Word: painterly
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...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...
...Here Comes the Diesel, 1987 (a train passing through a cutting in North London), connect Kossoff back to late Constable, with their flickering impasto, their palpable joy in light and freshness embodied in substance. In his effort to squeeze so much from the world, Kossoff is a wholly traditional painter; only his anxiety about whether it can be done makes him a late-modern...
JASPER JOHNS: WORK SINCE 1974, Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show that won the grand prize at last summer's Venice Biennale and cemented Johns' status as America's deepest living painter. Through...