The portraits caught my attention first as I walked around the first room of the show at Luhring Augustine. Kossoff's gesture, captured in the thickly layered paint, blends into a brownish grey and in some cases morphs out of the "frame" altogether, as in Head of Chaim (1985) and Portrait of Philip (1962), pictured here. In Portrait of Philip, the man's head appears elongated, as though it has been stretched, his facial features grouped in the picture's lower right-hand corner.

Next I looked at Head of Chaim, which depicts Kossoff's brother, Chaim (or Himey, a family nickname). He was frequently a subject of Kossoff's work and one of his "longest standing models," Roberta Smith writes in "Leon Kossoff, British Painter of Postwar London, Dies at 92." In Kossoff's drawings of Chaim, such as the one below from 1990, the lines seem to collect of their own accord, giving the work an "Etch A Sketch" quality — the toys with magnetic sand-like materials that only let you draw straight lines unless you turn both knobs at once, which results in a haphazard organic line. The knobs are very hard to control, and the patterns you make with an "Etch A Sketch" usually end up looking like they were drawn by someone with arthritis.

[IMAGE — Leon Kossoff, Chaim, 1990. Courtesy Bonhams.]

Like his contemporaries of the London School — Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud — much of Kossoff's work was figurative. Kossoff met Auerbach at the Saint Martin's School of Art in 1948, having just returned from serving in the military. Both Kossoff and Auerbach took an evening class at Borough Polytechnic, where they studied under David Bomberg, who encouraged them to focus on revealing the figures' forms to bring out "the spirit in the mass," as Daniel Culpan quotes in an article on Kossoff for Artforum.

Kossoff tended to paint or draw family members, such as Chaim, his other brother Jack, or his father Wolf, and friends such as Frank Auerbach — in short, people he knew very well. In the drawing above, as in the painting from the exhibition, Chaim's skull seems disproportionate and looks unfocused, as though it has been doubled or stretched.

In his cityscapes, Kossoff was enamored with places of movement and transition, where paths crossed. He often painted train stations and railways, of which he said, "Something happens when you see Willesden Junction stretching out in front of you. What else can you do but draw it?" Many of the places Kossoff drew or painted are demolition sites or train stations, which are so often remodeled or rebuilt, as Charlotte Higgins mentions in "Leon Kossoff's Love Affair with London": "Many of the landscapes in his drawings and paintings are now gone, which is why to look at them is to look through Kossoff's eyes but also to travel into his past with him." This is interesting because Kossoff's cityscapes seem to cave in on themselves, the people crowded into a too-small frame.

[IMAGE — Leon Kossoff, Willesden Junction, 1965/6. Courtesy Sotheby's.]

Willesden Junction was a popular subject of Kossoff's paintings and drawings, almost all of which are set in London, the city where he lived and worked for the entirety of his life — aside from two years, from 1939 to 1941, when he lived with an older couple in East Anglia, having evacuated