Autumn 2027

• Overview
• The Author

• This catalogue is the first to publish and illustrate the entire print output of Leon Kossoff, one of Britain’s most significant post-war artists.

  Kossoff’s prints were rarely exhibited during his lifetime, and many have not been published before. The book charts his course as a printmaker from his earliest etchings, made in 1953 while still a student at St Martin’s School of Art, to his final, impassioned etchings, made when he was in his 80s and based on subjects from the Old Masters, including Poussin, Rubens and Constable. In total, more than 300 works are illustrated. Additional sections include illustrations of his etching plates, photographs of his family and models, and images of Kossoff at work with his long-time collaborator, the painter Ann Dowker.

  Kossoff was the antithesis of the conventional printmaker. Although he made a number of editioned prints, for the most part working with Marc Balakjian at Studio Prints, his preference was for the individuality of the one-off. He loved to experiment with different inkings, to add aquatint, or new drawing, once his plates had already been bitten. This has at times led to some confusion over nomenclature, with some of his prints described as ‘unique’, when, in fact, they are more akin to variations. The authors of the catalogue have carefully distinguished between variations, unique prints and artist’s proofs, as well as clarifying the different versions of prints bearing the same title but using different plates (for example, The Rape of the Sabines, nos. 1 and 2). The catalogue also includes for the first time all the etchings that Kossoff hand-coloured in watercolour or gouache, making this the definitive inventory of all Kossoff’s work in the print medium.

  Andrew Dempsey has written an introduction and also essays on Kossoff’s principal subjects, and Ann Dowker vividly recalls what it was like to work with Kossoff – their radical experimentation when it came to the processes of printmaking, their willingness to push the process so that it became more akin to drawing than to printmaking, and their delight at the many and varied expressions a print could take depending on how it was processed. There are also contributions from Andrea Rose, the author of Leon Kossoff: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings (Modern Art Press, 2021).

  Above all, the catalogue will shed new light on one of Britain’s foremost artists, whose mistrust of promotion and publicity may have somewhat obscured his reputation. Here are works that range from intimate and touching portraits of his family – his new wife, his baby son, a two-day-old grandson, an ageing parent – to the majestic late prints, based on subjects from the Old Masters, encompassing love, lust, rape, jealousy, ambition, murder and mayhem. Kossoff’s subjects are both immediate and profound, and this book will help to bring his range and variety into full view.

• Andrew Dempsey was formerly Director of Exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, London, and has had a distinguished career as a curator, working on such exhibitions as Whistler and Sickert (Spain, 1998); British Vision, Imagination and Observation in British Art, 1750–1950 (Belgium, 2007); and Let Us Face The Future: Art Britannic 1945–1968 (Spain, 2010). He is also the author of Leon Kossoff: Drawings from the Plan Chest (Web of Stories, London, 2016) and was the lead researcher on Leon Kossoff: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings (Modern Art Press, London, 2021).

  The archivist Andrew Warrington has worked with the archives of Patrick George, Jeffrey Camp and Deanna Petherbridge, among others, and has been working with the Kossoff Estate since 2019.