A Street in Willesden, Summer 1983

Rendered with thick, intuitive strokes of impasto, Leon Kossoff’s A Street in Willesden captures the flux of daily urban existence. Executed on a dramatic scale, it offers a snapshot of community life in Willesden, North-West London, where the artist has lived and worked since 1966. Executed in the summer of 1983, the work belongs to a series of paintings and drawings created between 1982 and 1985, all of which represent variations on a single street scene. Passers-by meander through the composition, stopping to converse on tree-lined pavements. Two figures – one of whom has been variously likened to the artist’s brother – watch the pageant unfold, seated in companionable silence on a bench. Situated within Kossoff’s celebrated body of London landscapes, the present work demonstrates the rich brushwork, subtle lighting effects and jostling linear rhythms that came to define his paintings during this period. The depth implied by its perspectival sweep is confounded by encrusted streaks of pigment that hover upon the surface, bringing the eye back to the frontal plane. Sun-kissed faces and façades are held in tension with deep shadows and sharp black lines. A flash of bright blue – a woman’s dress – interrupts an otherwise earthbound palette of ochre and soft green. It is an ode to a single moment, distilled through an extensive process of drafting, scraping-off and reworking. ‘The pictures are about specific places, changing seasons and special times’, explains Kossoff. ‘But mostly ... they are about how the human figure, passing through the streets, transforms the space by its presence’ (L. Kossoff, quoted in R. Hughes, Leon Kossoff, London 1995, p. 15). In A Street in Willesden, the artist asks how the transient nature of everyday life, with all its overlooked and half-forgotten detail, might be fixed and preserved in paint.

Born in Shoreditch, where his family owned a bakery, Kossoff was evacuated during the Second World War. On his return, inspired by the teachings of David Bomberg during a series of evening classes, he immersed himself in the gritty reality of London’s fractured landscape. Along with his friend and fellow student Frank Auerbach, he scoured the city’s streets for suitable subjects, seeking to reveal what Bomberg described as ‘the spirit in the mass’ (D. Bomberg, quoted ibid., p. 12). Championing physical intuition over studied precision, Kossoff captured the living essence of his London haunts: Mornington Crescent, Christ Church Spitalfields, the disused railway lands behind King’s Cross, St Paul’s, Kilburn, Willesden Junction and Willesden Green. Frequently returning to the same subjects through the changing seasons, the artist would obsessively revisit his pictures, excavating and rebuilding them like archaeological fragments. ‘My studio is like a field, a field in a house’, he explained. ‘Muddy hillocks of paint-sodden newspapers cover the floor, burying scraped off images … The subject, person or landscape, reverberate, in my head unleashing a compelling need to destroy and restate. Drawing is a springing to life in the presence of the friend in the studio or in the sunlit summer streets of London from this excavated state and painting is a deepening of this process until, moved by unpremeditated visual excitement, the painting, like a flame, flares up in spite of oneself, and, when the sparks begin to fly, you let it be’ (L. Kossoff, 1986, quoted in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1988, unpaged). With its visceral painterly charge, A Street in Willesden is a powerful illustration of this statement.