Through an Artist’s Eyes

Granting his first interview in 45 years, the eminent and reclusive English painter Leon Kossoff moans, “It’s all terribly boring. I don’t know why you want to talk about all this.”

Well, there are two pressing reasons: Kossoff’s simultaneous shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Both are based on a personal project five years in the making: Kossoff’s interpretations of the paintings of 17th century French artist Nicolas Poussin.

At the Getty last week, Kossoff sat on an ottoman amid his own vigorously executed etchings and drawings and the two richly detailed Poussin landscapes that inspired them. The LACMA exhibition showcases another set of prints and drawings based on figurative Poussin paintings. Distractedly, Kossoff ran his hand through his gray hair as his blue eyes appraised his landscapes.

“I just planned to get as close as possible to the paintings, through drawing,” he said, explaining his works. “I feel I’m experiencing the paintings in a down-to-earth way that makes [them] real for me. [And] they keep my own drawing on the move.”

Kossoff, 73, is a member of the School of London, a group of loosely representational painters that includes Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and R.B. Kitaj, who came up with the label and their first exhibition some 20 years ago. Kossoff represented Britain at the 1995 Venice Bienniale and was the subject of a critically acclaimed retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1996.

He is celebrated for a body of work that could not look more different than Poussin’s warm, idealized Baroque-era pictures. Since the mid-1950s, his subject matter mostly has been the bustle of everyday life in London, around subways and rail yards, swimming pools and churches.

Known for his dour palette and thickly painted surfaces, even his most intimate portraits of friends and family appear melancholy. London Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak once wrote that Kossoff’s art “provides so much unrestricted access to such massive amounts of spiritual discomfort that you marvel at its starkness.” Not, in other words, idealized.

Although Kossoff first painted from a Poussin at London’s National Gallery of Art some 20 years ago, the current exhibitions grew out of his reaction to a Poussin show at the Royal Academy in London in 1995. Kossoff obtained permission to enter the galleries before the public at 6:30 each morning, bringing with him a drawing board, paper and materials.

“It was physically quite demanding,” he said. He stood for hours drawing from Poussin’s pictures of mythological scenes such as “The Triumph of Pan” or religious subjects such as the “Holy Family on the Steps.” After two months, he decided, “I’m not really getting closer to the paintings. I wonder if I could be more direct.”

He began to draw with an etching needle directly onto waxed copper or zinc plates. He explains, “You’ve got no chance to change your mind with etching, while drawing is endlessly restating. Plus, with etching, you can’t really see what you are doing very clearly, it’s all intuition.”

After two months, he had a body of work that his primary dealer, Peter Goulds, found so compelling that he brought it back to his L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice and invited LACMA’s senior curator of prints and drawings, Victor Carlson, for a visit.

“Frankly, I was blown away,” Carlson said, who arranged LACMA’s exhibition of 40 of Kossoff’s studies. “It has everything to do with the power of his draftsmanship, the way the scumbles of line coalesce into an image.”

When Getty Museum director John Walsh went to the gallery to see Kossoff’s work, he was equally intrigued by the interactions between the “transcriptions” and the historical paintings.

“Kossoff talks about the difference between knowing and experiencing,” Walsh said. “That’s what our visitors need, to experience the work, not to read more wall labels on art history.”

Walsh invited Kossoff to continue his Poussin work, using “Landscape With a Calm,” a painting the Getty had bought in 1997. Kossoff agreed but didn’t want to come to L.A., so the Getty picture was loaned to the National Gallery, so that Kossoff could continue his pursuit of Poussin.

Initially, Kossoff was distressed to find that the painting lived up to its title. “It was awfully peaceful,” he said with a sigh. For the most part, he’d been working from Poussin’s figurative portrayals of revelry, reverence or mayhem. The Getty’s picture of a serene lake reflecting a castle and mountains stymied him. He turned to another Poussin hanging nearby at the National Gallery, “Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake.” Eventually, he says, the tension between the two paintings, which both depicted the same lake, inspired him to action. In addition, there was pressure to create something from the Getty loan.

“All I can say is that the greater the anxiety to make something happen, the more likely it is going to happen,” he said, laughing.

As it turns out, the process of running an earlier painter’s work through his own eye and hand is a long habit of Kossoff’s. When he was 9, he saw Rembrandt van Rijn’s “A Woman Bathing in a Stream” and decided to teach himself to draw from it.

It was only the beginning of his education: At 17, he took his first life drawing class; after military service in the late ‘40s, he studied in London at St. Martins School of Art but considers his breakthrough to have been studying with David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic.

Kossoff has time and again returned to art history, although he considers those studies “absolutely separate” from his main body of work. “Any influence,” he said, “is completely subliminal.”

In part at least, it’s the process itself that attracts him. An artist, he said, doesn’t begin a work knowing exactly why he’s doing it. “He works,” according to Kossoff, “in order to know.”

When pressed, though, Kossoff will admit that his interpretations from the past are mostly about the continuing education of a painter.

“I used to see painting as some mysterious process,” he said. “I no longer see it that way. I feel the gestures have to be gestures of draftsmanship. I go back to earlier painting because I’ve a terrific sense of feeling that I can’t draw. That I have to learn all the time. Artists like Poussin were working as draftsmen with paint.

“These pictures reverberate in one’s mind. It’s a question of presence, really. Photography has made it difficult for us to experience the presence of painting. We see drawings as an alternative to photography, but drawing grew up as a means of expressing one’s individual relationship to the outside world.

“My obsession is that I can’t draw,” Kossoff continued. “As a result, my drawing has developed. If you think you can draw, maybe your drawing doesn’t develop.”

Looking distressed at these insights, he concluded, “I’m sure I’m going to regret saying any of this.”