Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff (London, 1926 – 2019) was a British figurative painter and printmaker, known above all for his portraits, life drawings and cityscapes of London. He is considered a neo-expressionist painter. His work returns insistently to the city where he grew up, built up in heavy impasto.

He was born on City Road in Islington, into a Russian-Jewish family of immigrants from Ukraine; his father was a baker. In 1939 he was evacuated with his school, Hackney Downs School, to King's Lynn in Norfolk, where the Bishop family encouraged his interest in art and he made his first paintings. After returning to London in 1943 he studied commercial art at Saint Martin's School of Art and attended evening life drawing classes at Toynbee Hall.

After three years of military service with the Royal Fusiliers, attached to the 2nd Battalion Jewish Brigade, he went back to Saint Martin's in 1949. From 1950 to 1952 he took special classes under David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic, and he studied at the Royal College of Art from 1953 to 1956. Bomberg and his fellow student Frank Auerbach, a close friend, shaped his approach, with shared subjects, emotions and thick paint.

From 1956 he showed with Helen Lessore's Beaux Arts Gallery. In 1959 he began teaching at several London art schools, while exhibiting alongside Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Keith Critchlow. His studio moved to Willesden Junction and, in 1966, permanently to Willesden Green.

In 1996 the Tate Gallery mounted a retrospective of his work, and in 2007 London's National Gallery held an exhibition of it. He declined appointment as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He died in London in 2019, aged 92. His legacy lies in painting a city and its neighbourhoods as a lasting subject.