Leon Kossoff (B. 1926)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more PROPERTY FROM AN AMERICAN COLLECTION
Leon Kossoff (B. 1926)

Head of Chaim

Details
Leon Kossoff (B. 1926)
Head of Chaim
charcoal and pastel on paper
30 x 22 ½in. (76 x 57cm.)
Executed in 1987
Provenance
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London.
LA Louver, Los Angeles.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
Literature
Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., London, Tate Gallery, 1996 (illustrated in colour, p. 33).
Exhibited
London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Leon Kossoff Drawings 1985-1992, 1993 (illustrated in colour, p. 6). This exhibition later travelled to Los Angeles, LA Louver.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. These lots have been imported from outside the EU for sale using a Temporary Import regime. Import VAT is payable (at 5%) on the Hammer price. VAT is also payable (at 20%) on the buyer’s Premium on a VAT inclusive basis. When a buyer of such a lot has registered an EU address but wishes to export the lot or complete the import into another EU country, he must advise Christie's immediately after the auction.

Lot Essay

Executed in 1987, Leon Kossof’s Head of Chaim is an exquisite charcoal and pastel study of the artist’s brother. Following the death of his father – who had been one of his principle subjects during the previous decade – Chaim came to dominate Kossof’s output of the 1980s. These portraits are defned by a newfound sense of intimacy and ease – in contrast to the frequently fraught, angular depictions of his father – and are widely considered to represent the artist’s greatest works. As Paul Moorhouse has suggested, Kossof found a ‘rapid, almost immediate sympathy with the subject and the resulting fgure studies [being] his most successful’ (P. Moorhouse, quoted in Leon Kossof, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1996, p. 33). Drawing constitutes an indispensable part of Kossof’s practice, not only forming the basis of his paintings but also representing an independent strand of his oeuvre. Rendered with fluid, intuitive curves, Chaim’s head fills the paper, every idiosyncrasy of his visage captured in intricately worked detail. As one reviewer wrote in response to the first exhibition of these works at Anthony d’Offay gallery in 1993, ‘Their immediacy emphasizes the artist’s attempt to close the gap between himself and his subject by stripping away intercession. With each successive picture, Chaim appears more massive and the drawing more Baroque’ (‘Leon Kossof: Drawings’, Modern Painters, Spring 1993, pp. 95-96).

More from First Open | London

View All
View All