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Lot Essay
Leon Kossoff was enthralled by London's landscapes and their physical metamorphoses. However, in his depictions of these landscapes, nature is only present by default. Kossoff’s focus is instead on his industrial cityscapes, with their congested, murky, and relentless forms.
He took interest in the people and places from his immediate surroundings, returning to particular local scenes, such as York Way Railway Bridge, over and over throughout his career. Kossoff’s veneration for personal, every day experience is apparent in the present work. Indeed, York Way held a particular importance for the artist as an area in which he spent many formative years drawing. This wholly unique sense of intimacy and familiarity with a subject matter enlivens the present work in a way that reconciles harsh industrial scenes with a sense of softness and memory.
Rendered in oil pastel, the railway lines in the present work have been completed in a frenzy, with energetic and swift movements covering every inch of the page. The physicality and the emotion of the artistic practice is palpable. Likely captured in the early evening, the rich colour palette of dark greys, blacks and browns gives way to a forceful interruption of vermillion red and sapphire blues strewn across the bottom of the paper. The effect is mesmeric. The railway tracks peel away from us under the bridge that has been flung from one bank to another, and the flashes of colour appear almost like an apparition – speeding by as if they are the coloured sides of blurred London trains. One can almost hear the tracks rattle.
The paper itself is thoroughly worked, the top of the page has clearly been wet, reworked, and scraped away – a technique usually seen in the works by fellow Slade School student and friend Frank Auerbach. Testament to this activity can be seen scattered across the whole page, with small rips pinned down and drawn over, built up layers of oil pastel across the tracks serving as potent evidence of his fascinating working practice. It is possible that when working on the drawing, it started to rain, resulting in the textured upper segment. It seems apt that London’s ever-consistent rainfall would leave such a lasting impact on the work. Teeming with a remarkable level of perceptual detail and sense of movement, York Way Railway Bridge from the Caledonian Road is a consummate crystallisation of Kossoff’s central artistic concern – the transformation of a specific location to a deeply chaotic, yet beautiful, industrial city set within the emotive bounds of history and memory’.
York Way Railway Bridge from the Caledonian Road was acquired directly from the artist by the present owners' father, Heinz Propper, who was a close friend of Leon for over seventy years. Heinz Propper sat for the artist over three decades, and Kossoff produced many portraits showing the changing and developing observations of his friend, though Kossoff once said that no matter many times he painted Heinz, he was never quite able to catch his likeness.
‘London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my blood stream. 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’ (Leon Kossoff, quoted in Leon Kossoff (exh. cat.), Tate, London, 1996, p.36).
He took interest in the people and places from his immediate surroundings, returning to particular local scenes, such as York Way Railway Bridge, over and over throughout his career. Kossoff’s veneration for personal, every day experience is apparent in the present work. Indeed, York Way held a particular importance for the artist as an area in which he spent many formative years drawing. This wholly unique sense of intimacy and familiarity with a subject matter enlivens the present work in a way that reconciles harsh industrial scenes with a sense of softness and memory.
Rendered in oil pastel, the railway lines in the present work have been completed in a frenzy, with energetic and swift movements covering every inch of the page. The physicality and the emotion of the artistic practice is palpable. Likely captured in the early evening, the rich colour palette of dark greys, blacks and browns gives way to a forceful interruption of vermillion red and sapphire blues strewn across the bottom of the paper. The effect is mesmeric. The railway tracks peel away from us under the bridge that has been flung from one bank to another, and the flashes of colour appear almost like an apparition – speeding by as if they are the coloured sides of blurred London trains. One can almost hear the tracks rattle.
The paper itself is thoroughly worked, the top of the page has clearly been wet, reworked, and scraped away – a technique usually seen in the works by fellow Slade School student and friend Frank Auerbach. Testament to this activity can be seen scattered across the whole page, with small rips pinned down and drawn over, built up layers of oil pastel across the tracks serving as potent evidence of his fascinating working practice. It is possible that when working on the drawing, it started to rain, resulting in the textured upper segment. It seems apt that London’s ever-consistent rainfall would leave such a lasting impact on the work. Teeming with a remarkable level of perceptual detail and sense of movement, York Way Railway Bridge from the Caledonian Road is a consummate crystallisation of Kossoff’s central artistic concern – the transformation of a specific location to a deeply chaotic, yet beautiful, industrial city set within the emotive bounds of history and memory’.
York Way Railway Bridge from the Caledonian Road was acquired directly from the artist by the present owners' father, Heinz Propper, who was a close friend of Leon for over seventy years. Heinz Propper sat for the artist over three decades, and Kossoff produced many portraits showing the changing and developing observations of his friend, though Kossoff once said that no matter many times he painted Heinz, he was never quite able to catch his likeness.
‘London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my blood stream. 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’ (Leon Kossoff, quoted in Leon Kossoff (exh. cat.), Tate, London, 1996, p.36).