Leon Kossoff: After Poussin

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present a series of 15 prints by the late British artist Leon Kossoff (1926–2019) at the gallery’s space in London. In 1998, Kossoff created a series of etchings in response to religious and mythological paintings by Nicolas Poussin, the leading painter of the French Baroque court under Louis XIII. Poussin painted pastoral masterpieces such as The Triumph of Pan, The Rape of the Sabines, and Cephalus and Aurora in luminous colour with classical lines, in stark contrast to Kossoff’s own dark, jagged paintings.

Rather than replicating the Poussin paintings, Kossoff translates these Old Master tableaus of ancient figures into writhing black-and-white forms, reflecting the gulf between Poussin’s pictorial culture and the thickly polluted world of the average Londoner after the Industrial Revolution. His dark, rougher renditions—of bacchanalian gatherings, pagan hunting scenes, and romances between Greek deities—summon a smoky fog and evoke the malaise of post-war life in London, as if the viewer were peering through a smudged window into the past.