Portrait of Leon Kossoff

‘We were like two mountain climbers roped together’
FRANK AUERBACH

‘Auerbach’s heads of Kossoff, painted and drawn, indicate precisely what he was doing: landscape into portraiture and portraiture into landscape, tangible spaces, intimacy and distance reconciled … it was a striving for lyrical authenticity’
WILLIAM FEAVER

‘I would sit for an hour and Leon would paint me, and then Leon would sit for an hour and I would paint him, and so we went on all day, turn and turn about. I’ve forgotten how long the process took and I’ve forgotten also how many days a week we did it, it may have been two days a week. It may have taken about two years for Leon to finish two paintings of me … and for me to finish two paintings of Leon’
FRANK AUERBACH

‘Frank and I are the only people in England who really understand Rembrandt’
LEON KOSSOFF

Embedded like a fossil in thick, near-sculptural swathes of impasto, Frank Auerbach’s Portrait of Leon Kossoff (1953) is an intimate testament to a friendship that changed the face of figurative portraiture. It is the second of eight paintings completed between 1950 and 1956 depicting his artistic comrade; the first now resides in Tate, London, with a further work held in the Yale Center for British Art. Originally owned for nearly sixty years by the celebrated film director Clive Donner, who acquired it directly from Auerbach in the 1950s, it stands among the earliest instances of the artist’s signature impasto technique, and is the first portrait of Kossoff rendered in this manner. From molten strands of pigment, piled high in rich, geological formations, a rudimentary visage emerges, gleaming white amidst the encroaching darkness. Pigment marbles and intermingles, creating a dramatic spectrum of light and shade that amplifies the work’s three-dimensional nature. Kossoff and Auerbach had first met in 1948 in a series of evening classes run by David Bomberg. Like their mentor, both longed to move beyond the conventions of traditional portraiture, seeking carnal rather than studied responses to their subjects. Taking it in turns to paint each other, the two artists sought to put Bomberg’s teachings into action: namely, to ‘apprehend the weight, the twist, the stance, of a human being anchored by gravity: to produce a souvenir of that’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 31). Informed by the scarred landscape of post- War London as much as the many hours spent together poring over Rembrandt in the National Gallery, Auerbach’s portraits of Kossoff are among the first decisive expressions of his artistic language. Confronting the viewer like a landscape or a fragment of earthbound matter, the present work trembles with human presence, illuminated like a beacon amidst the dark, granular rubble.

Georges Braque famously said that he and Picasso ‘were like two mountain climbers roped together’; Auerbach would later appropriate this simile to describe his relationship with Kossoff (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, p. 62). Like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, who cultivated a similarly fruitful relationship during this period, Auerbach and Kossoff spurred each other to greater heights during the formative stages of their careers. United by their shared disregard for the conservative teachings of the academy, they fervently championed Bomberg’s desire to reveal what he termed ‘the spirit in the mass’ (D. Bomberg, quoted in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., Tate, London, 1996, p. 12). Rather than rendering external appearances with faithful accuracy, the two artists sought instead to capture the living, breathing essence of their subjects. ‘I think Leo and I were perhaps a bit rougher and more rebellious than the other students’, recalls Auerbach. ‘We wanted something a little less urbane, a little less tea-time, a little less limited. And not so linear and illustrative’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 29). Over long, intense periods, the artists took it in turns to sit for on another. ‘I would sit for an hour and Leon would paint me, and then Leon would sit for an hour and I would paint him, and so we went on all day, turn and turn about’, explains Auerbach. ‘I’ve forgotten how long the process took and I’ve forgotten also how many days a week we did it, it may have been two days a week. It may have taken about two years for Leon to finish two paintings of me … and for me to finish two paintings of Leon’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, p. 63). Rendered on a jewel-like scale, the present work is among the most refined, concentrated products of this process.

With their near-architectural forms, deep shadows and rich tonal variation, Auerbach’s portraits of Kossoff bear witness to the two artists’ shared fascination with the Old Masters. ‘Frank and I are the only people in England who really understand Rembrandt’, Kossoff asserted; ‘[his] handling is so rapid and responsive, but the mind is that of a conceptualising architect’, enthused Auerbach (L. Kossoff and F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 87). At the same time, however, a much more contemporary spectre looms within their depths. Auerbach and Kossoff spent a great deal of time at construction sites across London, and watched as the city attempted to rebuild itself in the aftermath of the Blitz. So deep was the impact of their observations that they even began to source their paint from local builders’ merchants. The influence of the urban post-War landscape is palpable in the present work’s caustic textures and deconstructed features. It is simultaneously a portrait of a young man and a skull-like memento mori, with hollow eyes and skin the colour of bone. ‘Auerbach’s heads of Kossoff, painted and drawn, indicate precisely what he was doing’, asserts William Feaver: ‘landscape into portraiture and portraiture into landscape, tangible spaces, intimacy and distance reconciled’ (W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 10). Like human remains excavated from the debris, it is a relic – a ‘souvenir’, as Bomberg put it – of a living presence. Fixed in tactile layers of paint, it is not just a portrait, but rather a record of his existence. Quivering with raw, visceral charge, it embodies what Auerbach would later describe as ‘the haptic, the tangible, what you feel when you touch somebody next to you in the dark’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001, p. 23).