Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting
Annely Juda Fine Art, London

EVER the outsider Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019) doggedly pursued his own truth, stubbornly refusing to divorce his work from observations of urban life throughout his long career.

Yet from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s when he was establishing himself as a serious artist, the dominant aesthetic dismissed such subject matter as out-dated, rooted in the 19th century and now fit only for amateurs.

Abstract Expressionism was followed by dispassionate, flatly painted geometric abstraction and pop art’s slyly knowing figuration. It was not until the1980s that leading Western critical opinion once again hailed a return to realism. In fact, of course realism never died.

It is no coincidence that Kossoff chose to depict life near his various homes or studios, in east and north London’s pre-gentrified, working-class districts of Spitafields, Kings Cross, Hackney’s Dalston Junction, Kilburn and Willesden, in all of which first generation immigrants abounded.