At Home in Diaspora: Leon Kossoff`s London Paintings

The son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, Leon Kossoff (1926- ), who grew up in London’s Jewish East End, is one of England’s best known modern artists. In 1988, R.B. Kitaj included Kossoff in his so-called London School of Diasporists, along with Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and himself. In a world that categorizes artists by their national origins or residence, the category was innovative. I have explored the diasporic cultural frame in my book Looking Jewish: Visual Art and Modern Diaspora (2015). In the present essay, I want to extend that identity and paradigm to Kossoff’s oeuvre with its many images of London monuments and neighbourhoods--Spitalfields church, Kings Cross Station among them. The pictures recurrent subjects, as well as their distinctive expressionist style, I suggest, combine the familiar and strange, the institutional and the personal, social distance and intimacy. Aligned together, I argue, these features convey the comfort and disquiet of diasporic home.