Prints among men

LEON Kossoff is part of a generation of post-war British painters who kept painting in the face of the immense success of American abstraction.

LEON Kossoff (born in 1926), with Frank Auerbach (born 1931) and Lucian Freud (born 1922), is part of a generation of post-war British painters, albeit of central European Jewish background, who kept painting, and painting figuratively, in the face of the immense success of American abstraction from the 1940s to the 60s, and then of the prematurely announced death of painting in the 70s and the fashion for postmodernism in the 80s.

Painting had not died but it had become difficult, as I suggested earlier this year in a review of their Australian disciple Nicholas Harding. There was the problem of painting at all after the horror of the war; there was the challenge of painting in the shadow of a school of abstraction that seemed to represent the end of the line for the art itself; and there was the specifically British predicament of a tradition severed from the continental mainstream by the 17th-century Puritans.

But perhaps this separateness from the complex tradition that runs from Giotto to Cezanne and even to cubism was what inspired this generation of British painters to attempt to rediscover picture-making for themselves. That all three are Jewish, from a religious background that prohibited images of living creatures for thousands of years, also meant they approached the art of painting, for all their familiarity with art history, from an external perspective.

The result, as I have observed before, is that they see painting less as a matter of rendering visual appearance, in the Renaissance tradition, than of manipulating matter until, like God in Genesis, they work earth into life and animate it with the breath of the spirit. Awkwardness and weight, as though matter were enormously heavy and resistant, are inescapable, and the image is always in danger of sinking into turgid darkness or dissipating into the amorphous.

Throughout his career, however, Kossoff has remained fascinated by the great masters of the past, particularly by the colossal figures of the 17th century, but also by giants of later periods. He has drawn from Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya and Cezanne, as well as Nicolas Poussin, the Frenchman who spent most of his life in Rome, and whose 400th anniversary was marked by a comprehensive retrospective in Paris in 1994 and London in 1995. Kossoff was allowed into the Royal Academy early in the morning, before opening hours -- as he famously visited the familiar masterpieces of the National Gallery -- to draw or etch alone before the works themselves. The result was an extensive suite of works inspired by Poussin.

Since then he has continued this dialogue with his great forebears, and the works have been shown at several important exhibitions in Britain, the US and Australia. The present show in Sydney at Bill Gregory's Annandale Galleries -- now extended for a week -- is essentially a smaller version of the London National Gallery's 2007 exhibition Drawing from Painting; it is an ambitious undertaking for a commercial gallery and an exceptional opportunity to enjoy and ponder a particularly complex collection of works.

This is not an exhibition for lazy or hurried viewers; it requires close attention, sensitivity to the media of drawing and etching and familiarity with the original paintings. That part of the task, at least, has been made easier by the reproductions provided for consultation in the gallery. Visitors who take the time to engage with Kossoff's works will find these indispensable to consult, not only in order to identify and decipher the subject in the broadest sense, but especially to understand the variations that Kossoff has introduced into different versions.

Variation, indeed, is at the heart of this work, not only in the sense that a composer may write variations on a theme by an earlier master, but in the sense that every performance of a piece of music, or of a dramatic text, is strictly speaking unique and nuances of meaning and emphasis will be slightly different on each occasion. How different will depend on the level of professionalism and the intention of the performers: a concert series or a theatre season will be as consistent as possible; for a jazz ensemble, improvisation and spontaneity may be the priorities. In printmaking, similarly, an artist normally takes proofs from a plate until he is happy with the result, then passes it to a master printer to produce what is called the edition, which is then numbered and signed. Kossoff's earlier Poussin series was produced as an edition in this way, and works from that series are exhibited in the first room of the show at Annandale.

The main hall, however, is devoted to drawings and what are called unique prints. The expression is an unfamiliar one in printmaking and it seems to mean one of two things. First, it can simply refer to what are normally called different states: after proofing a plate, an artist will often make further changes, then proof it again. These different versions, if preserved, are classed as different states. Rembrandt revelled in the possibilities of revision and modification that the art of etching offered, frequently changing the image dramatically, especially in his use of light and shade. His collectors, similarly, responded immediately to the way these different states reflected the evolution of the imagination of the artist in the process of creation.

