Word: kossoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NORTH CAROLINA: Military bases prepared for possible change in status. At Raleigh-Durham International Airport, spokeswoman Mirinda Kossoff said a strategy meeting was planned with the Federal Aviation Administration...
...Jewish baker, Kossoff grew up in the East End of London. After being discharged from the army at the end of World War II, he studied under David Bomberg -- once a prodigy of the vorticist movement but by 1947 a forgotten man, a failure, whose stature as a painter is only now being recognized. Bomberg gave Kossoff two things: first, a grounding in the relations between modernism and the past, based on unrelenting drawing from life, which has practically been wiped out of art training in the past 20 years; and second, patience, a sense of endurance...
...result, Kossoff's work went naturally against the grain. A figurative painter when abstract art was the rage, he sinned by embracing premature neoexpressionism back in the '50s and '60s. When painting was required to be thin, linear and efflorescent, Kossoff stuck to delving into the images and people around him and the memories within. His scenes of public baths, markets and Underground entrances are packed with small figures, stuck in their social matrix as though in jam (especially given Kossoff's dense pigment) -- a pictorial equivalent, as it were, of the double meaning of the Hebrew word olam, which...
...Kossoff is, above all, a painter obsessed with oily stuff. His paint is thick without being rhetorical. The surface develops by addition, sometimes over months, and contains an extraordinary range of nuances both in color and in texture: tremulous depths of pinkish-gray held within the sallow planes of a face, innumerable gradations of Venetian red and salmon pink in the body of a nude, rescued from mere allusiveness by the vehement drawing of shadow that gives Kossoff's work its tonal framework. Its solidity is relieved, almost involuntarily, by the whipping of skeins of pigment fallen directly from...
Light counts for a great deal in Kossoff's work. The paint is never opaque; it contains streaks and underglows, akin to the suppressed radiance in Rembrandt's midtones. And there is atmosphere too. One particularly senses it in Kossoff's view of Christ Church in Spitalfields. This tall, slender building, designed by the English baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, acquires a comatose power; the columns of its portico look as thick and squat as those of Karnak, repeating the compression of Kossoff's nudes and heads. But it is the light that one most remembers, a pale, almost chalky emanation...