Leon Kossoff valuation
Painted London's streets, swimming pools, stations and family in thick, worked paint, alongside his friend Frank Auerbach.
Leon Kossoff was born in Islington in 1926 to Russian-Jewish parents from Ukraine; his father was a baker.
What a work by Leon Kossoff is worth
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Bio
Leon Kossoff was born in Islington in 1926 to Russian-Jewish parents from Ukraine; his father was a baker. Evacuated to King's Lynn in 1939, he made his first paintings there, and after war service in Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany he studied at Saint Martin's School of Art, took classes with David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic from 1950 to 1952 alongside Frank Auerbach, and attended the Royal College of Art from 1953 to 1956. His subjects were London, its building sites, railway stations, the Kilburn swimming pool and Christ Church Spitalfields, and the people closest to him, painted and drawn again and again in heavy impasto. He showed with Helen Lessore's Beaux Arts Gallery from 1956, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995, and died in London in 2019.
Kossoff was a prolific draughtsman and printmaker as well as a painter, so drawings, etchings and smaller paintings come up more often than the large canvases. His drawings and prints after old master paintings form a group of their own, and provenance through his galleries is usual.
Bomberg, Willesden and the National Gallery
From 1966 he lived and worked at Willesden Green, and the trains and the junction there became one of his subjects.
The National Gallery showed his drawings and prints after paintings in its collection in Drawing from Painting in 2007, and Tate gave him a retrospective in 1996.
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