Jun 25, 2009 2
Leon Kossoff: From the Early Years - 1957-1967
The School of London has always posed a problem on this side of the Atlantic. The term was coined by the American ex-pat R.B. Kitaj for the 48 artists he included in a show called The Human Clay at the Hayward Gallery in 1976. Today we associate the term primarily with Kitaj, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff. Of these artists, Bacon and Freud are of course the best known in the United States. Kitaj has hovered at the margins, a kind of literary curiosity that no one quite knows what to make of, while Auerbach and Kossoff have remained comparatively obscure. A major critical stumbling block has been the group’s inborn conservatism — having coalesced, as it were, at the moment the coffin lid was slamming shut on the art object in general and painting in particular. Kitaj’s criterion that the work in The Human Clay be exclusively “pictures representing people” was, for a Greenbergian, as intellectually bankrupt as a premise could get. Read the rest of this entry »
