Stop 1436

Female Narrator Leon Kossoff often portrayed close friends and family members... here, it's his aging parents. Curator Elena Crippa.

[sluggishly-paced solo clarinet music that transitions to an upbeat tempo]

Elena Crippa It's very clear that it's about, in a way, the boredom of life and of the very activity of sitting for a painter. They are no professional models. They are just being themselves rather than taking on particular expressions or postures.

There is a very interesting contrast between the sense of boredom of the parents sitting and the great energy and excitement and movement of the paint and the way it is applied.

Female Narrator Kossoff completed the painting with unusual speed: he made two sketches in the morning, and finished the painting itself that same afternoon, in about two hours.

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Elena Crippa Effectively the painting registers the bodily movement of the painter. We can see the heavily loaded brush, passing above the surface and dripping while it's being moved, so that the result in the painting is a synthesis of broad masses of thickly applied paint and traces that have been dripping off.

Female Narrator By 1980, the time of this portrait, painting had been sidelined by the development of conceptual and text-based art, installation, performance, and other new media.

[upbeat solo clarinet music]

Elena Crippa The desire and need to stick to the medium of paint, to the excitement of working with paint, and remaining loyal to the figure and to one's surroundings, is what defines Kossoff, as much as the other artists, part of this group.

[music ends]