A given state of an etching may or may not be strictly unique; the artist may pull several proofs of a single state, but if the inking were sufficiently different it would be plausible to describe it as unique.

More commonly, Kossoff seems to prefer to start again on a new plate. This may seem a wasteful procedure if the intention is to take a single impression from it -- and economy in art is an aesthetic principle, not simply a financial one -- but it is perhaps justified by his particular circumstances. The plate is to record the immediate encounter with the original work on a particular morning; time is limited and the next occasion will be another experience, another variation.

Within the exhibition, there is at least one plate that appears to have been reworked, and that is the one after Rembrandt's Ecce Homo. The sepia version has been gone over, again, with drypoint and aquatint, creating a more unified composition of light and shade, but leaving unaltered dozens of tiny details in the faces and elsewhere that reveal its identity. The curious thing is that the plate sizes are given as different in the catalogue, but this may be due to an inconsistency between sheet size and image size.

These reworkings reveal a second stage of the process: if the first is drawing straight on to the plate -- whether using etching or scratching straight into the metal with drypoint -- the second represents a later stage of reflection, reinforcing parts of the design or adding tone with aquatint, a process that can be carried out only in the studio and is used with particular effectiveness in the print after Poussin's Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake.

Understanding Kossoff's printmaking practice is vital, but only part of the viewer's task and pleasure in viewing this exhibition. There are drawings, too, usually of the subjects that are also executed in etching. The drawings are mostly in charcoal and remind us, first -- because they are in the same orientation as the originals -- that the prints reverse the compositions of their models, thus adding to the challenge of recognising and reading the images.

The drawings exist in different versions as well. A particularly good example is the pair of sketches after Rubens's dense and complicated Allegory of the Blessings of Peace. This picture was painted for Charles I in 1629-30, when Rubens was in England combining his two careers as a painter and a senior diplomat, and trying to negotiate peace in The Netherlands. It shows peace as a nurse of children in the middle, while behind Minerva, as the personification of reason, drives away Mars, the god of war, attended by a Fury. In the foreground, Hymen, the god of marriage, with his torch and a little Cupid, crowns the young girls who will grow up to be happily married, while on the left a satyr carrying a cornucopia and the leopard of Bacchus allude to the prosperity of nature in times of peace.

The two drawings are different attempts to understand and express this rich composition, obscure to our -- perhaps paradoxically -- less visually literate age. Looking at the two of them closely, we see subtle variations in the reading of the central figure of peace, different interpretations of Minerva and Mars; in one version the young girl in gold is almost reduced to her sumptuous dress and the gesture of lifting its hem; in the other she has practically disappeared, but the joyous figure of Hymen is made even more prominent. In this version the nymph on the left is more happily realised as a harmonious unity of movement, while the satyr is more approximate; in the other, the nymph is comparatively wooden, but the satyr's torso is beautifully articulated.

The point of these drawings, as of the prints, is to capture something of the pictorial idea behind these eloquent paintings: neither simply the composition, understood in formalist terms, nor the story or allegory as a narrative, but the point at which the two combine into an alchemical whole.

The process of working out a picture was called invention, a term borrowed from the ancient theory of rhetoric. (No ancient art theory had survived, so modern art theorists sought inspiration in the theories of poetry, rhetoric and architecture.) Invention in oratory meant working out the overall point of your argument and it was followed by disposition, which was establishing the sequence of the speech, and elocution, which was its writing and speaking.

In painting it was soon realised that invention was not just a matter of finding a good subject for a picture; it was conceiving an idea in pictorial terms, uniting narrative and composition. The kind of drawings artists made when working out their ideas were consequently called invention sketches; they were often very quick, bold and summary. Oddly enough, Kossoff's drawings recall such sketches, mirroring the original process from a great temporal and cultural distance. They are like the reinvention sketches of an artist reaching out to understand his great predecessors and masters in the art of painting.