2002, p. 2).
The expressiveness of the physicality of the paint acts as a form of emotional release. For Kossoff painting becomes, a cathartic act: the mounds and ridges representative of fluctuating feelings, an almost personal confession of the artist, holding some sort of special truth, presence, and passion spent.
In the present work, Small Head of Rosalind II, Kossoff has laboured over the painting to such an extent that the paint has become a thick impasto, heavily laden with swathes of luxurious paint, the mass of layers of oil creating a depth and texture. The expression and features of Rosalind’s face are rendered through wedges; the result is as much sculpted as it is painted. The highly dexterous and vigorous brushstrokes brings the viewer into almost direct contact with the sitter portrayed, instilling an intimacy between the viewer and her. Rosalind’s head, so closely framed, is rendered through the impassioned, deliberate brushstrokes that suggest a familiarity and tenderness one bestows only upon a cherished relation. One finds that the focused inquiry on the face is all that is necessary ,to understand the sitter, the head becomes symbolic of her entirety, the mind, the body and the soul.
For Kossoff, whose paintings derive directly from the present physicality before him, it is the unique way in which the body occupies space that ultimately generates the spontaneous result; ‘I’m always working to make [the painting] more like the sitter…to make the structure more real, more intense - but in the end, at the final minute, something else happens, something overtakes…in the presence of whoever I’m painting...I stop thinking for better or worse.’ (L. Kossoff in Conversation with A. G. Dixon in The Independent, 16 September 1988, p. 16). Here, within Small Head of Rosalind II, one sees an unquestionable interaction and empathy that the artist has shared with his model. Klaus Kertess suggests ‘There is a sense that both painter and painted seem to struggle together for identity. The modest format of the portrait paintings is nevertheless densely packed with drawing incident; every millimeter of the surface is pulled into action. The heavier the impasto of the face filling the space, the more modulations of light suffuse and transform the face in the portrait. These works radiate a somber grace and earthiness that can be related to Cézanne’s mid-1860s portraits of his uncle and also to Van Gogh’s early paintings of peasants, both groups of works that are highly regarded by Kossoff’ (K. Kertess, Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., Annely Juda Fine Art and Mitchell-Inness & Nash, New York, 2000, p. 10).
Through the intuitive magic of the artist’s spontaneous response to the figure in front of him, and the ability capture something of this life, combined with the artist’s response to the material quality of paint simultaneously crescendo within the present work to produce something extraordinary.